Remembering Emru

Local film enthusiast Emru Townsend
leaves behind a health care legacy

1969–2008: Emru Townsend

by MATTHEW HAYS

When Emru Townsend passed away at the Jewish General Hospital on the night of Tuesday, Nov. 11, many felt a gap in the city’s cultural milieu.

Those who knew Townsend will recall his infectious enthusiasm for movies, especially off-kilter, cult and international cinema and animation. He was the founder of Frames Per Second magazine, an online journal dedicated to any- and everything related to animation. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that, as the film editor at the Mirror during much of the ’90s, I assigned and edited many of Townsend’s well-written stories.

But besides Townsend’s cultural interests and contributions, he will now be remembered for the awareness he raised about the medical challenges he faced in the last year of his life.

It was almost a year ago, but days before Christmas, when Townsend would get the diagnosis: he had leukemia. And then, in the New Year, his doctors would tell him that the only way to save his life was to get a bone-marrow transplant.

As his sister, Tamu Townsend, now recalls, her brother would learn the hard way about some little-known information. There is indeed a bone-marrow transplant registry, but because there are so few donors who are of Caribbean descent (as was Townsend), matches would be especially difficult to find.

“This was a tough thing for us to deal with,” Tamu says now. “But leave it to Emru to turn it into something positive.” The Townsend siblings worked together to use Facebook, local and national media and their Web site (heal-emru.com) to raise awareness about the dearth of minority representation in the bone-marrow registry. “We felt we were pretty aware, well-read people,” says Tamu. “But we knew nothing about this.”

The awareness drive worked, as a bone-marrow match was found for Townsend. And Townsend got help in other ways: Mitch Davis, a programmer at the Fantasia Film Festival, organized a benefit screening at last summer’s fest, with the profits going to Townsend and his family during such a rough time. Sadly, the transplant came too late, and despite it, the leukemia overwhelmed Townsend.

But Tamu says Emru died in relative comfort at the Jewish General (“He had amazing nurses and doctors there,” she says) and was able to say goodbye to friends, loved ones and his wife and son before dying.

Tamu says there are two things that she came away with from this harsh experience. She’s glad that more people are now aware about issues and problems with the bone-marrow registry, and for the need for people to register. “People think it’s painful to give a bone marrow donation,” she says. “In fact, it’s not. A small amount of pain could mean saving someone’s life.”

And the other thing she is now more convinced of than ever is the importance of a public health care system, where everyone has access. “We have had a lot of e-mail exchanges with people in other parts of the world who are going through the same thing. One woman I’m in touch with in the U.S. got word that she had needed a bone-marrow transplant. But she had to wait months, because her parents couldn’t afford it and had to save up. That’s outrageous—in the wealthiest country in the world, her life was threatened because they didn’t have enough money? We have to support our health care system—it’s vital that we have it and keep it.”

Tamu says she intends to continue to maintain the Web site and raise awareness about bone marrow transplants.