Running on Hope

From a barren hill near St. Innocent Orphanage, Ismael Valadez can view the Pacific horizon. Sea winds offer coolness and faint crescendos of distant surf. Sunset hues saturate the sky, and life becomes a quiet blend of beauty and darkness. Such is his feeling of being alone. Beauty and darkness.

Sometimes he runs up and over these hills to Rosarito, five miles away. He loves the feeling of speed and is one of Baja’s fastest teenage sprinters. Later this month, he will compete in the Northern regionals, where he hopes to qualify for national competition.

When he runs, he says, he does not think about his past, about his father’s death or his mother’s absence. He does not dwell on his brother and four sisters, whom he rarely sees. When he runs, he forgets his loneliness.

It is a different loneliness that Vera Uliantzeff of West L.A. knows. Hers is the kind that cancer brings when you have not prepared yourself to die, when all you want is to somehow live and you look at the doctor for hope. And the doctor looks away. So you look at your family, and it says nothing.

Vera, winner of this year’s Patsy Choco Courage Award, given to the Los Angeles Marathon participant who best serves as an inspiration, is 39, Ismael is 16. They are of different countries, different cultures, but they both know loneliness. Today they will be together, running side by side in the marathon.

It is Vera’s second marathon. The first was in 1991, two years after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. When she first heard the diagnosis, she thought only of death--not survival. Buried in her native Chile are her grandmother and great-grandmother, both Russian immigrants. Between them rests Alexander, her brother who died shortly before turning 9. All were claimed by cancer. Her mother too has cancer.

In her journal, she described Jan. 27, 1989, as “the day that changed the rest of my life.” She expressed herself simply that day, in short sentences.

“My world crumbled,” she wrote. “I have cancer.”

The marathon came to symbolize that which becomes distant in dark moments: hope, possibilities, life. Inspired after reading about a woman with breast cancer running in the event, Vera committed herself to training.

She ran in ’91 to raise money for a children’s cancer fund, and today she runs for the boys of St. Innocent, where she volunteers, and the Rhonda Fleming Mann Resource Center for Women With Cancer at UCLA.

When she decided to run, she knew she did not want to run alone. She wanted the event to be about the boys, not her, so even though Ismael is not a long-distance runner, the boys chose him to represent them. He has never run 26.2 miles, but he is not afraid.

He only wishes his family could see him run. Perhaps, he says, it would help him run faster. Perhaps they would be proud, and perhaps the loneliness would go away.

A Joyful Family Is Stricken by Grief

Vera remembers dipping a comb in water and running it through her brother’s hair as he lay dying. The day he was buried, it was cold in Santiago, and Vera, then 7, wore flannel pants and a black sweater. She hid behind her grandmother’s gravestone so no one would see her cry.

Life changed forever when Alexander died. Vera’s father became withdrawn, absent. He threw himself into his business as a tool and dye maker. On Sundays, the family no longer went on trips to explore and hunt rocks. It became a day of somber music, the saddest day of the week.

Everyone spoke lovingly of Alexander, which made Vera believe that his death was a horrible mistake.

“It was the feeling that God must have made a mistake,” she says. “My brother was so wonderful, and his death made everyone so sad that I thought I was the one who was supposed to die.”

In 1978, with Chile in political turmoil, the family moved to the United States, first to Miami, then to Los Angeles. But her father, who had always worked for himself, could not get used to the idea of working for others and in 1980 returned alone to Chile.

It was left to Vera’s mother, Glina Stewart, to support the family of five daughters. For a year, they were on public assistance. Glina worked odd jobs before finding permanent employment at a mortuary. She worked as a counselor, helping people plan funerals, and later worked in accounting.

Vera, who had just graduated from a private German high school in Chile, worked wherever she could. She sorted dirty clothes at a dry cleaner, cleaned houses, worked at a concession stand at the zoo. She earned an associate’s degree in graphic design but could not afford art school. Instead, she studied to be a translator in legal cases and for 11 years has worked for the Superior Court system.

She will always remember the morning in 1989 when she woke up in pain.

“It felt like someone was stabbing a hot knife into my breast. I just knew,” she says. “I can’t explain it, but I knew that it was cancer.”

A lumpectomy was followed by radiation and chemotherapy. During treatment, her boyfriend of nine years left.

“He couldn’t face the treatments with me. Six months later, he was married,” she says.

It was a lonely, hopeless time. Later that year, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation treatment.

“Why her, God?” Vera asked. “If someone has to have cancer let it be me, not her.”

The two women found courage from each other.

“She’s the one who taught me to fight and never give up,” says Glina, 62. But how does one fight cancer? How can one fend off its assault, avoid its silent approach? The answer came to Vera when she read about the woman running in the marathon.

“That moment changed me,” she says. “I was going through this not knowing what was going to happen, and all the sudden there was life in front of me. I told myself that day that I was going to run the marathon.”

Even before the bandages were removed, she began preparing. She trained through 1990, but four months before the race, her world crumbled again. A melanoma was discovered on her leg and required surgery.

As she wrote in her journal on Nov. 27, 1990, her sentences were again short and to the point: “So I was right. It’s cancer. A malignant melanoma. It might be in my lymph nodes. My world fell apart.”

She refused radiation and chemotherapy so she could continue preparing for the marathon. Nothing was going to keep her from running.

“I had to get on with my life,” she says. “I had to run.”

She completed the course in less than 5 hours. The accomplishment renewed her faith in possibilities. If she could complete a marathon, what else might be within her reach? She proved what she had wanted so much to believe: that cancer did not mean death.

“It was the beginning of a new life,” she says. “It’s when my search started.”

Church Becomes Source of Comfort--and Life

Vera discovered that if life remained, she needed to learn how to live it. And if it didn’t, she needed to learn how to die. Both paths led to St. Sophia Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles and Father Andrew Barakos.

It was Barakos who taught her to see the goodness within her, overcoming feelings traced to her brother’s death. He welcomed her into the church, and she thrived.

On Dec. 30, 1991, she reflected in her journal: “I guess it’s been a pretty good year in a lot of ways. Well, actually, the best one I’ve had in a long, long time. I found God. . . . St. Sophia is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. God finally heard me, and he’s still listening. He’s being so good to me. Unbelievable.”

But cancer can be cruelly patient. On June 29, 1993, Vera went in for a routine checkup, and this time spots were found on her lungs. She felt caught in a familiar avalanche.

“My world is shattered,” she wrote. “I cry. Go home, trying to have faith.”

On July 13, a biopsy and surgery were performed. Vera already feared the worst, and when she saw the expression on her doctor’s face, when she saw her family huddled in the corner, she knew. She reached for an icon of the mother of God with Christ and held it to her chest.

“I looked at my mom and said, ‘It’s cancer, isn’t it?’ And she nodded.”

Barakos visited her at the hospital, sat at her bedside and held her hand. “Father, is it time to go?” Vera asked. “Is it time to let go?”

Barakos said he would fast and pray, and ask others to do the same. The words she remembers most are, “We will fight.”

There were few options remaining. With traditional chemotherapy, her chances of long-term survival were about 5%. With a stem-cell transplant, a process considered experimental, her chances were 20%.

She opted for the transplant, and on Nov. 18, 1993, before checking into the hospital, she went to the ocean.

“Today has been an incredible day,” she wrote. “I have felt God’s presence. . . . I have no fear. My heart is filled with such incredible peace. . . . I am facing what should be the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. This morning was a glorious one. I got up and went down to the beach Rollerblading. Then I walked in the water, ran in the sand and watched the dolphins go by. I felt so happy, so grateful, so close to God.”

She was in the hospital for 3 1/2 weeks. The treatment drained life from her. She couldn’t walk. At one point, she couldn’t remember where she lived. The nightmares were horrendous. Her hair fell out. Once again, Vera’s family rallied around her.

She slowly regained strength, began exercising and eventually sought the advice of a nutritionist and Chinese herb specialist. Her body began to feel stronger, and to strengthen her soul she began working as a volunteer with St. Innocent Orphanage and Project Mexico, an outreach effort of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church that builds homes for the poor.

By helping others, she says, she found meaning in her life. She helped build homes for the poor in Mexico. Then, 2 1/2 years ago, when the orphanage opened, Vera spent six weeks helping prepare the facility, which was converted from a horse ranch.

That’s when she met a brash, angry young man named Ismael Valadez, one of St. Innocent’s first residents. He was a fighter, she says, who kept to himself. He would not open up at first, but when she told him she had run in a marathon, he seemed impressed.

Ismael, who has lived in several orphanages since age 4, slowly began to open up to Vera, but he thought she would be like other people who had come and gone from his life. No one ever stayed. When Vera’s six weeks at the ranch ended and she was preparing to return home, Ismael approached her.

“You’re not coming back, are you?” he asked.

Boys Bring Fear and Little Else to the Orphanage

When new boys arrive at St. Innocent, they are afraid, says Luis Sanchez, director of operations, through an interpreter.

“They arrive here empty, they have nothing,” he says.

Some were abandoned as babies, their names and birthdays unknown. One was chained to a doghouse, where he ate and slept. Another was burned by his father, beaten by his mother and grandmother.

“If people who are supposed to love them treat them like that, what can they expect from a stranger?” Sanchez asks. “When they first arrive, they won’t let anybody near them. They’re afraid someone will hurt them.”

A narrow dirt road that turns quickly to mud leads to the 8 1/2-acre ranch, home to 15 boys. It is one of the few orphanages in Mexico that allow teenage boys to stay. Because there are so many children, so few beds, teenagers often must leave. At St. Innocent, they can stay as long as they want. It is their home.

In the center of the property is a dirt soccer field. Someday, they hope to have a gym. There are no telephones, no heat. Since electricity was introduced a year ago, ground has been broken on a computer center.

St. Innocent operates under the auspices of the Orthodox Christian Church and is funded through private donations. Vera is trying to raise $1 million through pledges.

“That way,” she says, “the boys will know that they will always have a home.”

Ismael speaks little about his past. It is easier to speak of the future. He would like to be an architect, he says, because he finds fascinating what lies hidden beneath walls. He would like to marry and have a family. One son, one daughter.

He has thought a lot about family, what it is, what it should be. When he is married and has children, he says through an interpreter, “I won’t leave them like mine left me. . . . To be together is the most important thing for a family.”

Vera visits as often as she can.

“When I got to the ranch and I started working with the boys, I realized that through these boys God made me aware of the gift I had, which was to love any child. I love these kids like they were my own,” she says.

But last year was another difficult year for her. Her mother was struck again by cancer and underwent a mastectomy. During her recovery, the family received an unexpected visit. After 18 years, Vera’s father returned.

He came to be with Glina, to reunite with his daughters, to meet his grandchildren. Shortly after he arrived, however, he suffered a stroke, then another. Vera was with him when he died.

Her cancer has been in remission for more than five years, but she has learned not to trust it. One night last year she wrote in her journal: “I feel funny tonight, and just in case our loving Father decides to take me home as I sleep, I wish to leave my goodbyes.

“I loved my life, I’ve lived it with passion. I tried to do everything with heart and soul. I’ve failed in many things but never ceased trying.

“I have lived, loved, hurt, sinned and forgiven. I am sorry for whatever pain I caused knowingly or not. I was far from perfect, and may God have mercy on me.

“I am grateful for the life I’ve had, my family that I loved so much yet never showed it enough.”

She continued to say her goodbyes and closed the entry with this: “Most importantly, please watch over the ranch and the boys. They need you so much. I love them so much. May God have mercy on my soul. Amen.”

She has learned to live and finds meaning that went unnoticed before. Part of her joy in living is knowing that she will be at peace when it is her time to die. For now, her heart beats strong.

When she runs, she will think of the boys of St. Innocent standing at the finish line awaiting her. She will push herself forward to them. She will need them today. Her immune system remains weak from her treatments, and she has been battling colds for two weeks.

She may have to walk some today, but she will not be alone. Ismael will be at her side, and the other boys will be there to cheer for them.

Maybe someday they too will run. People will cheer for them, and at day’s end, when they stand alone atop the hills of St. Innocent, they will see more than darkness come with the night.