A dream that still inspires
On a bluff above the Trans-Canada Highway just east of Thunder Bay, the vastness of Lake Superior below and the Sleeping Giant in the distance, stands one of the most inspiring places in the country.
The Terry Fox Monument, a larger-than-life bronze replica of the one-legged runner, is set in a cathedral-like grove where visitors tend to speak in reverent whispers.
The memorial — and the reaction to it — testify to the place a young man who would never grow old holds in Canadian hearts 40 years after his Marathon of Hope for cancer research.
Manfred Pirwitz of Oakville, the artist who created the sculpture, called Fox “the greatest Canadian who ever lived.”
“That boy really had something inside driving him on. I don’t know what it was, but it was very strong.”
To contemplate Fox’s legacy from the distance of decades is to note how applicable the lessons of his run are to the present day.
He was motivated to fight cancer. But the determination, focus, commitment he mustered, his willingness to bear pain and loneliness in the cause of a greater good is precisely what is called for to fight the coronavirus.
Already more than 9,000 Canadians — and almost a million around the world — have died from COVID-19. More than 140,000 people in Canada — and 30 million worldwide — have contracted the virus.
In many places, including Ontario, cases are spiking again, in large part because of widespread unwillingness to do what’s urged — wear a mask, maintain physical distance and vigilant hygiene — to reduce the spread.
By September 1980, Fox had travelled more than halfway across the country — 5,373 kilometres in gruelling 42-kilometre average daily instalments — on a far-from-ideal prosthetic leg.
Nearing Thunder Bay he had to abandon his run when cancer returned, taking his life nine months later, just shy of his 23rd birthday.
Forty years on, the campaign Terry Fox started — hoping first to raise $1 million, then upping the goal to a dollar for every Canadian — has raised more than $800 million for cancer research.
Fox had lost his right leg to osteogenic sarcoma at 18. Astonishingly, the idea of a cross-country run came to him the night before surgery, from a magazine an old basketball coach had given him telling of an amputee who ran the New York Marathon.
So Fox learned to walk again, then to run. He ran 5,000 kilometres in training. He announced his plan to his family. They tried to talk him out of it. They failed.
Accompanied by his longtime best friend, driving a donated camper-van, the marathon began at the Atlantic Ocean in Newfoundland.
It was audacious on the face of it. It is gruelling enough to drive across this country, much less run across, much less on one leg.
But Fox attacked the project the only way big things can be, by breaking it down into manageable steps, setting small goals, focusing on a mile at a time.
At first, donations trickled in by the dollar — a pensioner’s fiver, a school class’s recess money, a passing motorcyclist chipping in $20.
It wasn’t until Fox hit Ontario that publicity began to build and money started pouring in faster than the Canadian Cancer Society could count it. By then, he was becoming the pride of a nation. His mop of curls, the trademark hitching gait, the youthful good looks became as iconic as any brand in the country. Canadians were awed by his courage, focus, commitment. They loved his unpretentiousness in speech and demeanour, the modest grit of his ultimately heart-broken working-class family.
They especially liked reports that he was temperamental and ornery, that he liked hockey and country music and pretty girls.
They came to see him as the manifestation of essentially Canadian traits. Terry had always been, said his middle-school phys-ed teacher, “the little guy who worked his rear off.” And we loved underdogs. For a time, and at a time when constitutional drama put Canada’s very future at stake, Terry Fox united us in ambitions bigger than ourselves.
He showed what the dreams of a single person could inspire, what all of us chipping in could accomplish.
“How many people do something they believe in?” Fox said after cancer returned to halt the run.
“I just wish people would realize that anything’s possible if you try. Dreams are made if people try.”
Forty years later, the application of such values, a day-by-day effort, a steady commitment, is what’s asked of Canadians to confront the coronavirus.
If Terry Fox’s life was brief, the values he embodied are eternal. In the final years of his life, he changed the lives of tens of thousands of others.
He did so because he did not want others to suffer as he and the cancer patients he met in hospital had.
He believed, that if we committed as individuals to try, we could do amazing things together.
That dream should inspire us still.
Fox’s willingness to bear pain and loneliness in the cause of a greater good is precisely what is called for to fight the coronavirus