Remembering Terrance Calvert: When A Son and Friend Dies

When most people think about a memorial walk for those who died of cancer, , they may think of older people who have fallen victim to the terrible disease.

But for one mother, she can only think of her 22-year-old son, Terrance Calvert.

While walking around the football field at the on Saturday, June 2, Linda Calvert shared her joyous and painful memories of her adopted son, Terrance, who died last month due to kidney cancer.

Linda relived how Terrance and his brother, Najah, came into her family’s life. Back in 1993 she was a special needs foster parent and received a call saying that two young boys needed a home for about two weeks. Six years later Linda and her family adopted the two brothers. 

“They never left,” she told the Haverford-Havertown Patch with a laugh. 

While she did not go into details, the Drexel Hill mother said that it was not easy to raise Terrance because he had emotional issues when he was younger.

Last August Terrance spoke to Patch about his tough times. He said being a black child growing up in a white, adoptive family was not easy.

“Being African-American and growing up in mostly white neighborhood and school was hard. Both blacks and whites shunned me. The black kids said I didn’t act ‘black’ and the white kids shunned me because I was the only black kid. I had to act differently with each group to try to fit in all the time. It was like being a chameleon. I just didn’t know how to act with anyone. I never felt connected in the community,” , Patch’s freelance reporter.

But Linda said that she had help.

“It takes a village to raise a child and never give up on a kid. That is what he taught me,” Linda said as she was a lap and half into her walk around the football field during the Relay for Life event.

While she had support from family, friends and neighbors to help raise Terrance during those hard times, Linda said what really helped the troubled youth was the Upper Darby Summer Stage and Shooting Stars that many Havertown students participate in. 

In 2004, when Terrance was only 14 years old he entered the musical ensemble where he blossomed into a singing and dancing artist. 

“He was coming into his own as a dancer, teacher and mentor,” Linda said. 

But when he was in New York City during auditions, of all places that should have been a cultural safe haven for a young artist, Terrance and his family discovered March of 2011 that he had stage-four kidney cancer.

But Linda said the cancer did not stop him. Terrance had surgery to remove a kidney, his spleen and several lymph nodes. He received radiation and chemotherapy treatments, which damaged his spine and underwent surgery to cement his vertebrae. 

Terrance was given five years to live, but he only lasted a little more than a year.

“If he had lived we wonder what he would do (right now),” Linda said, right after she completed her second lap. 

But because of his love of music, Terrance became a positive person, even after finding out about cancer.

“He always saw that something could be better,” Linda said. That is, except for her cooking.

Terrance loved his mother’s cooking and she expressed great sadness, with tears in her eyes, that she will never cook another meal for Terrance and his friends again. 

The 61-year-old Linda said she knew that Terrance’s time was close when three weeks before he died he lost his famous sense of humor.

But blissful sadness has surrounded Linda since Terrance’s death as she has received letters or just people walking up to her and telling stories of how they or their children learned to become better dancers or to have more confidence in themselves because her son took the time to teach and encourage them.

His presence was felt when his friends would joyfully hug Linda and say words of encouragement and sharing stories as she was being interviewed by Patch. At one point, she stopped in her tracks when she read a Relay for Life shirt that had a saying that Terrance would utter:

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass; it is about dancing in the rain.”

District Judge Robert Burke, a cancer survivor, was wearing the shirt. The two stopped for a moment and spoke.

In fact, Terrance was a constant reminder as his friends performed Summer Stage songs for the hundreds who gathered at the Relay For Life.  His friends raised $2,300 in his name, which was donated to Relay For Life.

When asked what Terrance would say if he were with her doing laps around the football field as so many did that weekend, Linda said with a laugh: 

“Why aren’t there more people?”