LAWRENCEVILLE – A man who has spent an unimaginable amount of time in hospital rooms, Joe Marelle doesn’t lack for medical stories, the touching ones or the painful variety.

That comes with the territory when the past eight years have seen separate fights with two life-threatening cancers, both won by the veteran basketball coach.

Yet one of his most emotional hospital stories happened when he was perfectly healthy, long before cancers repeatedly ravaged his body and long before his courage in the face of those diseases earned him national acclaim. He was only 35 at the time, his youngest child hadn’t been born and he hadn’t even won the bulk of his 300-plus basketball games as a head coach.

The scene played out roughly 20 years ago when Marelle’s father, a professional guitar player who once appeared on the cover of Life magazine and played with the likes of Glenn Miller and Guy Lombardo, lay in dire condition. The elder Marelle, who had suffered a stroke, drifted in and out of a coma.

Before he passed away, Marelle’s father gathered enough strength in his musically gifted and then shaky hands to scrawl a simple note to his son. The words were simple, yet moving.

“I’m proud of you.”

Marelle, now 55, carries those words close to his heart to this day, a reminder of his late father’s feelings. Even though his passion was athletics and not music, his father was thrilled with the coach’s accomplishments, even if he died before he got to see his son’s full body of work.

Not too long ago, Marelle appeared destined for the same fate.

Between 1998 and 2004, two different types of cancer – first non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, then leukemia – brought the worst kind of news to the longtime Duluth High coach, who is now the head coach at Mt. Pisgah Christian. The statistics showed that he had little, if any, chance of

surviving. It appeared to just be a matter of time before he succumbed, to one cancer or the other.

During the hard times, Marelle couldn’t help but think about his own children. What milestones in their lives was he going to miss?

Lately he hasn’t missed any, thanks to putting both cancers into remission. He’s soaking up every moment with three of his blessings – 24-year-old son Joey, 21-year-old daughter Mary Pat and 17-year-old son Tony. And today, on Father’s Day, the Marelle siblings will celebrate the life their father fought so hard over the past eight years to keep.

“I think about fathers getting asked what they want for Father’s Day,” Marelle said. “Do you want a grill? Do you want a tie? I don’t want anything. I have the three things I want – my kids. All I want is to continue to see their successes in life. I want to be there when they trip and stumble, and help them up. And just encourage them with what they want to do. It’s great.

“There was a time, as negative as it was, when I thought I’d never be able to see my kids again and see their great accomplishments.”

Initial shock

Cancer was nothing new to Marelle prior to his initial diagnosis in 1998.

His mother, Eddie, so named because her parents planned on a boy and decided not to switch her name, suffered from lung cancer, then debilitating bone cancer. The latter left her paralyzed and she passed away weighing just 58 pounds, a startlingly low weight even for a petite woman who normally weighed 110.

Doctors gave her six weeks to live, but she lasted six months. She beat the odds vs. cancer, something her son would later show runs in the family.

The odds certainly weren’t stacked in Marelle’s favor nearly eight years ago when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the official word coming after it was previously thought that he had mononucleosis. His disease was in Stage Four, an incurable point his first doctor said gave him six months to live.

His oldest son, Joey, was a 10th-grader at the time. Mary Pat was in middle school, and Tony was just a third-grader.

“I got scared. I got nervous,” Joey said about his father’s first cancer in 1998. “At the same time, I never really panicked because I had never been there before. I didn’t know if I should panic. It didn’t really hit me until I saw the chemo and how that was. The doctors predicted six months to live, and that’s when it really hit me.”

The ensuing years were filled with trials and tribulations. Chemo. Radiation. A spleen removal. A failed stem-cell harvest doomed by a blood infection.

He was in and out of the hospital, but most of the time he managed to still coach his Duluth boys basketball team and serve as the school’s athletic director. When he couldn’t make it, his close friends filled in.

The outpouring of support for Marelle in Duluth and Gwinnett County was amazing, but at times it was trying on his three children. In a school system where nearly everyone knew their dad and were aware of his cancer, they routinely faced questions about their dad’s health.

In a way, they appreciated that people genuinely cared about his condition. But the constant reminders also made it hard to keep their thoughts off the ordeal, even for the shortest time.

Marelle said he doesn’t know how they channeled such toughness.

“(My children) were just under constant pressure and anxiety,” said Marelle, whose wife, Kathy, is Duluth’s parks and recreation director. “I can’t put myself in their shoes. I don’t know what it’s like. I just know that it was bothersome from an emotional standpoint. Had I been in another profession, I don’t know if the same type of attention would have been brought to my situation.

“But word just spread across Gwinnett County. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to try to focus on my academics, my athletics or just be a normal teenage kid wondering if my dad is going to make it. They’re wondering, why is my dad throwing up? Why is he 40 pounds less than he weighed? Why doesn’t he smile? Why is he shaking? Those are pretty tough things to envision.”

Their worries weren’t over.

More bad news,

then renewed hope

Tony Marelle remembers the day well.

The youngster was sitting on his bed one day in September 2003, chatting on the phone. His father walked in with uncharacteristic mannerisms.

He knew it was something serious. Maybe it’s my grades, the youngest Marelle thought.

“He told me, ‘I no longer have non-Hodgkins lymphoma,’” Tony said. “I’m like, ‘Why are we sitting here? Let’s go celebrate.’ Then he said, ‘I have Leukemia. If it’s not treated in three weeks I might die.’ That was hard. I’m one of those people who tries to stay strong, but sometimes I’m not. I told him I was OK, but I had to look away.”

The coming months were rough on Marelle’s body, a resilient yet worn down shell of what it once was. Hope was fading and officials rushed a ceremony to honor the longtime Duluth coach.

That ceremony took place Oct. 19, 2003, as the Wildcats’ gym was officially named “Joe Marelle Gymnasium.” A moving ceremony followed that brought waves of tears, the usual cries of reminiscing and the ones because people were well aware the guest of honor was staring death head on.

Many of the more than 700 people in attendance, Marelle included, felt the event was partly like a celebration, partly like his funeral.

But then a funny thing happened. The coach cheated death once again. As his longtime friend and frequent caretaker Eric Hanada said, “Joe’s like a cat with nine lives.”

Marelle spent late 2003 and early 2004 undergoing chemo and radiation, confined predominantly to his house to avoid germs. He watched Tony, who wore shoes with his dad’s name written on them in marker, play just one basketball game. Joe had to wear a mask to that game.

Soon Marelle’s body got to the point where it couldn’t rebound from any more heavy chemo doses. The only option against the leukemia was a bone marrow transplant, and his oldest son Joey, the best match, gave his father the ultimate gift, another shot at life.

After months at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University Hospital recovering from the haplotype bone marrow transplant, Marelle returned cancer-free. While he was gone, he missed more important family events, like Mary Pat’s graduation from Duluth, but the procedure allowed him to experience many more.

“I appreciate (my dad) more than ever,” Tony said. “He thinks he’s an ordinary guy, but to me and my friends, he’s far from ordinary. For him to be completely healthy, it’s awesome. Me, my brother and my sister are all pretty well on our own ways, but we would be nothing without him. Without what he showed us and how we should carry ourselves in certain situations, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. For him to always be focused on us and how we developed while he was fighting life-threatening diseases is amazing.”

Now that he’s gotten the upper hand on cancer, Marelle regularly talks to others fighting one of the world’s most feared conditions.

“He’s a blessing,” Mary Pat said. “We’re proud he got through and proud how he helps other people get through their struggles, young people that get diagnosed. I can tell him this person got diagnosed and needs help, and he’ll go talk to them and check up on them. He’s very caring, and he doesn’t take life for granted.”

The family

Marelle’s roller coaster of health did more than attack his health. The variety of treatments, some partially covered by health insurance and some not covered at all, also wiped out the money he had saved for his children’s education and for his retirement. He’s still paying down his medical debt.

He was disappointed that he couldn’t provide for the kids’ college educations, but they didn’t seem to mind. They were just happy that their father was alive to help them in other ways. He had beat the odds, escaping not one but two cancers.

“Statistics are not always true,” Marelle said. “They don’t weigh in factors. They don’t weigh in people’s desire to compete. … I had my wife, my kids, my community, my school, all the prayer chains I had going for me. You can’t weigh in all those things. I can’t ever say Joe Marelle defeated it on his own because he didn’t. I just know that if somebody told me three years ago that I’d see all these things my kids have done, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy. I’m never going to make it.’

“But through the grace of God and a lot of help, I’m here to see it.”

The help came from everywhere. Hanada was with him the whole way, staying with him throughout his time at Johns Hopkins.

But the most vital support came from home.

“For eight years, my wife was the mother and the father because I was out of the picture,” Marelle said. “She’s the one who managed everything. She managed the house, the bills, everything. You’ve got to look at that and say as much stress as there was on the kids, there was at least as much stress on her.”

But after years of bad news, the Marelles’ life is grand. Mother and father marvel at their children’s accomplishments, taking note of the things Joe didn’t miss.

He got to see Joey graduate college at the top of his class and take a desirable job with an Atlanta accounting firm. He gets to see Mary Pat study toward a nursing degree, pursuing that field to work with cancer patients in part because of her father’s ordeals.

Just this past basketball season, he got to experience the ultimate high school prize with his youngest son. Marelle returned to coaching in 2005-06, fulfilling a goal he made while fighting cancer, and closed the season with a storybook ending.

Mt. Pisgah won its first state championship with Joe on the sidelines and Tony on the court at his dad’s point guard.

“(My dad’s) perseverance more than anything was really amazing,” Joey said. “For him to make it through all that, come back from years off and win a title like that was awesome. To win a state championship means something to him, but in a way he just wanted to be back coaching. The state championship was just an added bonus.”

The season added even more memories to Marelle’s enjoyable years as an educator. Countless numbers of his former players stay in touch, including New York Yankee Nick Green, who visited Marelle in Baltimore.

Atlanta Braves catcher Brian McCann still visits and leaves tickets to games at Turner Field. Many others less famous than those two make it a point to keep Marelle in their lives, a testament to his impact on high school students over the years. One of his teams shaved their heads when chemo took Marelle’s hair. Another wore white wristbands with messages to their coach.

Marelle’s impact on his former players is undeniable. He’s also become a role model – he was the 2004 American Cancer Society’s Coaches vs. Cancer National Man of the Year – for others battling cancer and plenty who aren’t, including his three children.

That’s plenty to make his father even more proud.

“Dad always told me, ‘Don’t ever get down on a pity trip because there’s always somebody worse off than you,” Marelle said. “If you don’t have money and your house is breaking down, there’s always somebody who doesn’t have a house – they may not have anything to break down. I try to keep that in perspective.

“My health right now, I feel great. I had a six-month check and it came out great. I’ve been called Miracle Man. Mr. Hope. But I’m just a normal guy who’s been very lucky.”