Sheila Kussner sits in the den in her Montreal home on July 18, 2023. Kussner started the foundation Hope & Cope to help meet the emotional and psychosocial needs of cancer survivors and their caregivers.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
When Lynda Turner was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, she received a visit in her room at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital from a woman on crutches who wanted to know if there was anything she could do. The visitor was Sheila Kussner, who had lost her leg as a teenager to osteosarcoma – the disease Terry Fox had – and who spent her adult life trying to bring hope to people with cancer.
Ms. Kussner, who died on Aug. 6, two weeks shy of her 92nd birthday, was the founder of Hope & Cope, a Montreal-based non-profit organization offering support and other vital services to cancer patients.
She also became a phenomenal fundraiser, spending her time and her own limited resources to raise tens of millions of dollars for projects involving cancer care, treatment and research. Ms. Kussner’s efforts were key to funding a new oncology department at McGill University, among many other things.
“We ended up with a new department of oncology but, of course, with no budget. If you wanted to do something new you either took money away from existing departments or you went out and raised new money,” says Dr. Richard Cruess, dean of medicine at McGill for 14 years. “That is where Sheila came in. She was one of the most skilled and devoted fundraisers I ever saw. We raised somewhere between 25- and 30-million dollars over a six- or eight-year period for this department of oncology.”
She was born Sheila Golden, in Montreal on Aug. 24, 1932. Her father, Jack Golden, descended from Jewish Eastern European immigrants, was a successful insurance salesman and the first in his family to break into the prosperous middle class. Early on the family moved from the working-class Mile End district to a semi-detached house in nearby Outremont.
When Sheila was 12, she was chased by a boy she knew and got her foot tangled in the spokes of his bicycle. Her ankle needed surgery, but it led to the discovery of a rare cancer in her knee. One doctor after another told Sheila and her mother that unless the leg was amputated above the knee, the cancer would spread and kill her.
The girl refused to accept the prospect of losing her leg.
“I said to my parents, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not having my leg amputated. That will be the end of my life,’” she recalled in her biography: Repairing the World, Sheila Kussner and the Power of Empathy.
More than a year after her initial diagnosis, a doctor quietly convinced her to go ahead with the amputation, pointing out what a hardship her death would be to her parents. The surgery took place just before her 14th birthday. Many people with osteosarcoma don’t survive long, but Sheila lived for another 77 years. She wore a prosthesis, which was apparent when she climbed stairs. One boyfriend asked her what was wrong. Realizing he was not aware of the amputation, she he told him about it, and he never asked her out again.
In her early 20s, she married Marvyn Kussner and the couple raised two children. Ms. Kussner was involved in charities early on but when her husband was diagnosed with lymphoma at age 43, she moved into high gear. It was in 1981 when she founded Hope & Cope. She came up with the name after speaking with a young woman with cancer who said to her: “How can I cope, when there is no hope?”
It started as a volunteer organization and today Hope & Cope has 15 people on staff and about 350 volunteers, almost all cancer survivors.
“That was Sheila’s model that there was a wisdom that came from having lived the experience of cancer and caregiving and the experience of loss that made it very powerful to accompany somebody through that journey,” said Suzanne O’Brien, interim executive director of Hope & Cope. “Sheila intuitively understood from her own experience that talking to somebody else who had that same circumstance could be very powerful in offering hope that you too could get through this.”
Ms. Kussner received honorary doctorates from both McGill and the University of Montreal because of her contribution to cancer care.
Along with the big things, such as funding cancer treatment and research, Ms. Kussner was also attuned to patients’ personal difficulties, such as finding suitable head coverings when experiencing hair loss from chemotherapy. So Hope & Cope began offering free wigs and cotton turbans.
Ms. Kussner never stopped networking. She had written lists of people she wanted to stay in touch with: She used an old flip phone and shunned e-mail. She spent her own money – unlike the donors she sought out, she was not that rich a woman – to send people gifts, which she often delivered herself. “She was very generous with her time and always remembered our wedding anniversary. She called just two weeks ago,” said Dr. Carolyn Freeman, who was chair of radiation oncology at McGill and a major innovator in that world.
“Sheila probably raised over 50 million dollars for cancer support at Hope & Cope, at McGill and at the hospital,” Ms. O’Brien said. “She was an absolute force, passionate and committed but every donation it could be $10 dollars or $100 or $1,000 or $100,000, they were all the same to her. She went after the big donations, but she valued the smaller gifts as well. If someone could give $100 today, maybe that future donor might, as their circumstances change, have the capacity to give more.”
It takes a certain kind of person to be a successful fundraiser. Ms. Kussner told The Globe and Mail’s Eric Andrew-Gee that when it comes to fundraising: “There’s no technique – you just have to know the donor.”
But her colleagues say knowing who has the money and the inclination to give was a big part of Ms. Kussner’s success.
“Her technique was really to get to know the other person. She valued relationships and she was not a cold-call kind of a fundraiser,” Ms. O’Brien said. “She made it her business to get to know who they were and what they valued but the secret to her success was that she knew the capacity of her giver. She never asked for more than what was their capacity to give although she did put people on the spot. She did her homework, and she valued the relationship.”
In some cases, the families of cancer patients she supported became donors. This was the case with Kerrigan Turner, whose wife, Lynda, died of breast cancer in 1994. “Sheila would call me and say this is the last time, but we’re so close and we need just another thousand dollars,” Mr. Turner recalled. “She was a dynamic, selfless person. You couldn’t say no to her.”
One of Ms. Kussner’s contacts was Pierre Trudeau, when he was prime minister and in retirement. The two would often have lunch at the Ritz-Carlton hotel’s garden. She always paid the bill. “He was cheap.” Ms. Kussner said. “But I loved him, he was a great man.”
She knew how to leverage contacts like Mr. Trudeau to help others. Once, she took a man with debilitating prostate cancer to a lunch where Mr. Trudeau was speaking. Introducing the depressed man to the prime minister lifted his spirits.
There were some amusing incidents in her fundraising life.
“We set up a fundraising committee that used to meet in my office and Sheila would arrive at the committee meeting usually with a caterer who would come with some champagne and smoked salmon,” recalled Dr. Cruess, the dean of medicine. “One of the most hilarious experiences was we were sitting around and people had finished their glass of champagne and Sheila said, “Dean, serve more champagne” and I jumped up and served more champagne and the waiter burst out laughing. The waiter’s name was Dean. I jumped up because I would never have dreamt of not doing what Sheila had suggested.”
Dr. Cruess, an orthopedic surgeon, said Ms. Kussner was in constant pain from her amputation, pain which got worse as she grew older.
“For people with prostheses as you get older you lose tissue under the skin so she had a terrible time for most of her adult life which she absolutely and totally ignored. She had to be in pain a lot of the time, but I never heard her complain,” Dr. Cruess said.
Along with her honorary degrees, Sheila Kussner was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1983 and promoted to officer in 1995. She was also an officer of the Order of Quebec, and commander of the Order of Montreal and the recipient of many awards from cancer societies and other groups in Canada and the United States.
She was predeceased by her husband, Marvyn, and leaves her two daughters, Janice Kussner and Joanne Kussner-Leopold, and two grandchildren.
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