Marcella Sangregorio will lace up her running shoes on March 28 and carry something sacred. She plans to run 100 kilometres with her mother’s ashes strapped to her back. The route stretches from northwest Calgary to Ghost Lake and back. It marks the second anniversary of her mother’s death.
This isn’t just about distance or endurance. It’s about keeping a promise that slipped away. “I promised I would take her there and that never ended up happening, so now I’m fulfilling my promise,” Marcella explained. She’s 23 now, but her mother’s illness defined much of her childhood.
Lisa Sangregorio received a devastating diagnosis in 2003. Doctors found a grade 3 Astrocytoma, a malignant brain tumour behind her left eye. Marcella was only one year old. The prognosis gave Lisa two to five years to live. She fought for nearly two decades instead.
“My mom was such a fighter,” Marcella said. “She miraculously survived until I was 21.” Those extra years came with a cost measured in hospital visits, seizures and slow decline. Still, Lisa refused to let cancer define her family’s story.
Mike Sangregorio, Marcella’s father, remembers how his wife protected ordinary life. Even through treatments and uncertainty, Lisa took the girls to school. She picked them up afterward. The family went camping together. “We lived our lives as normal as possible,” Mike said.
For years, many people wouldn’t have guessed what Lisa carried. “She looked and functioned like a normal person,” Mike explained. But behind closed doors, the family understood the grim reality. They knew time was borrowed, not guaranteed.
Lisa passed away on March 28, 2024, surrounded by loved ones in a hospital. “I wish I told her I loved her more,” Mike said. His regret echoes what many feel after losing someone slowly to illness.
Marcella wants people to understand something crucial about grief. Too often, she says, people don’t know how to speak to someone mourning. “If I could tell people one thing on how to speak to a grieving person, it is to ask about the person who has passed away,” she said.
She also wants her mother remembered as more than a diagnosis. “My mother was not cancer,” Marcella insisted. “My mom was this incredibly strong, resilient person who just would not quit, and she had a sense of humour through all of it.”
Lisa grew up in Windsor, Ontario, before building her life in Alberta. She studied at the University of Calgary and ran track. She became a social worker, a path Marcella now follows herself. Lisa loved simple pleasures like a French vanilla from Tim Hortons. That small treat could make her entire week.
Music carried Lisa through dark times. She leaned on it during treatments and the brutality of cancer. Marcella titled her run “Still Alive” after a Pearl Jam song her mother loved. Lisa was cremated wearing her Pearl Jam t-shirt.
The decline in Lisa’s final years was steep and heartbreaking. “She went from kissing me goodbye at the door whenever I left the house to needing a wheelchair and needing help lifting her head up,” Marcella recalled. “It was really disheartening.”
Marcella watched her mother lose abilities that once seemed ordinary. “We would have to pick her up on both sides and walk her out to the car,” she said. “One wrong turn could just go horribly for her, and I was always scared for her health.”
For much of Marcella’s life, illness was a constant presence. “Her cancer was so consistent in my life since I was a child that I grew numb to it,” she admitted. That numbness doesn’t mean the pain disappeared. It just meant survival required emotional distance.
Now Marcella channels that pain into movement. Running gives her a way to express anger and grief about her mother’s passing. It also honours the perseverance Lisa showed while battling cancer. “I am my mom,” Marcella said. “I share blood with my mom, and this is her running and her strength to get me through those 100 kilometres.”
Mike finds his daughter’s plan difficult to imagine. “She’s running with her ashes, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you’re crazy,’ but she needs this to be able to grieve and for closure,” he said. He plans to support her along the route.
Marcella is no stranger to extreme distances. In November, she completed her first ultra race called The Dark 24 with Sinister Sports. She ran 90 kilometres for roughly 21 hours inside a mine shaft. Now she’s training with weights in her backpack equivalent to the weight of her mother’s urn.
She’s also used running to raise money before. So far, Marcella has collected about $3,000 for Janis Care Services and another $3,000 for the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada. Her current focus is continuing to raise funds for Janis Care Services through an online fundraiser.
“I really want them to take the focus right now,” she said. “They provided exceptional end-of-life care for my mom, and their staff is considered family.” She doesn’t have a specific fundraising target. “The more the merrier,” she added. “They deserve recognition and appreciation.”
For Marcella, this run isn’t about loss. It’s about connection. “It never goes away, and it does not get easier,” she acknowledged. But carrying her mother’s ashes on this journey feels like carrying her memory forward with intention and love.
The route to Ghost Lake represents more than geography. It symbolizes an unfulfilled promise and a chance to make things right. Marcella used to tell her mother they’d take a girls trip together, just the two of them. Cancer and decline made that impossible while Lisa was alive.
“As a way to remain connected with her and to try to give her hope, I used to tell her, ‘I’m going to take you on a girls trip, just me and you—we’re going to get out of Calgary for a day, and I’ll take you on a drive to Ghost Lake,'” Marcella recalled.
On March 28, she’ll make good on that promise. The journey won’t look like what either of them imagined. But it will honour the bond they shared and the strength Lisa showed every day.
Marcella wants others to understand that grief doesn’t follow a script. “Grief does not need to be silent,” she said. “Grief is angry, grief is messy and grief deserves to be heard in any form that people are comfortable to express that in.”
Her 100-kilometre run is a public declaration of that messy, angry, beautiful grief. It’s a way to carry loss out loud instead of burying it quietly. And it’s a tribute to a woman who refused to let brain cancer steal her family’s joy.
