Gary Cornelius with daughter Hannah at a Relay for Life event at Auburn.

In 2002, Gary Cornelius had a business meeting to plan for, and it required him to use his voice — a lot. But there was a problem: The chronic cough he’d considered a mere nuisance for months was starting to get worse.

“I couldn’t finish two sentences without coughing,” he says, “and about 70 percent of the itinerary was going to be me talking. So I went to urgent care. I told them that I’ve had this cough, and oh — by the way, a skin condition — and they did a chest X-ray. It revealed this large mass in my chest.”

Some fast phone calls on the part of Gary’s wife Belinda, who worked in health care, had him in Birmingham for a followup diagnosis the very next day. What he’d ignored as a nuisance turned out to be something far more serious: Stage 4 Hodgkins lymphoma.

“It’s a circulatory cancer that’s within your circulatory system. My tumors were in my lymph nodes,” he explains. “I had secondary spleen and slight liver involvement where it had metastasized. Stage 4 is the worst of any cancer staging, but fortunately, Hodgkins is one of the ‘best’ diagnoses you could ask for, because it’s one of the most treatable.”

Treatment was, of course, soon to follow — an ordeal of chemotherapy that consumed six months, followed by another six weeks of radiation.

“After all of that, I went in for my scans to see if we were done — and we were not,” he reflects. “I had an immediate recurrence. This time it went from my chest to my clavicle area, and I had lymph nodes in my clavicle are that were hot with disease. That was followed by surgery, more chemo, and then an autologous stem cell transplant at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. In common terms, it’s a bone marrow transplant.”

Cornelius looks back on his bout with cancer as someone who’d always gotten involved locally, through his former career at McGriff Transportation, in community causes that supported the search for a cure. But while it’s one thing to sympathize with victims and survivors (including his mother, at the time a two-time breast cancer survivor), it’s another thing altogether to join their ranks.

Because it can target so many places in the body and because it doesn’t discriminate for age, gender, or ethnicity, cancer affects everyone differently. For many men in the prime of life, it can affect their sense of security, shattering the confidence that they’ll always be there to provide for themselves and the ones they love.

“It touched me personally. Two weeks before my 40th birthday, we heard those words: ‘You have cancer.’ I’d been married for 16 years, I had a seven year-old daughter at the time, and I was in the middle of building my career the way I wanted to,” Cornelius says. “Suddenly, the kevlar that you think protects you and your life falls to the ground when you hear those words.

“For where I was in life, it quickly became apparent — and I think this is true for any catastrophic diagnosis — that it’s as much of an emotional battle as it is a physical one,” he adds. “That’s really where Relay for Life comes in for me. The local people who were in the fight at the time; my support network both at McGriff and elsewhere in our community…it was critical in helping me in that emotional battle.”

Back in the early 2000s, Relay for Life was a huge community event; the kind of occasion that would draw people out to its Heritage Park venue each year just to feel swept up in the local energy. McGriff and lots more area businesses and organizations were deeply entrenched in rallying both financial and boots-on-the ground support, fielding Relay teams and working behind the scenes to raise money in the ongoing fight to find a cure.

Fast forward 20 years, and Relay has gone through a number of different permutations as a local event. But it’s never lost sight of its mission, and many of those same Cullman businesses have kept up their annual sponsorship — even as the event itself became less visible and its scope, at least as a must-attend public spectacle, grew narrower.

This year, Cornelius and his fellow organizers are aiming to raise Relay’s profile — not only as a celebration for survivors and a memorial for those claimed by the disease, but as a community-wide outing that emanates some of the same energy as its turn-of-the-millennium predecessors. The streets will close near Cullman’s Warehouse District for a “Party in the Park” event centered at Depot Park and branching down First Avenue. All of the customary Relay moments will be a part of the evening, from the Survivors’ Walk to the reflective luminaria ceremony. But this year, there’ll be food trucks. There’ll be music. There’ll be fun things for kids to do. TV newscaster and cancer survivor Rick Karle will be there as the featured speaker.

“It’s our first real in-person event since COVID, and there have been improvements in the battle against cancer since then — improvements that we want to celebrate,” says Cornelius, who’s remained an active volunteer in multiple capacities for the American Cancer Society through the 19 years he’s been cancer free.

“We want to do it in a festival way where people can celebrate, where they can come and enjoy a night out, but give them the opportunity to donate. ‘Party at the Park’ is designed to allow us as a community to celebrate the wins against cancer by having fun together, and by remembering those we’ve lost. It’s also giving us the opportunity to fight back, through personal commitment and financial support.”

Visit www.relayforlife.org/cullmanal to learn more about Relay for Life’s April 30 Party at the Park celebration, and visit www.cancer.org/relay to learn how the money raised through thousands of nationwide local events like the one in Cullman help fund research and treatment interventions for those affected by the disease.