Remembering Rebecca Grundy

I’m feeling such a mix of emotions sitting down to write this piece to honour and remember my friend and colleague Rebecca Grundy. Even though I knew her death was imminent, it feels like a shocking loss and it’s a lot to process. And even after attending her funeral and a beautiful celebration of life last Friday, it still doesn’t feel fully real. But what is real is the lasting effect of the incredible amount of love flowing and filling us on Friday alongside our sadness and grief. Friday was a massive gathering of people who loved Rebecca so, so much and whom she made feel so, so loved. That was one of her superpowers, which was mentioned in different ways by each person who spoke about her at both the service and the celebration of life. Whether you’d known Rebecca for an hour, a month, a year, a decade or more, you felt her positive, open, warm, helpful, loving energy. Rebecca was one of the most vibrant, beautiful souls I’ve had the pleasure of working and becoming friends with and loving. Her fiancé’s mom, Cheryl, captured her beautifully in sharing that, “to me, Rebecca was a wildflower. She was willowy, naturally beautiful with the fortitude to thrive almost anywhere.”

I met Rebecca in the summer of 2017 when we hired her firm to help with one of Rethink’s first big national advocacy campaigns for metastatic breast cancer. She was assigned our file, working on a major and urgent drug access issue that had erupted. The Canadian drug approval process is complex, and while Rebecca was fresh from working at Queen’s Park and clearly bright and keen, we were a bit nervous that this very young person who knew next to nothing about cancer, our issue or the processes involved in drug access was going to be our day-to-day contact. Well, it turned out that we were truly lucky and are extremely grateful that her boss tapped her to be our person. Her enormous gifts were a gift to us and a gift to our community. Rebecca was an integral part of our success on the advocacy issues we had in front of us, and she also played a major role in shaping our current advocacy program. She had both an immediate and a lasting impact on Rethink. One of the things that struck me as we launched our first campaign with her was how Rebecca was incredibly well liked and respected by every single politician we met with no matter their party. Everyone knew Rebecca at Queen’s Park. Everyone respected her. Everyone loved her.

I can vividly remember our early days together. Rebecca soaked up information like a sponge. She threw herself into learning about everything to do with drug access – the processes, the problems, the players. In a shockingly short amount of time, she had a handle on the intricacies involved and she was honing our strategy and tenaciously pushing and driving change. I knew she’d be bringing smart government relations strategy and government connections to the table, but her passion and drive on behalf of the MBC community blew me away. I was like, who is this incredible force of a young woman? She even brought advocacy to our Boobyball event. I’ll never forget scanning the crowd and spotting her dressed in 80s attire for that year’s theme, working a room of almost 2,000 and in a way only she could pull off. She was interrupting and engaging other young people in the issue, getting petition sign-ups and then later dancing the night away. That was so her! At the heart of it all was her passion for the patients affected. She got to know our community, especially our metastatic community those first two years of working so closely together. We didn’t feel like her client at all; we felt like she was an integral part of our team with a direct connection to our community. As we celebrated a huge advocacy win with #MBCintheDark, we had no idea just how direct Rebecca’s connection to our community was about to get.

On the heels of our successful #MBCinthedark campaign launch October 2017, Rebecca turned her focus to also helping us with another access issue affecting our metastatic breast cancer community in Ontario. We’d been working to improve access to oral cancer treatments for many years, but it was with Rebecca’s help that we focused those efforts on our #BitterestPill campaign, heading into the provincial election in June 2018. Once again, it was Rebecca’s mix of strategy, connections, tenacity and endless energy that helped create much needed momentum and progress on the issue. We were shocked and devastated that, just a few months later, Rebecca was then suddenly diagnosed with grade 4 glioblastoma (a form of brain cancer) and directly impacted by this issue herself. A brilliant young woman in the prime of her life and career, she was in desperate need of access to an oral cancer treatment, and she experienced delays, dollars and distress to do so. Almost overnight, she went from working hard behind the scenes on #BitterestPill to becoming an important face of our campaign too.

Rebecca continued working and volunteering on our advocacy throughout much of her illness and treatment, brain surgeries, rounds of brain radiation. Sometimes it was tricky for us to try and manage her desire to continue to be a part of this work while knowing she needed to focus on her own health. She listened to her body and would take time away but then would always reach out and get re-involved, insisting that helping us was also emotionally healing for her.

Despite her heavy burden of treatment, she would come up with brilliant ideas for our campaigns. Jumping through hoops in-front of Queen’s Park to make a point – her idea. Rolling up her sleeves and helping build the activation she’d envisioned – her insistence. She brought the house down with her impassioned, heartfelt speech in front of Queen’s Park that day. The day resulted in the Ontario Government including a commitment to tackle take-home cancer drug inequities in their 2022 budget announcement. ⁠We were thrilled. Rebecca was thrilled. Unfortunately, it was a promise that has not been delivered on, something that frustrated Rebecca to no end. Despite her grace and positivity, the lack of action was devastating to her.

She was still texting me ideas on the advocacy front as recently as last March while also doing everything she could to advocate for herself, take care of herself, live as good a quality of life as she could, and plan for her personal life goals with her fiancé, Tano. She was generous in sharing personal updates about her hopes and dreams and small wins. Amidst all this, she would reach out to me with happy birthday wishes, she helped my daughter get a summer job at the restaurant she had worked at in university (of course the management team there loved Rebecca) and she’d ask about my life. And I know she did this times ten with her family and close friends. 

Rebecca once called me a mentor, but the mentorship was mutual. I learned so much from Rebecca, far beyond anything to do with advocacy or government relations. Her life lessons shared through her example of how to live and be in this world are something I hope I can bring forward into my life, even in small ways.

Thank you, Rebecca. We will carry on our work with you in our hearts. I will miss you dearly and remember you always.

I’m sending so much love to Rebecca’s family and to all who were also lucky to have known and loved Rebecca. 

— MJ DeCoteau, Rethink’s Founder + Executive Director