Her friends called her "Jill the
Pill," a humorous tribute to her single-minded focus in pursuit of her
goals. But when they talk seriously, they'll tell you that Jill Costello was
the bravest person they've ever known.
Also the smartest. And the
funniest. And the sweetest, kindest, most thoughtful person, too.
Jill was the coxswain who willed the
2010 Cal women's crew to victory in the Pac 12 championships and a close second
in the NCAAs. Her coach, Dave O'Neill, called her "the toughest competitor
I've ever coached" and asked her to be godmother to his son, Dash.
She was almost perfect, except for
one flaw: She was mortal. A few weeks after the NCAAs she achieved her dream of
making it to graduation. A few weeks after that she was dead from lung cancer.
Like Joe Roth 40 years before her,
she gallantly fought the disease throughout her senior year, never complaining
but never giving up, either.
"She'd go from chemo directly
to practice or class," says her teammate, Erica Bellis. "How many
other people would do that?"
She not only fought lung cancer for
her own sake, she fought it for all the other victims, too.
The sad fact is that even though
lung cancer is the number one cancer killer, the survival rate hasn't improved
in more than 40 years. It's still stuck at 16 percent.
Why? Because of the stigma. People
assume the victims brought it on themselves, so the funding for research is
ridiculously low.
Never mind that many people with
lung cancer, like Jill or comedian Andy Kaufman, never smoked in their lives.
In fact, one out of every five female lung cancer patients are non-smokers. And
even for people who do smoke, death from lung cancer is an awfully stiff price
to pay.
Does this make you angry? Good. It
made Jill angry, too. And before she died, she decided to do something about
it.
She founded an organization called
Jill's Legacy to raise money for lung cancer research. The main fundraiser is
an annual Jog For Jill on the Cal campus. Last year's jog - which attracted
1,200 runners, joggers, walkers and strollers - raised more than $62,000. All
told, Jill's Legacy has raised more than half a million.
Since her death, Jill's Legacy has
been run by her teammates and her sorority sisters in Kappa Kapp Gamma. And
it's no longer limited to the Cal campus. There have been Jogs For Jill at 12
different colleges, each of them organized by local Kappa chapters or members
of that college's crew.
This year's Jog For Jill at Cal
will be held March 16 at Kroeber Fountain, at the corner of College and
Bancroft. The starting gun will go off at noon, and the runners will wend their
way on a 5K course around the campus before meeting again at Kroeber Fountain
at 1 p.m. for a celebration that is expected to last most of the afternoon.
The center of attention, as he has
been at every Jog For Jill, will be Jill's Maltese terrier – named Jack, of
course – whom she adopted in the last months of her life so her parents could
have something she loved to console them.
I'll be there. And, in a very real
sense, so will Jill.
·
* *
On a much happier note, shchastlyvoi dorohy (that's Ukranian for "Bon Voyage") to conductor Marika Kuzma
and the UC Chamber Chorus, who have been invited to perform at Carnegie Hall in
New York on March 21.
But before they go, they're going
to perform a free lunchtime send-off concert on March 12 at UC Berkeley's Hertz
Hall, singing colorful a cappella pieces by Berkeley composers Randall
Thompson, Trevor Weston, Robin Estrada, Joaquin Nin-Culmel, Jorge Liderman and
Richard Felciano, as well as out-of-towners Lesia Dychko and Eric Whitacre.
If you missed the Chamber Chorus's outstanding
performance of Handel's "Messiah" (in cooperation with the University
Chorus) last December, here's another chance to get turned on to something
truly special. They're that good.
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