Photos by Deb Gau Honorary survivors and caregivers for this year’s Relay For Life event, Dyllen Yockey, Brittany Christensen and Kari Loft held up a quilt for auction Friday night at the Red Baron Arena and Expo. The live auction was just one of the activities raising money for the American Cancer Society.

MARSHALL — In many ways, it was a night about hope, speakers at Lyon County’s annual Relay For Life event said.

The Relay event raises money to help continue the fight against cancer and give people hope for the future. But there were other ways you could visualize hope by looking at the crowd.

“I define hope by purple. Look at the number of purple shirts out there tonight,” said Tara Brandl, a member of the Relay event leadership team, at the start of Friday night’s opening ceremony. The audience gathered in the Red Baron Arena included lots of people wearing purple T-shirts identifying them as cancer survivors.

Speakers at the opening ceremony had hope that they’d see the number of survivors grow. According to an annual report published this year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, cancer death rates have declined over the past several years, said Betsy Jo Kack.

But the stories shared Friday night were about more than statistics. People talked about the human impact of fighting cancer, and the importance of support from family, friends and loved ones. This year’s Relay was a special occasion for the family of 11-year cancer survivor Jim Wohnoutka. Event organizers said all nine of Wohnoutka’s siblings had come to Minnesota to surprise him this weekend. Wohnoutka’s family members traveled from all across the country, organizers said.

Fighting cancer as a family was a big part of the story shared by Brittany Christensen and her son Dyllen. Dyllen, 10, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Burkett’s lymphoma in 2018.

“Telling Dyllen was extra hard,” Christensen said of the news. But she said their family’s response to the cancer was, “We fight, and we fight hard.”

The fight was tough, Christensen said. Dyllen went through surgery to remove his appendix and part of his intestines, as well as seven rounds of chemotherapy. But today, she said, Dyllen has been 10 months cancer-free.

“I am his mother, and his number one supporter,” Christensen said, and she was glad to see Dyllen become one of the 16.9 million cancer survivors across the country.

Kari Loft, an honorary survivor for this year’s Relay, said she dealt with a cancer diagnosis not only with the help of loved ones, but by trying to “keep on keeping on.”

Loft was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in January 2018. But, she said, “My cancer didn’t know that I like challenges.” At the time, Loft had started a running streak, with the goal of running every day for a year. Keeping up with her daily run, even during cancer treatment, was a way for her to say “Take that, cancer,” she said.

Eventually, Loft’s running streak went for 399 days, until the end of her radiation treatments.

No matter how their lives were affected by cancer, people at Friday’s Relay For Life were united, speakers said.

“We all have something very much in common,” Brandl said. “We all want to make a difference in the fight against cancer.”