Book I
In the Beginning
In the beginning was the country, and the country was cold, and the country was large beyond reckoning.
And the country was a long thin strip of rock and water and trees pressed against the top of the world, and the people who lived upon it numbered fewer than the people of one large city to the south, and yet the country was the second largest under the sun.
In the days before the boy, the country had names for many things and no name for itself. It was called the Dominion, and it was called the True North, and it was called by the names of the men who had drawn lines across it. But the country was older than the lines.
The country was the cold Atlantic at St. John’s where the sea breaks itself on rock that is older than the continent that holds it. The country was the wheat of Saskatchewan moving in a wind that does not stop for ten months of the year. The country was the Rockies and the rain forest behind them and the Pacific against which the rain forest leans.
And between these things were highways. And on the highways were the people. And the people were uncertain whether they belonged to one country or to many.
For there were those who spoke French and those who spoke English and those who had spoken older tongues before either, and the lines between them were drawn in legislation and in resentment and in the small mercies of daily commerce.
And in the days before the boy, the country looked southward across an unguarded border and saw an empire, and the empire was loud, and the empire was rich, and the empire could not understand why the country had not yet asked to be joined to it.
And the country, in those days, did not know what it was. It knew only what it was not. And this is the condition into which the boy was born.
Book II
The Boy
In the days when Pierre, called the elder, reigned over the country, and the dollar was worth eighty-six cents of the American coin, a boy was born in the city of Winnipeg, which lies upon the cold flat centre of the land.
His father was Rolly and his mother was Betty, and they were not rich. And the boy was the second of four children, and his name was Terrance, and he was called Terry by all who knew him.
And when Terry was eight years old his family moved westward to the place called Port Coquitlam, which lies in the shadow of the mountains of British Columbia, and there he was raised.
And Terry was small and was not naturally gifted at the games of his country. He could not skate as the others skated. He could not strike the puck with the assurance of the others. He could not run with the speed of those who ran.
But Terry would not stop. And in the gymnasium of Mary Hill Junior Secondary, his coach took notice, for the coach saw that the boy did not have the gift, and yet the boy refused to leave the gym while there was still light.
And this was the first thing about Terry that any man who knew him would later remember. Not the talent, for he had little. But the refusal to leave the gym.
The coach said unto him: most of the boys who come here will be more gifted than thee. And Terry said unto him: that is fine. I will be the one who stayed.
And in those days Terry believed in nothing in particular. He believed in his family, and he believed in the basketball court, and he believed that the world was a thing that could be moved if one did not stop pushing against it.
He did not yet know that the world would be moved through him rather than by him. He did not yet know what would be asked.
Book III
The Worm
In the year of our country one hundred and ten, in the month of November, Terry was driving home from a basketball practice when his right knee gave way beneath him.
And in the days that followed there was pain in the knee, and the pain did not leave him, and his mother said go to the doctor, and he went.
And the doctor looked upon the leg and the doctor took the pictures of the bone, and the doctor saw the thing that had begun within him.
And the name of the thing was osteogenic sarcoma. And it is a cancer of the bone. And it eats outward from the marrow.
And the doctors said unto Terry: we must take the leg. And Terry was eighteen years old, and he was not yet a man as the country reckoned men, and the leg was taken from him six inches above the knee.
And in the night, in the hospital, before they took the leg, the coach who had known him in the gymnasium brought to Terry a magazine. And in the magazine was the story of a man named Dick Traum, who had run a marathon upon one leg.
And Terry read the story, and he did not sleep that night, and in his sleeping-which-was-not-sleeping he saw the country laid out like a thread, and he saw himself running along the thread, and he saw the people gathering at the edges of the highway as he passed.
He told no one of the vision in the morning. He told no one for many months. He kept the vision inside himself the way a man keeps a coal alive under ash, that it might be ready when the wind came.
The chemotherapy followed the surgery, and it was sixteen months long, and in those months Terry lost his hair and he lost his weight and he saw the children in the cancer ward who were younger than him and who would not live to see eighteen.
And the children who would not live to see eighteen were the thing that made the vision into a calling. For Terry came to understand that the running was not for himself. He had already lost what he was going to lose. The running was for the ones still inside the rooms.
He wrote to the Canadian Cancer Society and he said: I will run across the country. I will run from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I will raise one dollar from every Canadian, and the money will go to the children in the rooms.
And the Canadian Cancer Society wrote back unto him, and they said: this is a fine ambition, but you must have insurance, and you must have support vehicles, and you must have sponsorships, and you must have a plan that does not look like a vision a boy had in a hospital bed.
And Terry said: I will get the insurance. I will get the vehicles. I will get the sponsorships. And I will not stop until I have done what I said I would do.
He trained for fourteen months. He ran in the rain of the Pacific coast through the winter. He ran when his stump bled into the cup of his prosthetic. He ran twenty-three miles in a day and he came home and he ate and he slept and he ran again.
His mother begged him to stop. He did not stop. His father said nothing, for his father had learned that there are sons who do not stop, and the loving of such a son is the watching of him.
Book IV
The Dip
And so it came to pass that on the twelfth day of the fourth month in the year of our country one hundred and thirteen, Terry stood upon the rocks at St. John’s, which is the easternmost city of the country, and which is older than the country, and the sea before him was cold and grey and indifferent.
He filled two large bottles with the Atlantic. The first he would carry across the country to the Pacific, that the two oceans might be joined. The second he poured upon the road behind him as a thing committed.
And his brother Darrell was there, and his friend Doug, son of Alward, who would drive the van.
And Terry dipped his prosthetic leg into the Atlantic, and he turned westward, and he began to run.
He ran a marathon that day. Twenty-six miles and three hundred and eighty-five yards. He ran a marathon the day after that. He ran a marathon the day after that.
In the early days no one watched. The country did not yet know what was happening upon its eastern shore. The newspapers wrote small paragraphs. The radio mentioned him at the end of the hour, after the sports and the weather.
The province of Newfoundland is small in population but vast in coastline, and the wind off the Atlantic comes across no land before it strikes the runner, and the runner felt every kilometre of the wind.
And there were days in those first weeks when Doug and Darrell and Terry would camp in the back of the van by the side of the highway, and the van smelled of wet socks and gasoline and the dressing on the stump.
And Terry was tired in a way that no eighteen-year-old has ever been tired. But he was also free in a way that very few men ever are. For he had given the cancer back to itself by running away from it in the only direction the cancer could not follow, which was outward, into the country, into the highway, into the eyes of the people who would soon see him.
Book V
The Wilderness
He crossed the Cabot Strait by ferry into Nova Scotia, and the people of Nova Scotia gathered at the wharves with their pennies and their dollars and their hands.
He ran the highway through Cape Breton where the road bends along the coast and the wind comes off the ocean and the houses are painted in the colours that announce a place where the winter is long.
And in those days the country began to know him. Slowly, and then all at once, as a fire moves through dry grass.
He ran through New Brunswick where the trees stand close to the highway and the smell of the pulp mills rises from the river valleys. He ran into Quebec and he did not speak the language and the people of Quebec did not always know what to make of him.
For there were those in Quebec who said: he is a boy from the west, and his cause is not our cause, and his country is not our country. And there were others who said: he is a boy who is dying, and he is running for the children, and the cause is the cause of all who suffer, and our money is as good as the money of anyone else.
And in the end the people of Quebec gave their money, though some of them gave it with a certain coolness, for that is the way of Quebec, and there is no other way of Quebec, and the country has long since made its peace with this.
In Ottawa, Pierre, called the elder, was the prime minister of the country, and Pierre had received many visitors in his time, and Pierre was a man who did not often allow himself to be impressed.
But Pierre received Terry, and Pierre walked with Terry for a short distance, and afterward Pierre would say to those close to him: I have met many men. I have not before met a boy who carried the country upon his shoulder the way this one does.
The Cancer Society, which had doubted, now sent representatives. The hockey players, who were the demigods of the country in those days, began to send their money and their jerseys and their public greetings.
Bobby, son of Orr, who had been the greatest of the hockey players, sent twenty-five thousand dollars. Darryl, son of Sittler, gave Terry his All-Star jersey, which Terry wore in the manner that a soldier wears a medal that he did not give himself but cannot refuse.
And the publicists came. And the publicists were not evil men, but they were men of their profession, and they saw in Terry an instrument that could be played, and they wished to play it.
Terry let them play, to a point. He understood that the running and the speaking were now one thing. That the highway and the camera were now one thing. He had not asked for the camera. But he had asked for the money, and the money was downstream of the camera, and he was not naive.
He gave the speeches when they asked. He shook the hands. He posed for the photographs in the cities and the towns and the diners along the road.
But every morning he ran a marathon. And every afternoon he ran another half a marathon. And every evening he ate the spaghetti his brother boiled in the back of the van, and every night he soaked the stump in salt water, and every dawn he ran again.
He had told the country that he would run from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And he had not yet seen the Pacific from the eastern side of the Rockies. And he was not yet halfway home.
Book VI
The Letter of Jesse to the Canadians
Here is inserted, by the hand of the compiler, an epistle composed in the year of our country one hundred and fifty-nine by Jesse of Victoria, who is called by some the apostle of the marathon, and who is here addressing the people of the country in the manner of those who came before him.
Jesse, an apostle of the marathon, not by appointment of any party nor by ordination of any church, to the Canadians dispersed from sea to sea to sea: grace and peace.
I write unto you in a season of doubt, when the empire to the south of us speaks of us as a province, and our currency staggers, and the cost of a small house in the city of Vancouver has exceeded the lifetime earnings of an honest man.
I write unto you concerning Terry, who ran. For there are those among you who have forgotten him, and there are those among you who never knew him, and there are those who know only the bronze of his statue and not the bone of his leg.
Hear, therefore, what the running was for. The running was not for the cancer alone. The running was for the proposition that the country has within itself the means of its own continuation, and that the continuation requires only that one of us, somewhere, refuse to stop.
Terry did not run for a sponsor. He did not run for a party. He did not run for the prime minister, nor for the queen, nor for any institution. He ran for the children who would not live to see eighteen, and he ran for the country that had not yet decided what it was, and he ran upon a leg that was not his.
And the country received him. Not because he asked it to, but because the country recognized, in the boy upon the highway, the only thing it had ever really been: a long thin stubbornness against the cold, run by people who would not stop.
Therefore, beloved, when the empire to the south speaks of annexation, remember the boy upon the highway. When the dollar falls and the men in suits whisper that we cannot stand alone, remember the boy upon the highway. When you are told that the country is too small, too cold, too divided, too tired to remain a country, remember the boy upon the highway.
He was twenty-two years old. He had one leg. He had no money. He had no sponsor at the start. He had a friend and a brother and a van.
He ran five thousand three hundred and seventy-three kilometres.
What, then, is your excuse?
Now concerning the practical matters: do not sell the rock to the empire to the south. Do not sell the water to the empire to the south. Do not sell the boy upon the highway, for he has been sold enough already, and the dignity of his memory is not yours to barter.
Donate. Run. Vote. Build. Hold the dollar. Defend the post office. Pay the broadcaster. Stand in the line at the polling station. Stand in the line at the food bank with the same patience. The country is in the lines.
Greet Doug, beloved of the van, who drove without recognition and without complaint and who has carried the boy’s memory longer than anyone. Greet Darrell, his brother who ran beside him. Greet the Cancer Society, who doubted but came around. Greet the people of Newfoundland, who gave first. Greet the people of Quebec, who gave with reservations and gave nonetheless.
Greet the runner you do not know, who is at this hour completing his own marathon somewhere along a highway in Manitoba, in the dark, for reasons he could not entirely explain to you if you asked.
The country is what we do not stop doing.
Grace be with you. And to the boy upon the highway, the only saint we have made, and the only one we needed.
Jesse, of Victoria, in the year of our country one hundred and fifty-nine.
Book VII
The Stopping
In the first day of the ninth month, on the highway outside Thunder Bay, in the heart of the country, Terry stopped running.
He had run for one hundred and forty-three days. He had crossed six provinces. He had run five thousand three hundred and seventy-three kilometres. He was two-thirds of the way home.
In the days before the stopping, he had felt the pain returning. Not the pain of the stump. Not the pain of the muscles he had asked everything of. A different pain. A pain in the chest. A pain that did not belong to a runner.
He had told no one. He had run on, for he had told the country he would not stop, and he was a boy who did not stop while there was still light.
But on the morning of the first of September the cough was wet, and his face was grey, and Doug looked upon him in the van and said: we have to take you to the hospital.
And Terry said: I will run today.
And Doug said: you cannot.
And Terry ran twelve miles that morning. And when they took the pictures of his chest in the hospital in Thunder Bay, the cancer had returned, and it was in the lungs, and there was no question of running further.
The press conference was held that afternoon. He sat in front of the cameras and his hair was wet from the rain and his voice was steady, and he said: I had hoped to run across Canada, and I will not be able to finish. The cancer has returned.
And then, because he was twenty-two, and because he had not yet learned how to perform grief for cameras, his voice broke for one half of one second, and he said: I’ll try.
And the country, which had not yet wept for him because it had not yet allowed itself to consider that he could be stopped, wept that night in every province at the same time.
The donations, which had been good, became something else. The Cancer Society, which had been receiving cheques, was now receiving currency. Children gave their allowances. Old men in pensioners’ apartments gave their pension cheques. By the night of the press conference the running total exceeded ten million dollars. Within a month it had passed twenty-four million, which was one dollar for every Canadian then living.
Terry had asked for one dollar. The country had given one dollar. It is the only contract the country has ever fully honoured.
Book VIII
The Year of Dying
He went home to British Columbia and the cancer went about its work and the country watched.
The honours came. Pierre, called the elder, made him a Companion of the Order of Canada, which is the highest civilian honour the country bestows, and which had not before been given to a man so young.
He received the honour in his hospital bed. He was thin, and he was tired, and he was kind to the official who travelled with the medal.
He gave interviews when he could. He took the telephone calls of children who had cancer. He did not tell the children that they would live, for he could not. He told them only that he was thinking of them. This was, in the end, the thing he was best at: the thinking of others while his own life burned down around him.
The Marathon of Hope continued without him in the form of letters, and in the form of the runs that were beginning to be organized in the cities, and in the form of the schools that began to put his picture in their hallways while he was still alive to know they had done so.
He saw none of this as it should be seen, for he was dying, and the dying was not gentle, and there is no script for a young man being eaten alive by his own bones.
On the twenty-eighth day of the sixth month, in the year of our country one hundred and fourteen, Terry died in the hospital in New Westminster. He was twenty-two years old. His mother was with him. His father was with him.
The country lowered its flags. The prime minister addressed the nation. The newspapers ran his face on the front page in colour, which was a thing the newspapers did rarely in those days.
The boy who had not stopped had been stopped.
And in the silence that followed, the country understood, for the first time perhaps in its history, that it had loved one of its own.
Book IX
The Continuation
The first Terry Fox Run was held in the autumn of the year he died. Three hundred thousand people ran. They ran in every province. They ran in cities and in towns and in villages and on country roads where the only witnesses were the cows.
The Run has been held every autumn since. It is held in schools and in parks and in the streets of the major cities. It is held in countries Terry never visited, by people who have only ever seen him in photographs.
By the time of this writing, the Marathon of Hope has raised more than eight hundred and fifty million dollars for cancer research.
He has been on the currency. He has been on the postage. He has been the namesake of a mountain in British Columbia, an icebreaker in the Arctic, a research institute, a highway, several schools, and at least one street in every city of any size in the country.
His statue stands at the eighteenth mile of the Trans-Canada Highway outside Thunder Bay, where he stopped. His statue stands at Mile Zero in Victoria, where the highway ends and the Pacific begins.
He has been canonized by a country that does not believe in saints. He has been venerated by a culture that does not believe in veneration. He has been turned into a religion by a nation that prides itself on having no national religion.
And this is the thing that should be said, and the thing that has not often been said: he became a religion because we needed one.
The country has very few national myths, and most of them are weak. We do not have a revolution. We do not have a founding war. We do not have a defining migration. We have the cold, and the rock, and the highway, and the boy who ran upon it for one hundred and forty-three days before the cancer caught him.
He is the closest thing we have to a saviour, and we know he did not save anyone, in the literal sense, for cancer still kills the children he ran for. But he saved the country in a different sense. He gave the country a thing to believe about itself.
He gave us this: that we are a people who do not stop while there is still light.
Whether we are still that people is a question that each generation must answer for itself. The answer in any given year is uncertain. But the example endures. The highway is still there. The statue is still there. The Run still happens.
And every autumn, somewhere in the country, a child who has not yet been diagnosed with anything runs his first kilometre in the name of a boy who died before that child’s parents were born.
The continuation is the country. The country is the continuation. The boy upon the highway is both the figure and the ground, the runner and the road, the cause and the answer to the cause.
He came not to save us from death, for he could not. He came to show us how to spend the time we have between the diagnosis and the end. Which, when one thinks about it, is the only kind of time anyone has ever had.
And the Marathon of Hope continues. And the highway is long. And the country, against all reasonable expectations, is still here.
Grace and peace.