NEWS FLASH - 11/22/09 - Delaware Today Magazine: "The Activists"

It wasn’t until months after his wife, Kelly Heinz-Grundner, had died of brain cancer in 2004 that Chris Grundner first realized he needed a logo for the foundation he had begun in Kelly’s name and memory.

“I remember thinking, ‘I have a new foundation, but I don’t have a logo,’” says Grundner, Executive Director of The Kelly Heinz-Grundner Brain Tumor Foundation in Wilmington. “It was then I looked up at the ceiling and saw a dragonfly buzzing around near the ceiling fan.” A dragonfly’s wings are green and blue, Kelly’s favorite colors. A graphic identity, now tied to a new foundation, had taken flight above him.

Grundner’s way of honoring his late wife is the same tribute of tireless dedication seen throughout Delaware, where a growing contingent of families, couples and individuals are taking their private struggle with illnesses and, in an effort to help others, making their stories known to everyone.

“These are people who have a passion to correct the wrong that’s been done to their families, so they go out and try to educate and support other families,” says Fred C. Sears II, president and CEO for the Delaware Community Foundation. “When you’ve lost another one that close, the loss can be devastating. By bringing their story to others, they’re saying, ‘Yes, it is overwhelming, but we’re here to help others through it.’”

Now in its 20th year, Delaware Community Foundation manages nearly 900 charitable funds and makes grants to organizations across the First State, including health organizations. Sears can count many families and individuals in the community who have gone to the foundation in search of ideas for establishing scholarships and endowments in honor of loved ones who struggle with illness or who have passed on.

“They want to carry on what those who they’ve lost would have done,” Sears says. “They see the fight and spirit within their family member, and they inherit that same fight and spirit. Whether their loved one regains health or not, their passion doesn’t die.”

When they first arrived in Wilmington in the late 1990s, the Grundners were a couple on the rise. Chris was a Senior Vice President at Bank One Card Services (now JPMorgan Chase) and Kelly was a catering manager at Toscana who ran triathlons. They were young, attractive, and had many friends in different social circles.

One day in September 2002, the storybook life ended. After spending six months trying to understand the cause of Kelly’s persistent migraine headaches, she was diagnosed with a primary brain tumor. It was the size of a golf ball.

Surgery to remove the tumor left Kelly paralyzed on her left side. By then, the neural pathways that controlled her ability to move had gone. To make her functioning leg move, she had to concentrate intensely. She made a vow to walk again on her 30th birthday. And she did, with the help of a cane, in front of 130 guests at Deep Blue restaurant in Wilmington.

Between November 2003 and June 2004, Kelly’s disease was in remission. “She had a determination to beat the disease and told others,” Chris Grundner says. “She even began writing a book that followed her journey, and she really thought the book was going to have a happy ending.”

But the tumor returned. Kelly died in 2004. She was 31.

Grundner immediately resigned from his job at JPMorgan Chase, then spent the first weeks of his mourning thumbing through Kelly’s book, “Whatever It Takes,” an expression she used often during her illness.

“It occurred to me that the book was not going to be enough,” Grundner says. “I had just lost my best friend of 12 years, I had just left my job, and one of the first people I went to was Fred Sears, who said to me, ‘What can I do to help you?’”

With DCF’s assistance, Grundner stood before an audience of more than 100 at the Delaware Center for Horticulture one year after Kelly’s death to announce formation of The Kelly Heinz-Grundner Brain Tumor Foundation. He has positioned the group as one of Delaware’s leading non-profit organizations. The Kelly Heinz-Grundner Brain Tumor Foundation is the only organization in the nation focused primarily on education and awareness about brain tumors.

To date, the foundation has raised close to $1 million. In September 2008, Grundner launched a three-month "Get Your Head In The Game" public awareness campaign that was seen on Delaware billboards, bus signs and on a floor display at the Wilmington Amtrak station. In May the foundation raised close to $200,000 with an awareness walk in Wilmington that drew 2,800 participants and 11 major sponsors.

“I used to believe that we were defined by our jobs,” Grundner says. “I now know that who we are defines what we do for a living. I am a servant.”

In many ways, without even writing a word, Grundner has given his late wife’s book the happy ending she desperately hoped for. He and his new wife, Susan, who was a close friend of Kelly’s, live in Landenberg with their son, Cooper. The little boy has a middle name: Kelly.

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