It shocked the nation. News that Gord Downie, lead singer of The Tragically Hip, had a rare and terminal brain cancer. Glioblastoma. It drew Canadians together and gave a face to a disease doctors say is one of the most aggressive cancers around.

“We have some very tough news to share with you, and we wish it wasn’t so,” The Tragically Hip said on its website. But in the same breath, the band announced the show would go on with one last cross-Canada tour.

It was the band’s swan song. And 12 million Canadians tuned in to watch the final Hip concert in Kingston, Ont.

Vaughn Becker was one of them. He’s also one of eight people impacted by glioblastoma who shared their stories with the Star.

They are Canadians from across the country who have battled this cancer, learned to live with it, died from it.

Here are their stories.

Yaron Butterfield

Vancouver, B.C.

The last thing Yaron Butterfield remembers of the moment that changed his life is not being able to speak. At the age of 29, at what felt like the height of his career in genome research, he had an unexplainable headache when he had the seizure nearly 13 years ago.

Butterfield, who happens to be a cancer researcher, is a rare long-term survivor of glioblastoma multiforme. His cancer was too deep for surgery, but chemo and radiation kept it at bay and he took the following year to do “all sorts of crazy things.”

He met someone with whom he got married and had a daughter, Hana, who is now 8. He ran a marathon in Iceland and participated in an unsuccessful clinical trial. After three years, he went back to work at the B.C. Cancer Agency, where he sequences genes. He hasn’t yet studied his own cancer.

“I’ve been very lucky,” he says. But he questions it and even took it up with a rabbi once, who suggested it’s for a reason.

“I want to help others,” Butterfield says. He meets with other glioblastoma patients once a month and is writing a book about his experience. He hopes it can inspire others.

Many diseases are incurable, he says. He’s learned to live with that. Once he’d recovered from the news of his diagnosis, he had a moment of clarity. “I had this feeling that if I died tomorrow, I’m not scared. The flip side is there’s so much I wanted to do.”

But he says he takes a little more time now to greet the cashier at the grocery store, to help people, to stop when he’s tired.

Angus MacAllister

Woodstock, Ont.

Angus MacAllister’s favourite thing to do these days is sit by the campfire in his backyard on starry nights. It’s what he was doing when The Tragically Hip played their last show on Aug. 20. MacAllister sat with his wife, Johanna, and their 10-year-old son, Fynn. The trio ate s’mores and bobbed their heads to Gord Downie’s familiar voice. They watched the stars as Downie sang “Bobcaygeon.”

MacAllister says he was “blown away” when he found out that Downie has the same cancer he has. Weeks before, the family had been to the Hip’s tour stop in London. MacAllister’s condition had worsened since the family bought the tickets in May. It was becoming harder to speak and he could no longer walk, so Johanna called the ticket vendor and it gave the family seats that would accommodate a wheelchair.

They caught Downie’s eye as he moved slowly across the stage at the end of the show, peering at what felt like every face in the room.

MacAllister was diagnosed in March 2014, when he was 44, after he began to have trouble speaking. He’s had two brain surgeries since. After the first one, doctors told the couple the tumour could come back within 18 to 24 months.

“Though we knew the seriousness of the situation, you always have a bit of denial,” says Johanna, 40. MacAllister had returned to work a month after, but “25 months later, in April, it came back.” Almost a week after the second surgery, the cancer showed signs it was growing back.

Now, the family is preparing to move to Halifax, where Johanna’s family lives and can help support them.

They’ll still enjoy the little things, she says, like the stars, revealing themselves one at a time.

Thursday, MacAllister’s most recent MRI showed signs the cancer had shrunk slightly, Johanna says.

Holly Arnold

Vancouver, B.C.

Long after 18-year-old Holly Arnold died in 2010, the nurses at the hospital where she was being treated for glioblastoma multiforme continued to talk about her, her sister, Beth Arnold, 30, says. In the month she spent there after her diagnosis, Holly had made a reputation for herself as a selfless person. When they’d ask her how she was, she’d say, “I’m fine, thanks,” but immediately ask, “How are you?” Beth says.

“People had talked about ... this young woman who had all this courage and all this empathy, and compassion for everybody else, despite what she was going through,” Arnold says. (Holly was a relative of Toronto Star editor, Michael Cooke.)

Holly was a passionate student, bent on helping people. She volunteered tirelessly at homeless shelters in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, was an avid soccer player and aimed to become a teacher. She had just graduated from high school the summer before her 18th birthday on Sept. 17, about a month before she started feeling sick. It was too late for surgery. But through it all, Arnold says, she maintained “incredible strength and wisdom beyond her years.”

Holly’s family has set up a scholarship in her honour. Every year, Arnold and Sean Brown, Holly’s high school sweetheart, walk across the same stage Holly and Brown shared during their graduation ceremony, to present it at the North Vancouver high school.

Every year, the bittersweet celebration of Holly’s legacy gets easier, says Arnold, who recently gave birth to her first child, Ben.

“He’s been a big light in our family after losing Holly,” she says of her son.

Katelyn Gilbert

Zealand, N.B.

It started with a tingling in her left hand and foot in December 2013, when Gilbert was 24. Her doctor said it could be a pinched nerve. Then, the following April, the symptoms escalated to spotting in her vision and the feeling of seeing her eyes “refocusing.” The doctor sent her to an optometrist, who sent her to an ophthalmologist, who sent her to the emergency room at a Fredericton hospital.

Within hours, Gilbert was in an ambulance to the Saint John Regional Hospital, an hour away. Within days, she was in surgery where doctors attempted to remove what they could of her tumour. Back home, her bags were packed and waiting for the trip to Cuba she would not take.

“That was a hard part,” Gilbert says. As a Disney fan, she’d hoped, too, one day to visit Disneyland, but despite her condition being “stable,” Gilbert’s oncologist recommended she stay in Canada.

She’s made the most of it, travelling with her family. They’ve planned a trip to Toronto in September.

The 27-year-old has been working full time in administration at a water distribution plant in Zealand, N.B., where she lives with her parents. They accompany her to her appointments in Fredericton and Saint John and try as much as possible, Gilbert says, to keep their own pain hidden.

But Gilbert says she feels “extremely lucky.” She’s been able to participate in two Brain Tumour Walks and support groups, in which she enjoys being a “sounding board” for those who need it.

The Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada asked her to speak at its walk in 2015, something she says she would not have done before her diagnosis. Talking wasn’t really her thing — until she was brought out of the operating room and the oncologist told her puzzled parents that she was “talking up a storm.”

“I haven’t shut up since,” she says, happy to share her story and help raise awareness.

Alice Schwarcz

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Montreal, Que.

If you asked anyone who knew Alice Schwarcz, they’d probably tell you about her smile, her husband, Dr. Joe Schwarcz says. “She was always happy; she just had a funny personality,” he says. “It changed in a wink of an eye.”

In an obituary Schwarcz read at his wife’s funeral, he compared life to pulling a tablecloth from a set table — the odds of doing it without breaking anything, almost random.

Alice’s diagnosis came on a day she had gone to the gym, a morning ritual, had seen physiotherapy patients, was “planning all sorts of things.” It felt, he said in the obituary, like the yanked tablecloth had sent glasses and plates crashing onto the floor, breaking into a million pieces, while simultaneously a rug was being pulled from underneath.

“It’s a tough eight or nine months when you see someone you’ve been with for 43 years, whose every thought you know, to see it all disappear,” Schwarcz, director of McGill’s Office for Science and Society, says.

He noticed the details in her walk and how they changed. How her left foot went from a slightly heavier slap to a drag, to her carrying a cane — to, a week before her death June 3 at the age of 64, her needing a wheelchair.

A month after the diagnosis, Alice had returned to playing tennis with Schwarz, who’s 69, but a small broken bone in her foot, the result of a tumble, began what he calls a “downhill cascade.”

Schwarcz says glioblastoma multiforme is “terribly unforgiving,” something that’s hard to understand unless you’ve seen it close. He says research is the key because still so little is understood about what may be one of the most complex types of cancer. Amid it, he says, Alice “was a trouper.”

Vaughn Becker

Cambridge, Ont.

Vaughn Becker, 53, is beating the odds he was given. He was diagnosed with the cancer on Sept. 21, 2013, after his knee gave out in a Staples store one day. It was like running into a brick wall, he says of the news. Doctors gave Becker 14 to 16 months to live.

“It makes you re-evaluate your life, what’s important,” says Becker. So he did. Becker went skiing in Whistler and in the Alps; he went to Switzerland, Holland and France; and he got a French waterdog puppy and named him Vinny.

He threw himself into two clinical trials — “I had nothing to lose” — which he recommends, as they’re often the new frontier in medicine and help develop treatments for future patients. He went through several cycles of chemotherapy and radiation, when the cancer showed itself again in January 2015, then again that April. He stopped his veterinary practice in 2014, but has kept busy maintaining a vegetable garden, attending veterinary seminars, going to the gym and spending time with his family.

“I try to live every day to the fullest,” he says. He watched the last Tragically Hip concert in his basement with friends last week and acknowledges the closeness in age with the band’s lead singer — Gord Downie is 52.

“I’m very proud of him,” Becker says. “Just because we’ve been given a terminal illness diagnosis, doesn’t mean life stops.”

Pat Murdock

Bancroft, Ont.

Pat Murdock, 67, says he’s been the kind of person to “run through life with my hair on fire.” Since he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme in the summer of 2014, he’s slowed down a bit.

“Of course, your world stops,” he says of finding out about it.

But it didn’t take long before he was back at it. “I don’t have time for this illness,” he says.

Murdock runs the airport in Bancroft, is on municipal committees and spends time with his 12 grandchildren. He’s also a Freemason and a Shriner.

“I’m allowing myself to be happy,” he says.

That includes pulling out some old vinyl records; joking with the nurses at Sunnybrook — “Ow!” he’ll say when they poke him with a needle, as if there hadn’t been many; as well as rediscovering his faith and the network of people and comfort it provides. Still, there are daily reminders of this illness he “wouldn’t wish on anybody.”

Murdock shares a doctor with Downie and offered himself up if the singer wants to talk.

“I can appreciate what he’s going through.”

You can beat it for some time, which he feels lucky for, but the notion it will come back remains. The days before the MRI, a test he takes every three months, are met with apprehension, he said.

“We’ve got to find a cure for this thing.”

Gordon Kennedy

Calgary, Alta.

Month-old Gordon Kennedy stayed true to his name, which means “strong fort,” his father, Joshua Kennedy, says.

The baby’s mother, Jerfield Bahaya, took Gordon for a checkup when he was 2 weeks old. She’d noticed his head seemed large. At that point, the baby’s cancer had extended almost fully throughout his tiny brain.

“It had spread to sugar-coat his brain stem and into about a walnut size in his cerebellum,” Kennedy says. The baby was too young and fragile to be operated on, let alone receive radiation. Gordon was given a couple of days to live, but he fought for 18. He let out a last breath in his parents’ arms on March 18.

“We had our beautiful baby boy Gordon at home for 15 days,” says Kennedy, who has another son, Dylan, 8, with Bahaya. “He was my world.”

There’s good news, though. Bahaya is pregnant with another baby boy. On Sunday, they’re getting married in a “simple and quaint” ceremony surrounded by friends and family.

After Gordon died, Kennedy says the family raised money for the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada and took part in the Calgary Brain Tumour Walk. He says he’s been following Downie’s story closely, adding the singer who shares a name with his late son (though the latter was named after Kennedy’s grandfather) is one of his favourite musicians.