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'They do so much ... It's helped me' |
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Friday, 22 August 2008 |
By JOSEPH B. NADEAU
WOONSOCKET — Gerry Forget will tell you he became involved in the East Woonsocket Little League Jimmy Fund Golf Tournament in the way many people get tapped for charitable events.
Someone had to volunteer to help, and tournament founders Norm Charette, Roger Gagnon and Paul Tancrell had their eyes on him.
It was also a cause Forget had no choice but to embrace: The Jimmy Fund helps kids with cancer, and a Little League organization is all about kids.
And so for the past 15 years, Forget spent his summers and some of the spring working on the annual fundraiser that honors longtime league manager and board member Jim Carr, who died of cancer.
“When they started it, they would get up to 100 players and it was always in August at different golf courses,” Forget said this week.
In his day job, Forget is project manager for store replenishment at CVS Pharmacy, His side project keeps him busy, too: After three years as a volunteer, he took over as tournament director.
Since that time, he has kept about 150 golfers on board for the annual Saturday event he presents at Triggs Golf Course in Providence.
The golf tourney is usually held after the Jimmy Fund Little League Tournament wraps up at Hartnett Field on Aylsworth Avenue. Both events support the same worthy cause.
In the years he has been involved, Forget has raised $108,000 for the Jimmy Fund Golf Program.
Last year alone, Forget sent along $10,879 to the organization, helping the Jimmy Fund collect $6.7 million from its golf fundraisers overall.
It would be easy to expect Forget to continue such good work if his family hadn’t suffered the devastating loss it endured this spring.
In his years working on the tournament, Forget could always count on the younger of his two sons, Jason, to be on hand, helping him with the all the details that go into making such events go smoothly.
Sometimes, in fact, the only support Forget received was from Jason, a former East Woonsocket Little Leaguer. Dad would be forced to call around for help at the last minute when it looked they would be the only ones running the show on Saturday.
But in February, Jason, 27, came down with stubborn flu-like symptoms and went to the hospital to get them checked out, Forget recalled this week.
The doctors thought Jason might have a treatable inflammation of the pancreas but scheduled him for an endoscopic exam to rule out other possibilities.
Not long after, Forget and his wife, Beverly, got a diagnosis no parent ever wants to hear: Jason had cancer of the esophagus. The most devastating news of all was that the disease had progressed to a stage that was not curable and at best could only be slowed or stalled with chemotherapy and other cancer-fighting tools.
It was at that point that Forget learned something about the organization he had been helping that he had not fully understood.
He had the number of Nancy Rowe, the director of the Jimmy Fund Golf program he had worked with over the years, and used it.
“I made a call to her at 3 a.m. in the morning and said, 'I just put my son in the hospital and he has cancer. I don’t even know what I am asking for, I just need help.'”
Rowe got the message later in the morning and called him back immediately, Forget said.
“She wanted details and she wanted to know what was happening,” he said.
As Jason's illness progressed, the Jimmy Fund came through for the family in many ways. There were counselors that stepped up unobtrusively to provide support if needed; the foundation also helped the family negotiate the difficulties of scheduling treatment and making transfers between facilities.
Jason was helped by the staff at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, and Forget remembers distinctly that the people he met during that time had a way of letting you know they really cared and somehow understood what his family was going through.
“There wasn’t a person I talked to that did not come across as being completely sincere,” Forget said.
The advancing cancer caused seizures in Jason's brain that led to his death on March 15 shortly after he returned home from Boston.
His father, mother, and older brother, Thomas, received an outpouring of support from their many friends in the area. Through that experience, they also learned how Jason had affected so many others with simple caring gestures and his ability to make people laugh.
“He was a good boy,” Forget said. “He was liked by a lot of people of all ages.”
Forget said he met people who had been customers at Shaw’s where Jason worked and was told things that his son did for them that he had never mentioned at home. “He would make them smile,” Forget said.
Jason’s funeral, at St. Joseph Church on Mendon Road, drew so many people that the line to get in wound down the front steps, then down the sidewalk along the street, Forget recalls.“It was pretty overwhelming,” he said.
Even this week, it was clear Forget is still in the process of coping with the loss of his son. In a way, his work with the Jimmy Fund could be helping him along that path.
Jason, he remembered, had enjoyed helping his father at the tournaments -- and in 2007, he even played the course for the first time in all those years.
“I told him just have some fun,” Forget said, not knowing then it would be Jason's last chance to play.
Most important of all for his father is the knowledge that Jason would not want his family to stop doing the things they all had shared.
“He would have wanted us to continue living our lives,” Forget said.
And so Forget will be at Triggs this morning, putting up the sponsor signs on the fairways and greens, setting up the sign-in table, greeting his golfers and thinking of Jason. It will be a tough day, he admitted with emotion, but one he wouldn’t miss.
“My pre-tournament budget projected we will make $10,500 for the Jimmy Fund this year,” he said.
The money will go to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston , helping the hospital with a wide range of possible needs during the course of the coming year. Forget is also expanding his work for the foundation, planning to raise money for the Jimmy Run on the Boston Marathon course come Sept. 21. It will be a personal effort carried out in Jason’s memory, he said.
“Now that I have experienced it, I know first hand what they do,” he said. “It’s not something I read about. They do so much and it’s touched me.” |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 August 2008 )
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