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About 1,400 mourners attended a 90-minute tribute to Roger Neilson, at the Northview Pentecostal Church in Peterborough, ON {Canada} on Saturday June 28th, 2003. The 69-year-old former NHL coach died on June 21st, after a 3 year battle with cancer.
In December 1999, he had been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and had a successful stem cell transplant in March 2000. He was also diagnosed in January 2001 with malignant melanoma, the worst form of skin cancer.
Roger Neilson 1934 - 2003 Please read his own words of faith & hope...
I still remember the look on the team doctor's face when he announced that I had Multiple Myeloma, a deadly cancer that had claimed the life of my sister only four years prior. Up to that point I had been pretty lucky in that I'd always been reasonably healthy. Now it looked like I would have to give up coaching. Worse, I probably had only two or three years to live.
Things looked pretty bad, but they didn't stay that way for long. My doctor told me not to worry about dying just yet. He prescribed a regimen of chemotherapy and arranged for a stem cell transplant.
'That will keep you around for the next four or five years for sure,' he said. 'By then, they'll have come up with some new things to help you.'
I was really encouraged by this news, especially once I found out I could keep coaching for the next two or three months.
It's been a year now since I was diagnosed with cancer. I'm in remission and off all medication. The most important thing that got me through it all was my faith in God. Without that, it would have been extremely difficult. There were so many times when I was lying in the hospital wondering if I'd ever get out. I would cry out to God and ask for His help. And somehow, something always happened that made things better. I knew all along that the Lord was with me and that whatever happened, I could trust Him to get me through it.
That's been true in my life a number of times, not only with cancer. I've been fired from eight or nine hockey teams. When you're fired in professional sports, it's a national thing; everybody knows about it. It's not easy, but knowing that God has a plan for my life gave me the ability to handle such disappointments. He didn't always make the difficult situation go away, but he gave me the grace and the wisdom to deal with it.
Suddenly finding out that you have cancer is tough. However, as a Christian, I know that no matter what I go through God is always with me. I know that if I trust in God then I don't have to worry about the future --it's in His hands. I've known the Lord since I was a young kid, and I've always felt that death is not something to be afraid of. Knowing Jesus means that when I die I'm going to heaven. I've got a place to go when it's all over. And that's the only way to go.
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