Sunday, Jun. 27, 2004

The Long Way Home

Legend says that if you throw a coin over your shoulder into Rome's Trevi Fountain, you'll guarantee your return to the Eternal City. "I threw several," says Jane Tomlinson with a chuckle. But Tomlinson, who is battling terminal metastasized breast cancer, was in Rome to begin a five-week, 3,000-km bike ride to her home in Leeds, England — and she knew she wouldn't be back. "Just to be around to contemplate it was fantastic," she says.

Tomlinson, 40, and her brother Luke Goward made the journey on a tandem bicycle and pulled into Leeds on June 7. The ride, her latest fund-raiser for cancer research and relief, brought a windfall of nearly $550,000 to the four charities supported by Jane's Appeal, the effort she started in 2000 after learning her cancer had spread. She has raised more than $1.4 million by doing three London marathons, two triathlons and an end-to-end bike ride of Britain. To the thousands who tracked her progress and those who will benefit from the charities' work, Tomlinson is a hero. Which is nice for her to hear, but she didn't make this one last trip for them. "This," she says, "was personal."

A fighting spirit is one of the few weapons an individual can throw at cancer, and Tomlinson is well armed. She refuses to stop living. A wife and mother of three, she still dispenses hugs, talks about school, wipes away tears. She still works as a pediatric radiographer. She still made it to London to be an Olympic torchbearer, calling it "such an honor." She's still out to prove, in big and small ways, that she's vibrantly, meaningfully alive. "One oncologist said, 'I don't understand why she's making this journey. She should be home,'" Tomlinson says, her soft voice turning steely. "I don't have to sit at home with a rug over me, waiting for my extended family to say their farewells."

The grand tour of Europe — Rome, Florence, Milan, Monte Carlo, Lyons, Paris, Lille, Calais, Dover, London and, at last, Leeds — "allowed me to see, feel, taste places that I might not [otherwise] get to," she says. But more than that, it was a journey of faith. Both practicing Catholics, Tomlinson and Goward chose to start their trip in their church's hometown, and tucked in their bicycle's pannier was a parchment scroll with a blessing from Pope John Paul II. Without her belief, Tomlinson says, "I don't think I could have continued."

Her faith flagged as the kilometers — 100, 150 a day — wore down her body and, slowly, her psyche. "I asked for the strength to carry this out. But I was fearful I'd made the wrong decision. I was becoming increasingly unwell," she says. "I was thinking I was taking five weeks to cycle home to die." But each night, she'd lie in bed, gaze up at the ceiling of some generic hotel and let her mind make its own therapeutic journey. Each stop was a station of her own personal cross, each evening her "prayerful time, when I looked through the day and was thankful. You try to remember the good things — a particularly good coffee on a pretty day, or managing to drench a cameraman in the rain," she says, laughing. "I'd think of how fortunate I was to have health." Invariably, her thoughts drifted to Leeds, toward her own Palace Beautiful and the family that lives there. Being far away, feeling isolated, "you really know how important home is," she says. "It became focal."

And she became humbler. Her trip, partly a declaration of not-dead-yet independence, forced her to acknowledge her reliance on others, especially her family. "I find it hard to say, 'This isn't easy. Can you help?'" Tomlinson admits. "That is the biggest thing. I realized that you can't do things alone, that you need support. My brother has helped me through difficult times — something I haven't been able to do for him."

The times aren't getting easier. The cancer "is still spreading, but it hasn't got into her vital organs," says husband Mike. "We don't know how long it will be. That's not something we ask anymore." She's receiving palliative radiotherapy and keeping up her work-and-family routine. "There aren't many alternatives, are there?" she says. "I'm here. I'm lucky to be here."

Why invent difficulty by deciding to trek across a continent? "Why?" is always the hardest question, and Tomlinson thinks for a long, silent while. The money raised, her inspirational example: these are by-products, not the point. And the point is something that she won't even try to express through words. "I don't think people can understand why I've undertaken the journey," she says bluntly. This is the mystery of the pilgrim's faith and quest. "I don't know if I can even completely define why I did it. But I've made a special journey. It meant a lot. To me."