Relay for Life team makes cancer fight a family affair

It was late spring or early summer in 2002, and Erin Lynch (then Erin Bruce) was in a panic.

Her mother, Mardi Bruce, then in her mid-40s, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer.

“It was just so sad for our family, and I just felt like I needed to find some source,” recalled Lynch, then a reporter and anchorwoman at KEZI-TV who now works for Beecher Carlson, an account risk management broker.

She Googled the words “cancer” and “Eugene” and found a link to the American Cancer Society’s annual Relay for Life for Eugene-Springfield.

Then she invited about 50 friends and family to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field for that 2002 relay, to surprise her mother, who thought she was just going to walk with her daughter.

That’s how the fundraising machine known as “Mardi’s Mission” began.

Thirteen years later, Mardi Bruce, now 60, estimates that the team her daughter started for her has raised about $250,000 through those annual relays, as well as Susan G. Komen for the Cure walks — a national breast cancer fundraiser — around the country.

The 2015 Relay for Life of Eugene-Springfield starts at noon today and goes until noon Saturday at the Sports Park at Willamalane Center in Springfield — and Mardi’s Mission will be at it again.

Even Bruce’s mother, 93-year-old Mardelle Bowles, who has lost two husbands to lung cancer, will walk.

“Because when you (are diagnosed with) cancer, every day from there on is a gift,” Mardi Bruce said on Wednesday, during a team gathering at her daughter’s southwest Eugene home.

“And with all the people I’ve lost in my life (to cancer), I want a cure. I have four grandbabies, and I don’t want them to have cancer.”

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States and one in every four deaths is due to cancer, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bruce has been cancer-free for more than a decade now, since undergoing radiation and chemotherapy.

Bruce’s nine-member team has raised about $15,000 this year as of Thursday, more than double its initial goal of $7,000, making it one of the local relay’s top fundraising teams once again.

That money is part of almost $400,000 raised by various teams so far for the Eugene-Springfield chapter for this year’s relay, before anyone has even set foot on the track in Springfield.

The goal for this year’s relay is $650,000. The most ever raised in a single year is $750,000, said Brenda Webber, senior manager for American Cancer Society’s Eugene-Springfield chapter.

Since the local relay began in 1992 at Hayward Field (before moving to LCC for a few years starting in 2003, then to Springfield), participants have raised more than $6 million. The money goes toward cancer research, but the relay also is a chance to honor the lives of those who have died and strengthen the hopes of survivors.

With 6,000 to 8,000 people taking part every year, the Eugene-Springfield relay is the fifth-largest in the world, Webber said, and one of more than 5,000 American Cancer Society relays held annually in more than 20 countries.

More than $400 million has been raised by all those relays, according to the American Cancer Society, since 1985 when the first relay was held in Tacoma.

That was the year Dr. Gordy Klatt, a marathoner, decided to help his local American Cancer Society chapter by running 83 miles around the University of Puget Sound track in 24 hours. He raised $27,000 from friends who donated $25 apiece to run or walk with him for 30 minutes at a time.

The Mardi’s Mission team did the relay at Hayward Field from 2002 to 2006 — even though Mardi Bruce and her first husband, Jim Bruce, lived in Bend at the time.

Then, in 2007, Jim Bruce was diagnosed with lung cancer, despite never having smoked a cigarette in his life.

He was dead within six months — at age 70.

“It just kind of, again, reminded us that we needed to keep fighting,” Erin Lynch said.

In addition to losing her father and her husband to lung cancer, Mardi Bruce says she has a couple of cousins who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

And Erin Lynch’s husband, Vance Lynch, lost his mother to lung cancer in 1987. Wanda Halley was only in her mid-40s when she died.

“Every family I’ve ever met seems to have been touched by this disease,” Bruce said. “And it’s a terrible disease, because you never do go another day in your life when you’re not worried a little bit (of the cancer coming back).”