Fighting the Good Fight

Brace yourself, kids. Grit your teeth and clench your fists. Your relatives have traveled across oceans and continents for your graduation ceremony and, at several points during the first week of June, they will embarrass you. Especially your grandparents. They will fuss over you and ask you if you’ve eaten and tell your roommates stories about that time when you were little and got sick from eating paste. They’ll brag about all the wonderful things you’re doing after graduation and tell anyone who will listen that you’re going to save the world someday.

I’m getting off easy on that front. I have a lot of relatives who should be here, asking me if I’ve met any nice boys or if I have a job yet. Unfortunately, over the last 10 years or so, cancer has hit my extended family hard. It was a pattern through middle school and high school: making hospital visits, going to funerals, and moving on. It never occurred to me that I could do anything about it—cancer was just a fact of life, something that tended to happen to the people I love. That was that.

The pattern repeated once I came to college. Instead of my own relatives, now it was the loved ones of my loved ones who were being diagnosed with a scary regularity, and I started reacting differently. When someone to whom I was personally close got ill, I had learned how to handle it. But when it was a family friend’s son or my godparent’s mother, I would react by doing something entirely unconstructive, like punching walls or practicing karate kicks or going for an obscenely long run. I started to get unreasonably angry, feeling like I should be doing something.

A few weeks before the 2001 Boston Marathon, my friend’s mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and my heart broke in that same way. Instead of punching walls, I found myself on the phone with people from the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge (DFMC), a group of about 400 people who run Boston every year and collect pledges for a research program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The combination of blind anger, frustration and college can-do-it-ism convinced me that I could finally do something about this disease that kept invading people’s lives.

So I raised about $5,000 from friends and family and slogged through the 26.2-mile course with the 2002 DFMC team, feeling better for the first time in ages. One month later, I’m just as angry as I was before.

I’m not pre-med, nor could I ever be. I passed my Science A course this semester on a proverbial wing and a prayer. I can’t do derivatives without breaking the calculator, can’t do chemistry experiments without blowing things up, can’t give blood without quaking in fear. Medical schools would pay me to stay 500 yards away. What can I do about cancer?

Not a hell of a lot.

Harvard breeds you to feel like you can take on the world, like you can tackle an issue you care about and make a difference in our society. With some of those issues, it really seems possible. We can tutor underprivileged kids and see quantifiable results when they bring home higher SAT scores. We can go to the Greater Boston Food Bank for a day and figure out how much food we salvaged and how many people we’ve theoretically fed with a few hours of picking through cans. We can do a walkathon—or a marathon—and raise money and feel good about ourselves.

Maybe it’s blindingly obvious, but I am constantly being reminded that cancer is so much bigger than any one person, even a Harvard person—any researcher, any doctor, and certainly any soon-to-be-graduate with nothing but a lot of anger and frustration. It has eluded the most brilliant minds the world has produced. Are your post-grad plans to change the world starting to make you feel important? Go walk the halls at Dana-Farber and listen to people’s stories. It will put things in perspective for you. It will make you feel utterly powerless.

What can I do? Well, I can run. I can send my fundraising letters every year, train from December to March and hand a little money over to Dana-Farber in May, maybe enough to buy a pipette or two in a researcher’s lab.

My marathon run and my four years at Harvard have only reinforced my acceptance of my own limitations. But I’ll still keep doing what I can. And I’ll probably never cease being angry that I can’t do more.

Jonelle M. Lonergan ’02, an English concentrator in Winthrop House, was photography chair of The Crimson in 2001.