The Roanoke Times
ROANOKE, Va. — Somewhere, she knew, her brother was shaking his head and, with all affection, calling her a “doofus.” Alice Obenchain-Leeson was eight miles shy of walking 100 miles in a single week in memory of her big brother, Billy Obenchain, Vinton’s former vice mayor and a beloved Roanoke firefighter and battalion chief. And that struck her as a good time to buy a dozen cupcakes at a child’s curbside bake sale. Her friend bought a cake.
It was a warm day in May, and they had eight miles to walk. “Billy would be like, ‘What were you thinking?’ ” Obenchain-Leeson said. But she lost her older brother, who was also a kind of father figure to her after their father died, to a rare form of cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma in December 2009.
A veteran long-distance walker with a few half-marathons under her belt, Obenchain-Leeson, 45, decided to address her grief by taking on a challenge that would raise awareness of her brother’s disease, and hopefully as much as $10,000 to fund research for a cure. Just 1,500 new cases of that strain of lymphoma are identified each year, compared with 150,000 cases of colon and rectal cancer, nearly 200,000 cases of breast cancer and almost 220,000 cases of lung cancer.
It’s often initially dismissed by victims as eczema or psoriasis. Obenchain’s case was full-blown when it was diagnosed, but he survived and continued to work for years. So, on a Monday in early May, Obenchain-Leeson set off on a 100-mile trek that over six days would take her all over the Roanoke Valley to landmarks important to her brother, from his Vinton grave to the town hall where he served on the town council for 15 years, to a number of fire stations from Vinton to Salem with which the career firefighter had been associated.
And she finished, along with her friend Carole Ann Creque, 51. She still has the journey recorded in her GPS unit to prove it. And while it’s hard to tell exactly how many donations were sent for research at Duke University, Obenchain-Leeson is confident she met her fundraising goal, too. It wasn’t easy. “I had blisters on blisters on blisters,” Obenchain-Leeson said.
But when her feet hurt, or her backpack felt especially heavy, or she took a spill, she just thought of her brother. For years, he had to live within what his cancer would allow. If he could persevere, she thought, so could she. They had help along the way. During one stretch down Melrose Avenue toward Salem, Roanoke Deputy Fire Chief Ralph Tartaglia took Obenchain-Leeson’s backpack and escorted the women in his vehicle.
Along the way, Tartaglia had fire trucks waiting with their lights on in tribute. Wherever she went, Obenchain-Leeson said, people would recognize her from news coverage and hand her money for the cause. All in all, the walk “kind of gave us that springboard to know that we can do more to fight this disease,” she said.
“I feel energized.” She’s pondering whether to do another walk in the coming year, and maybe making it 150 miles this time. Or to do a 5K race instead. But she said all this during a particularly tough week, with the first anniversary of her brother’s death on Dec. 23 on the horizon. She knew what he would say: “Don’t wallow around and be sad. You go and do something for somebody else.”
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