FOLLOWING the Brunswick Police Honor Guard is the Coombs family, undeterred by the rain starting to fall, carrying the banner during the survivor lap Friday night at Relay For Life at Brunswick High School.
With a rainbow of markers, they wrote the name of Coombs family members diagnosed by cancer on the team sign for their campsite at the Brunswick High School track Friday night.
Some have survived and are in remission — one was just a child when he was diagnosed, but at 14 he is now cancer free. Cancer took others — some fast and some not. There are more when you count spouses lost to cancer too.
BRENDA UHLE holds up a photo of sister Georgia White, who participated in the annual Relay For Life fundraiser for many years herself. White died two weeks after walking the survivor lap at last year’s Relay shortly after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Many members of the Coombs family, which always has a team at Relay For Life, have been diagnosed with cancer, so they attend Relay For Life every year.
About half of the family members affected by various kinds of cancer have survived, she said, and “we’re here every year.”
Uhle’s sister, Helen Vigliotta, 79, started doing Relay For Life with their sister, Georgia White, and normally they called the team Coombs Family.
“We changed our name little bit this year,” to ‘Georgia on our Mind,’ Uhle said.
White, 67 when she died, walked the survivor lap last year “and then two weeks later we lost her,” said Uhle.
White, with her “exuberant personality,” had walked as part of Relay For Life for many years but last May she had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Even though she wasn’t feeling well, she finished that first survivor lap to kick off the event and at the end, her grandson was waiting to walk with her another halflap. Not expecting to lose her so fast, the family was happy to have that one last Relay with White, who also lost her husband to cancer.
There were fewer teams at this year’s Relay For Life, and as rain fell incrementally and bursts of high winds blasted Relay campers and knocked down the occasional tent, many of the toughest filtered out through the allnight event designed to represent the long battle that is cancer — but still some hard-core Relayers continued to walk all night in pouring rain and wind.
Vigliotta said family told her she might not be going to Relay this year because of forecasts of rain.
“And I said, ‘You just watch me, I’m going,’” she said.
Helping get set up for Relay For Life was Vigliotta’s great-granddaughter, 11- year-old Olivia Vaillancourt, and White’s best friend, Carol Bisson, as well as other family members and friends.
“If we can stop one (cancer casualty), or help someone make it through,” Uhle said, that is why the family returns every year to Relay. “It just makes us feel closer to the ones we lost and it’s a chance to reflect.”
Whether it is genetic or “in the food,” the Coombses can’t say why so many of their family members, who have lived in many different areas, have been so impacted by cancer.
“It’s so hard to say and that’s one of the reasons that we Relay, to find out why and what’s causing it,” Uhle said, “so fewer and fewer people have to hear that word.”
When you hear cancer, “it makes your stomach do a little flip flop,” she added. “It used to be people didn’t even say the word.”
dmoore@timesrecord.com
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