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Athletic prowess no match for disease

By Steve Landwehr
STAFF WRITER


Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of the stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.

MANCHESTER — It's an insidious disease, all the more so because the first symptoms are often so benign.

Some victims notice a finger that won't uncurl after making a fist. Others experience a drooping foot, as though the brain is forgetting its command to move in midstride.

Everyone who comes down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis eventually loses control of their vocal cords, and that's where David Virden's slow imprisonment began.

Virden, a longtime Manchester resident, died Friday, Aug. 29, at the Kaplan Family Hospice House in Danvers. He was 58.

"Suddenly, out of nowhere, it would be like he couldn't speak," son David Jr. said of the unusual symptoms his dad began exhibiting in January 2006.

As one diagnosis after another proved false, David's wife and his mother began cruising the Internet for information and became concerned Virden might have Lou Gehrig's disease.

In October 2006, the grim verdict was official, and he was given two to five years to live.

Virden's body had seldom betrayed him before.

Summers in his youth were spent at the Bras Coupe Hunting and Fishing Club in northern Ontario, Canada. His parents moved to southern California in the 1960s, and while he loved the lifestyle, he missed the changing of the seasons during his time growing up in Shaker Heights, in Cleveland, Ohio.

He was a good amateur athlete, captained his high school and college swim and water polo teams, and maintained an avid interest in swimming and numerous other athletic activities all his life.

It was equally frightening for his family. Here was a husband and father of three, the man who had raised tens of thousands of dollars for cancer research by riding in the Pan Mass Challenge every year, in need of treatment for a disease that has no cure and attracts too little research money.

"It's the red-headed stepchild of diseases," David Jr. said.

Virden had a positive, can-do attitude all his life, and he did what he could to maintain it despite his illness, his son said.

"Yeah, OK, I've got this," he would say. "But I'm still going to live to be 80."

He got to work building a wine cellar in the basement and managed to complete it before he was no longer capable of work.

A group of cycling friends rallied around him, calling itself Team Virden and riding to raise money for ALS research. Virden was able to complete a short section of the Tri-State Trek from Boston to New York with the group after his diagnosis.

Virden has an understandable regard for fellow biker Lance Armstrong and was a proponent of his Live Strong motto until the end, when he knew he had just days to live, David Jr. said.

Verdin's love of speed, whether pedaling his bike or at the wheel of a car, was legendary, David Jr. said.

"He believed the object of driving was to get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible," his son said.

David Jr. said the only time he thinks his dad got depressed was when he realized his optimism alone could not beat ALS, and he believes he'd have some advice for anyone who got a diagnosis like his.

"Do all the things you ever wanted to do, as fast as you can," he said.

Staff writer Steve Landwehr can be reached at 978-338-2660 or by e-mail at slandwehr@salemnews.com.



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