I have long been involved with a non-profit group called the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This group raises money, and awareness, for research on breast cancer. My involvement in past years was primarily my strong back. A co-worker and long time Board of Directors member, Barbara Hoffman, would conscript me to move boxes of shirts, pamphlets, equipment and other, manual labor type tasks.

This year, I volunteered to lend my photography skills to the cause and the Board was delighted to accept me as a staff photographer for the local chapter.

Over the last several months, I have been involved in documenting the volunteer effort that goes in to an organization of this type, and I focused on the activities leading up to their largest yearly event, the ‘Race for the Cure.’ This 5K race draws huge crowds of supporters and gives a lot of good media exposure to the foundation.

The race, for many, is just a side show. This event is much, much more than just sweaty people paying to pound the pavement! The event gathers cancer survivors together to celebrate life, to acknowledge the struggle they face and to show the world that they are winning the battle.

As a self-proclaimed curmudgeon and a card-carrying cynic, I am not one to get weepy eyed over a fallen bird nest or the picture of a starving child on the television. I don’t sob at chick flicks and I don’t bemoan the state of the Amazon rainforest. Yet, I defy any person with a shred of humanity to maintain a stoic face when spending time with 5,000 cancer survivors and listening to their stories.

Each one is different and each one poignant in its own way. You laugh, you cry, you shake your head in wonder and you get angry at the treatment some have received. Even as a supposedly objective observer, involved only as a journalist recording the events for posterity, you cannot help but be scooped up and carried along on the waves of emotion pouring out of the men and women gathered together.

If none of the interactions, none of the stories of hardship and survival against all odds, none of the love and support that they show each other, if none of that penetrates your thorny exterior, you need only wait for the final act.

Each of the survivors received a pink balloon, one for each year they have survived since being diagnosed with Breast Cancer. They carry these balloons with them throughout the morning and it serves as a visual reminder of the thousands of people who are suffering from this cancer. You can look out across the crowd of people and see, here and there, sometimes clustered in groups, the pink balloons floating above the heads of people milling around the various information and vendor booths.

At the end of the event, the cancer survivors, and those ubiquitous pink balloons, gather together to listen to the stories and to celebrate the longest survivors. They offer up thanks and prayers for their lives and their families, for friends and fallen comrades. They imbue these balloons with the fears they have faced, the heartache they have felt and also with the hope they have for a brighter future, the hope for a cure.

Then, as one, these afflicted men and women release the balloons, turning loose the fears, sending out the prayers to the world. You can hear, for a moment, absolute silence as every eye is turned heavenward to watch the flight of these balloons. Then, if you listen close enough, you can hear a soft, almost universal sigh as the weight of those fears and prayers is lifted, if just for a moment, from the shoulders of those who have carried them for so long.

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