Melissa Barber was preparing to run her first Boston Marathon in March 2020 as a member of Team JAF when the world stopped. And for the moment, so did those marathon plans. You see, the 2020 Boston Marathon was first postponed to September of that year only later to be canceled entirely due to the global pandemic.
Melissa had been inspired to run in honor of her mom, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2018. It was a difficult diagnosis for someone Melissa called ‘her very best friend.’ She watched her mom valiantly battle the disease over five and a half years before passing away in August 2023.
Despite those challenging years, Melissa took time and decided she was ready to try this again. She wanted to find a way to honor her mom’s memory and decided to give the Boston Marathon another try.
She ended up finding a great fit in the Joe Andruzzi Foundation (JAF). Melissa learned about JAF through two mutual friends who had run for the Foundation in the past in honor of their brother. They talked about what a positive experience it was and a unique way to honor the memory of their loved one. It was also a good match for Melissa, who wanted to run for a charity that helped cancer patients.
“Thankfully, we had the resources we needed, and my mom didn’t need to utilize something like JAF, but I saw at that time how difficult it is on the patient and on the family, and how stressful it can be both financially and emotionally. I really love what JAF was doing for patients that were going through this.”
It has been a cold and windy winter leading up to the 2025 Boston Marathon, and Melissa is one of many runners fighting their way through it, heading into Boston for many of the long training runs. That sense of community has stood out to her through being part of Team JAF.
“The time and effort that JAF and Charity Teams put into ensuring that we as runners and as fundraisers are well taken care of is just amazing. It’s just such a nice community, and everyone’s there for the same reason. Most people are not very experienced runners…for the most part, we’re all just doing this for the first, second, or third time. And so, we’re all in it together.”
That willingness to do whatever is necessary explains why the mission of JAF stands out to Melissa so much and why she chose to fundraise for the organization.
“I really liked that they helped the patients with household needs. We were lucky where my mom’s treatments and surgery; everything was very local to where she lived, so she didn’t have to travel too far; but I know, especially living in Massachusetts with all these cancer centers being in Boston, it can be tough for a lot of people to get there. So, I loved that they could provide transportation, [or] putting food on the table for the week, whatever it was to make that load a little bit easier.”
And it’s those patients, especially her mom, that Melissa will think about as she makes that left on Hereford and right on Boylston on race day.
“Just knowing how difficult [my mom’s] five and a half years were and the battle that she put up every single day with a smile on her face really has just inspired me to want to do this again in hopes that I’m helping JAF raise money and puts smiles on faces of other patients that are going through something similar. I think you hear about cancer, and nobody likes the word cancer, but until you have a family member, or yourself, I’m sure, go through it, you never really know what it’s actually like and how it’s life-altering for the patient and the family. So having JAF supporting people like that means so much to me.”