Cancer claims Tour de Rock stalwart Mike Lawless
After years helping kids with cancer, Mike Lawless succumbs to disease
‘It seems kind of ironic, doesn’t it?” Mike Lawless said. “You spend years trying to help kids with cancer, and you end up getting cancer yourself.”
That was in 2013, after the Saanich Police sergeant was diagnosed with the disease that claimed him Sunday.
The 44-year-old died at the Central Saanich home he shared with wife Krista and their sons Tanner, 14, and Ethan, 12.
It was the end of a struggle that seemed appallingly unjust, given who he was and how much he meant to the Tour de Rock, the annual bike ride to fight childhood cancer.
Lawless rode the 2004 tour, then came back every fall as a member of the support crew who volunteer to shepherd the team — a new batch of cyclists is chosen every year — on its 1,000kilometre journey around Vancouver Island.
That’s where I met Mike. I don’t pretend I knew him any better than did any of the 200 or so other riders he coaxed up the hills, and I certainly wasn’t as close as his colleagues at Saanich police, but he was a friend I admired: good-humoured, compassionate, a respected voice of reason.
He was the rock of the Tour de Rock, a strapping 6’5”, 240-pound pillar whose calming influence and com- manding presence would stiffen the spines of riders who weren’t sure they had what it took to climb the next big ascent. His riproaring (and unprintable) speeches at Cathedral Grove gave riders the shot of adrenalin they needed to get over The Hump to Port Alberni. He was legendary for whipping a gym full of school kids into the kind of frenzy that would leave teachers muttering about the length of time it would take to bring them back down.
“What he brought to the Tour de Rock, where people from outside the organization got to see him, is what he brought to work every day here and that was a pos- itive attitude,” Saanich Police Chief Bob Downie said Monday.
Lawless called the tour his addiction. Last October, he told the Times Colonist’s Cindy Harnett, herself a former tour rider: “It became such an emotional thing. Each year the tour came up, I’d ask my wife: ‘Do you mind if I do Tour this year?’ She’d reply: ‘You have to do Tour.’ ” Once, he hurt himself playing volleyball the night before the team embarked but didn’t get his broken ankle diagnosed until his Cops For Cancer duties were done.
When illness kept him away from the 2013 and 2014 Tours, people noticed. “First thing asked by all the communities, schools and supporters was ‘Where’s Mike?’ ” said the Canadian Cancer Society’s Debi Dempsey, the “Tour mum.”
Lawless was home, sick, leaving the cyclists to ride with his badge number — 25 — fixed to helmets and bikes. Diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer in July 2013, he came close to the brink before making what looked like a remarkable recovery — only to discover in the summer of 2014 that the disease had spread to his brain.
There was no fairness to it, just as there is no fairness to childhood cancer. Kids don’t have the risk factors — smoking, bad diet, obesity, lack of exercise — linked to cancer. Nor did Lawless. It was just random, capricious fate that chose him, the kind that tests the faith of those who want to believe there is an explanation for such things. This isn’t a rare story. About 76,000 Canadians died of cancer last year, people who loved and were loved by others.
An expression of how much Lawless was cared for came in October, when close to 100 former tour riders geared up for a pilgrimage to his home.
Looking on, Harnett was amazed by how Lawless, a Saanich police officer since 1995, defaulted to cop mode, controlling the logistics as the bikes crowded the cul de sac. Fighting the dizziness he didn’t want his friends to see, he stood in their midst and said some gracious words.
After they left, Harnett hugged him — or, rather, he hugged her. “He was consoling me,” she says. That shows character.
The Lawless family has asked for privacy to grieve, Downie said.