We miss Geoff Thaxter

By Benson Pau, on behalf of the International Confederation of Childhood Cancer Parent Organisations (ICCCPO) Board

We are all mourning the loss of Geoff Thaxter, who passed away in August 2008, following a short, but severe, illness.

Geoff became Chair of ICCCPO in the fall of 2007, after having served on the Board for seven years. He was full of energy and ideas for his term as Chair of the international childhood cancer organisation, based on the initiatives started in previous years.

In the name of his daughter Lisa, who died from childhood cancer, Geoff and his wife Gill founded the Lisa Thaxter Trust as a charitable instrument to support childhood cancer projects in the UK. Their aim was that childhood cancer would be curable in all children affected by the disease – in his own words “every child dying from cancer is one too many!”

From his first contact with ICCCPO, at the Frankfurt meeting in 1998, he was touched by ICCCPO issues and supported every move that would help to make a difference for children with cancer everywhere in the world. He was deeply worried by the unfair discrepancies in the chances of curing children in poorer countries and did everything possible to help. He visited countries like Bangladesh, got a team of paediatric oncologists involved, started twinning projects and, through the Lisa Thaxter Trust, financially supported projects in Africa.

Knowing that energies combined for the common aim are stronger, he initiated the founding of the national childhood cancer umbrella group in the UK, NACCPO. Sadly, it was at their meeting this year that he fell ill.

Geoff was the stimulus for founding International Childhood Cancer Day in 2002, celebrated by all ICCCPO groups around the world on February 15th ever since.

He was also influential in selecting organisations from the ICCCPO family to receive grants from the UICC–Sanofi Aventis initiative “My Child Matters” in 2006, and was personally involved in supporting and monitoring those projects.

The recent founding of the World Child Cancer Fund was yet another important step in his striving to help. This organisation will enable ICCCPO to generate money for projects that will hopefully make a difference in areas where funds are still a problem.

The Board met Geoff and his wife Gill for the last time at the mid-year meeting in South Africa, where he made us work very hard – but we also had a lot of fun together. This is the way we will remember him - and miss him very much.