Simone Conner went out for dinner last week and was supposed to be the designated driver.
Then the Duncan woman looked up at her host’s two-storey house — and compared its height to that of the 35-storey tower she’ll rappel down on Friday.
“And then I started drinking red wine, which I do not like.”
Which raises an obvious question: Why would a woman who is terrified of heights, who can barely bring herself to stand on the deck of her own home, volunteer to go over the edge of Vancouver’s 359-foot-high Hyatt Regency?
Because of her son.
Because of somebody else’s son, or daughter, who deserves to have a ray of light shine in when life is dark.
Because she’s one of the bravest people you’ll ever meet.
Simone’s son, Ryan Rowlinson, was just seven years old when he was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, a disorder in which tumours grow along nerve pathways. It’s the same condition that afflicts Victoria’s Jeneece Edroff. There is no cure, just a series of surgeries.
In Ryan’s case, that has meant — so far — two major operations on his back (including one that left him in a halo brace with a fused spine), one on his ankle, and one in his brain. He’s waiting for more brain surgery. He turns 18 next week.
Imagine being a teen on that bleak journey. And imagine being Ryan when Make-A-Wish — a charity for children with serious illnesses — stepped into that bleakness to whisk him off to meet his hero, Washington Capitals star Alexander Ovechkin.
That was in 2011. Make-A-Wish flew Ryan, his brother, mother and father to Washington, D.C., a five-star trip in which the family was put up at a luxury hotel, limo’d to swank restaurants and treated like gold by the Capitals, who gave Ryan his own locker, stuffed with team loot. Every player signed Ryan’s jersey.
Ovechkin himself toured the teen around the team’s practice facility. “He was great with Ryan,” Simone says.
Ryan told his hero that he would score on the Edmonton Oilers three times that night. In fact, with Ryan watching from Ovi’s arena seats, the player got two goals and an assist. “It felt like he was playing for Ryan,” says Simone.
It’s hard to express how much that trip meant to mother and son, she says. “Not only did it help Ryan get through those years, it helped me.”
Sometimes, sitting at the ferry terminal, coming back to the Island after another bad-news appointment at B.C. Children’s Hospital, the memory of that Ovechkin trip was all they had to relieve the gloom. “I couldn’t give Ryan hope. I couldn’t make him smile anymore. This gave me something that would light up Ryan’s eyes.”
So now it’s payback time. Simone has signed up for Friday’s Rope For Hope, a Make-A-Wish fundraiser in which participants gain pledges for rappelling down tall buildings.
She has raised more than $10,000 so far, and has enlisted three others — Shawna Dillabaugh and Carolyn Dawson, friends who have been around since the start of Ryan’s journey, plus Kathy Samuel, the Make-A-Wish volunteer who made the Washington trip happen — to make the descent, too.
Yes, she is terrified. She tried ascending a climbing wall in Nanaimo, but only made it six rocks up. In Vancouver, she’ll spend Thursday night across town, in a two-storey hotel, so that she doesn’t have to look at the Hyatt until she has to.
But bravery isn’t about the absence of fear, it’s about carrying on despite it — and Simone Conner has been doing that for years.
“If I close my eyes, I can picture the moment when Ryan saw Ovechkin skating up,” she says. “I would rappel a thousand buildings to give that moment to someone else.”
•••
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a handful of Stelly’s Secondary grads who were continuing to volunteer in Nepal after April’s earthquake struck.
Their presence was a legacy of the school’s Global Perspectives program, in which students travel abroad to do good works. That included building a women’s shelter in the remote area where the grads are volunteering.
Stelly’s will host a fundraising concert for Nepal at 7 p.m. this Friday, May 29. There’ll be food, a silent auction and music. “We have a budget of $0 and a goal to raise $10,000,” says student Nathan Creighton-Kelly. Tickets are $15, available at the school office or at the door.
