Learning from Lia

Many of the world’s elite marathoners will gather for the 126^th running of the Boston Marathon on April 18, chasing the title of champion of one of the most prestigious road races in the world.

They’ll be followed by more than 28,000 other runners, including Kristan Murphy, an account executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, who are running for much more. Kristan runs in honor of a little girl named Lia, who she never met.

Lia DiFronzo was a spunky, rambunctious 6-year-old, when she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 2006. She was treated by both Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital.

“She was fearful at first, of course” recalled her father, Rick. “But she was also very brave. She underwent medical procedures I don’t know I could have.”

Lia grew up fast, her parents remember. She adored her brother, Rico, who at 8 years old donated his bone marrow in a bid to cure his sister’s cancer. “She was worried more for her brother undergoing the donor operation than herself,” Rick said.

When that first transplant was unsuccessful, a second bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor led to complications. Lia died at the age of 8 after battling cancer for two and half years.

A special connection

Murphy has been a runner for as long as she can remember. A member of her high school track team, she ran with her dad many mornings before school. In college, she ran so that she “could eat and drink anything she wanted.” Running later helped her deal with the stress and sadness of her divorce.

Murphy found a new purpose for her running in 2009, when she joined the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge.

Since 1989, the Boston Athletic Association has offered invitational race entries to non-profits who then provide those official spots in the marathon to people who raise money for them.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has been an official charity partner of the race from the beginning. Runners like Murphy have raised more than $100 million for Dana-Farber’s Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research. Murphy herself has raised more than $175,000 in her 13 years of running on the challenge team.

In 2012, she deepened her commitment to the race and the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team when she was asked to join the in-memory partner program, which pairs a runner with a family who has lost a child to cancer and was treated at Dana-Farber.

Murphy was paired with the DiFronzo family and remembers being a little nervous about meeting them for the first time at a dinner specifically for in-memory runners and families. “While we both had a common interest in supporting Dana-Farber and fighting cancer, I wondered if we would connect and if we would have enough in common. Their family had lost a child to cancer, and I couldn't imagine anything worse than that.”

The connection though was immediate. “I felt like I had known them forever,” Murphy recalled. “They told me all about Lia and shared photos of her with me.”

“We consider her part of the family,” Laura DiFronzo said of Murphy.

Deepening bonds

Their bond has grown even closer through more recent tragedy and hardship.

Every marathon, Dana-Farber families gather at mile 25 to cheer on their runners. In 2013, Murphy planned to meet the DiFronzos at mile 25, and pick up Rico, then 14, and run together to the finish line.

They never made it. Race officials stopped them after they passed through Kenmore Square because two bombs had just gone off at the finish line. In the chaos that followed, Rick and Laura managed to find Kristan and their son in the crowd of confused runners and spectators. Rick draped his coat over her shoulders and the family would not leave her side until she had reunited with her family.

“They could have easily gotten themselves and their child out of the city, which really would have been the right thing to do, but they didn’t,” Murphy remembers. “They risked their own safety to stay with me. They treated me like I was their own family.”

Last year, a more personal trial brought them even closer when Murphy became more than a Dana-Farber runner – she became a patient.

A routine mammogram led to a breast cancer diagnosis. She began treatment in April – usually marathon month - but the race had been pushed back to the fall because of COVID-19.

Incredibly, five months after her diagnosis, following two surgeries and four weeks of radiation therapy, she was ready to run Boston again.

The DiFronzos were astonished. “I have a lot of respect and admiration for her,” said Laura. “After going through all that and still running for Lia and the many others she runs for, it’s inspiring.”

Finding inspiration

Murphy said it’s the DiFronzos and the other Dana-Farber families at mile 25, as well as all the people that line the entire marathon route, who inspire her. And it’s the clinicians and fellow patients who cared so deeply for her and her emotional wellbeing every time she stepped into Dana-Farber for treatment that motivate her.

While her latest scans show no malignancy, Murphy is now forever part of what she calls the “cancer world” – patients, survivors, families of those affected by cancer and the caregivers who treat them.

That family generates a special energy, Rick DiFronzo said. He feels it every year at mile 25 of the Boston Marathon and at the finish line of the race. It’s a feeling of care and compassion, much like that shared by a brave little 6-year-old when she learned her big brother was donating his bone marrow to her in her fight against leukemia.

It’s an energy the DiFronzos and Murphy hope will someday lead to a world without cancer.

Since 1989 marathon runners like Kristan Murphy have raised more than $284 million for charities. When combined with money raised by marathon sponsor John Hancock, over the last 36 years the Boston Marathon has contributed more than $426 million to community organizations.