When 9-year-old Walker Beery died Sept. 4 after a grace-filled two-year battle with brain cancer, he bequeathed to the world a mission of his own devising: raise money to find treatments and a cure for pediatric brain cancer — and involve children in the effort.
As September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, there’s no better time to do so than now.
Walker, a New Orleanian, was 7 years old when diagnosed on July 28, 2019, with Medulloblastoma, an aggressive cancer with a low survival rate. With a wonderfully supportive extended family, led by his parents Taylor and Angel Beery, Walker approached his various treatment regimens with remarkable spunk, patience, and a sense of infectious joyfulness that shone through all the fact-filled, superbly written updates his family regularly shared on Caring Bridge.
“Walker is working harder every day on some of the post op challenges (muscular, vision and speech),” wrote his father Taylor less than a month after diagnosis and three weeks after diagnostic surgery. “In that process he’s fallen in love with a 3 wheel bike that he can drive around the hospital halls. Nurses know that Walker’s about to come through on his bike when they hear ‘Old Town Road’ and his laugh, both at high volumes.”
This was followed by a short summation in plain English, both informative and concise, of the latest medical assessments and plans.
The setbacks, complicated almost exponentially by the coronavirus outbreak, were all recorded — but so were the many triumphs and grace notes along the way. Visits with professional athletes, to the NASA Space Center, to aquariums, and other fun occasions were detailed with a sense of wonder and gratitude.
“It’s been very hard, but I’ve always been able to find joy in it, like coming home after a week or two weeks in the hospital,” said Walker in a video. “But … I want other people who have cancer to not have to go through the same thing I went through.”
While being treated with chemotherapy at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, an incident set Walker’s mind to work.
“During those treatments, we were in Walker’s room, and a little girl came next door and handed him a teddy bear,” his father Taylor said. “When she left the room, he was very choked up. He said his nose was burning, but it was with a happy cry because that was so nice of her. Later, he and his sister Evelyn were around the dinner table and said, ‘We want to do an event to raise money for other kids with pediatric cancer. Why don’t we do a lemonade stand?’ Well, they ended up raising like $3,000 overnight selling a few jugs of lemonade.”
Taylor continued: “He kept talking about wanting to do something else, saying he thought there is an opportunity to raise money for a lot of kids. ‘It’s gonna take some work on our part,’ I said. But he said, ‘I don’t care, let’s go.’ He was super impatient about it. I reached out to a friend in town who was an event planner and left the idea with her. Then I went back to focusing on Walker’s treatment. When I circled back with her a month later, there were team captains and other concepts that had been worked through. A lot had happened.”
With Walker frequently asking about the effort’s progress, much of which involved enlisting children across the country to do lemonade fundraisers, sell bracelets, walk dogs, or however else they could raise money, the idea grew into a new non-profit organization. The group, “Kids Join the Fight,” raises money for two things: research and development for treatments or cures for pediatric brain cancer specifically, with a special focus on immunotherapies and more general support for incidentals for families dealing with any sort of childhood cancer. The organization is run entirely by a volunteer board, and 100% of the proceeds go directly to the two announced causes.
Children in almost all 50 states have already gotten involved, and the organization has raised nearly $300,000 toward a year-end goal of $1 million. Taylor Beery says only 4% of all cancer research funding goes toward fighting pediatric cancer. Research costs are too high for the relatively small size of the “market,” so non-profit and government efforts are desperately needed to supplement what the pharmaceutical companies are already doing.
“I think the extraordinary national reaction to the KJTF foundation is the direct result of the inspiration Walker provided by finding gratefulness and joy when he could have been consumed by unfairness and pain,” Taylor said. “That’s a decision many, with and without cancer, can relate to with the challenges they face every day. After seeing how others responded to him, Walker’s mission was to prevent any other child from having to go through what he had to go through. With only 4% of cancer funding dedicated to pediatric cancer and the challenges families in this fight face, he left us with a difficult mission. However, he also left us with the confidence that, fueled by his inspiration, we can play an important role in saving these children and supporting these families.”
But the last word goes to young Walker: “You can do really anything to raise money for cancer. Anything in the world. You just have to do something.”
Then, with a megawatt smile, he added: “So get after it!”
