‘I wasn’t there to say goodbye’: Daughter from Dartmouth running in London Marathon for her late dad

Grief is a long road — certainly longer than 26.2 miles — but with every step, Joanna Budair is honouring those she lost.

It was three vicious blows within 18 months: Budair lost her father, grandmother and uncle.

“The three people who were very impactful in my life — my father, my grandmother who I was extremely close to, and my uncle who was like a second father and helped me through when my father passed away,” she said. “It was very hard, all within 18 months. And I wasn’t there to say goodbye.”

In honour of those she lost, Budair is training and fundraising to run in the London Marathon in April. She has a lifetime goal to hit five other big marathons too — Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo, New York and Boston — in tribute to her family.

Kentville to Abu Dhabi

Budair, 40, was born in Kentville at the Blanchard-Fraser Memorial Hospital (which was replaced by Valley Regional Hospital) where her father, Dennis Pyne, worked as a physician. When her parents split in 1992, she moved to Dartmouth with her mother. Budair trained as a teacher and ended up in Abu Dhabi, where she’s currently teaching at a British school, got married and had two kids.

Her father trained at Dalhousie University in Halifax and worked at Valley Regional Hospital. An accomplished  general, thoracic and vascular surgeon, Pyne worked at other hospitals across Canada, and in other parts of the world before finishing off his career in the nation of his birth, Jamaica. Then the pandemic struck.

Pyne fell ill in the early days.

“He declined very quickly within four days,” Budair said during a long-distance phone interview.

He died in Jamaica on Dec. 4, 2020, but COVID wasn’t done with her family yet. Budair’s grandmother got COVID in 2020 while she was living at Northwood in Halifax.

“But she pulled through even though we didn’t think she was going to make it,” Budair said. “But she was never the same.”

Her grandmother died four months later in May 2021. Then her uncle died of melanoma in September 2022.

Her running journey

“I was a lifeguard for HRM beaches and I remember doing running tests … and I remember how much I hated it,” she said. “We had to do a three-kilometre run and now looking back, that would have been so easy.”

So Budair wasn’t always a runner. She said she took it up about seven years ago to get in shape after the birth of her son.

It snowballed and soon enough she was running in longer and longer races and now, marathons.

She had the idea to honour her father’s memory by running in world-class marathons because he used to run in high school. And she’s fundraising for Kidney Care U.K. because her father went into double kidney failure in 2015 and received a donor kidney in 2017. The charities are actually very selective in choosing runners, Budair said, adding she feels very fortunate she got in.

“What I like about marathons is it’s such a test physically and mentally,” she said.

She goes to a physiotherapist three times a week and is working with personal trainer.

“I’m on a six-day-a-week training right now in preparation for (London),” she said. A lot of her training and races are done indoors as the temperatures in Abu Dhabi right now are at around 40-50C.

What would dad think?

Budair said she’s back in Nova Scotia all the time and she ran in her father’s memory in the Valley Harvest Marathon last year. She said it was like no other run and it reminded her of the hospitality and kindness of Nova Scotians.

“I sound like an American because I’m around a lot of Americans here, but when I do go home, I feel like I’m at home,” she said.

Her dad would think she’s crazy putting her body though all this, she said.

“But at the same time, with what he went through (with kidney disease) … he’d be really happy to see I’m going for a cause that’s going to help people that have gone through the same thing he’s gone through.”