The track is a little less than a quarter mile around. But the celebration that surrounds it on this warm June evening at Tate Field next to Bain Middle School in Cranston is much bigger than that.

There are tents and food and music. The Ocean State Children’s Choir is singing (and by the way, they are outstanding). There are kids playing, dogs barking, crowds gathering in anticipation of the main event.

Suddenly, all eyes are riveted on the 25 or so people who are heading over to the start. They are wearing purple T-shirts with white sashes slung around their shoulders. Other than their attire, you would not guess they have anything in common. Some are men and some are women. Some are young and some are old. Some look like they could go farther than the one lap, while others will be content to walk slowly one time around.

What brings them together on this night, what bonds them in a way that observers can’t really understand, is cancer. As proudly proclaimed on their white sashes, they are survivors.

The banner hanging near the start reminds us, “there is no finish line until we find a cure.” And so the American Cancer Society holds events like this Relay For Life in towns and cities throughout the state and throughout the country. We are indeed making progress, but there is still much to be done.

The participants making their way around the “Survivor Lap” are a bold departure from the days when a cancer diagnosis was often kept secret.

There in the midst of the white sashes, with a reporter’s notebook sticking out of the back pocket of her jeans, is Meri Kennedy. In typical fashion, she’s working on a story for the Cranston Herald at the same time as she is celebrating her own victory over breast cancer.

As I watch her walk around the track, I can’t help thinking she should be wearing more than one sash. You might recall that Meri is the author of My Enemy, Myself, a courageous book detailing her battle to overcome a childhood of sexual abuse and rape. Just when things were finally smoothing out a bit in her life, here she is now faced with a new hurdle. Honestly, how much can one person take?

Meri tells me she was out working on a story with firefighters last October, when she got the grim diagnosis. As they talked about life-saving techniques, she answered her cell phone. Somehow she managed to hold it together until she got into her car.

From there, everything happened so fast. Within two weeks, she met with a surgeon, had a biopsy, then a lumpectomy. Two weeks later, she required another surgery and three weeks after that, a third.

Ironically, before any of this, Meri had just written about local women who had participated in a march for cancer research in Washington, DC. While interviewing these survivors, she could never have anticipated how much support and comfort they would give her when the tables so abruptly turned.

Even on this night, Meri is working on a story about another survivor. And maybe that’s the key. Maybe it’s her care and concern, the way she reaches out to others in the community that is coming back to help her now.

The track is a little less than a quarter mile around. But to those like Meri Kennedy who have made their way around, they’ve come a whole lot further than that.