BRATTLEBORO — Wayne Thies' 13 children can pinpoint the moment everything changed: On April 4, 1995, at 5:20 p.m., the song “Danny Boy” played on a piano, the sun broke through the rain clouds, and their 50-year-old father died of cancer in the blink in between.
In the two decades since, the late Brattleboro accountant's sons and daughters - from oldest to youngest, Mary, Theresa, Maura, Bob, Jim, Amy, Katie, Tim, Dan, Peggy, Virginia, Stephen, and Brigid - have scattered throughout Windham County, New England and the nation.
But on the 20th anniversary of their patriarch's passing, they're turning to the Internet to reconnect to their roots.
Log onto Facebook during this week of Passover and Easter and you can find the family's “13x20 Challenge in Honor of Wayne Thies.”
“If you have reached this page, you have been challenged by me, or by one of my siblings,” eldest child Mary writes on a website already “liked” by nearly 200 people. “If each one of the 'Thies Kids' gets 20 people to donate just $10, we will raise $2,600 for cancer research. That would make our Dad smile.”
Back in December 1993, the family's biggest challenge was living in an Oak Street home with 14 rooms, 15 residents and one-and-a-half baths. Then Thies discovered a lump diagnosed five months later as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Until then, Thies' life was relatively smooth, from his birth in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1945, to his first date with a fellow religious education teacher named Ann in 1968, their marriage a year later, and their budding family's move to Brattleboro a decade after that.
Some people would keep the physician's news private. Thies told everyone in town.
“I have cancer,” he'd say to anyone who'd listen. “Pray for me. I'm going to fight.”
And he did, all while walking daughter Theresa down the aisle one summer day between chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant; celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary one fall night after his discharge from the hospital; and watching the family car sputter and friends surprise him with a minivan after his cancer returned between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It was the Monday before March Town Meeting Day 1995 when Thies told this reporter the whole story.
Seated in his kitchen, the father wore a thick robe over his clothes in a room stifling with radiator heat. He was shivering. He had no immune system and was taking almost two dozen pills a day.
Having every reason to be concerned about himself, he instead talked about his compassion for those suffering more.
“This disease is very much - people don't talk about it - but it's very much like having AIDS,” he said. “Except you come into it with the cancer. I don't have a lot of experience with AIDS, but I think that the other symptoms and so forth are very similar. It's got to give you some sympathy for others.”
So much for stereotypes about a Catholic father of 13.
Thies initially wanted his interview published on Father's Day 1995. He envisioned a feel-good feature with a harrowing beginning and happy ending.
But some stories don't turn out as planned.
Thies died that year at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., just before Easter - the day he asked, in a last request, that his story appear to thank all the people who helped him and his family.
Whoever was playing the hospital piano that final stormy day didn't know “Danny Boy” was Thies' favorite song. That's why it was reprised as the prelude at his Mass of the Resurrection, where his sons wore their father's ties and his newlywed daughter sat pregnant with his first grandchild.
Twenty years later, the family continues to grow.
Those in Thies' brood with two children: Mary, now 44 and living in Rhode Island; Jim, 41, in Colorado; Amy, 39, in the Mount Snow valley; Katie, 38, in Albany; and Brigid, 29, in Georgia.
Those with three: Maura, 42, in California, and Tim, 37, in Massachusetts.
Those with four: Theresa, 43, in Seattle; Bob, 42, in Brattleboro; and Peggy, 34 in New York state.
“For those of you keeping track at home,” Bob said, “that's 28 children.”
(Readers may recognize Bob's clan as the one chronicled in wife Bethany Kriger Thies' blog, badparentingmoments.com. For their part, Dan, 35, and Virginia, 31, are focusing on their spouses in, respectively, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Burlington, while Stephen, 30, is enjoying the single life in Burbank, Calif.)
As the anniversary of Wayne's death approached, his family's thoughts circled back home.
“It was gnawing at me that we should do something,” Mary says, “but we're all over the place.”
Then she remembered Facebook, “the easiest way for all of us to communicate, as it's definitely more efficient than dialing the phone 13 times.”
This March 18, the day their father would have turned 70, Mary sent her siblings “The 13x20 Challenge in Honor of Wayne Thies.”
Its instructions: Reach out to 20 friends and request at least $10 each to support the Children's Cancer Therapy Development Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit laboratory that specializes in researching and testing new treatments.
Thies loved children and wanted to fight cancer, his family explained of its choice of charity. And wife Ann, remarried and resettled in Connecticut, has a 6-year-old step-granddaughter who's battling a rare form of the ailment.
“My father would be thrilled to know that we've accepted such a challenge,” Bob said, “one that supports children, increases awareness and gains funds to research and combat the disease.”
People can learn more by logging onto Facebook and its “The 13x20 Challenge in Honor of Wayne Thies” page.
“The best kind of sibling rivalry,” one follower there has commented.
“Great way to pay it forward,” another concludes.
Thies, his children believe, would agree. They recall the note he penned 20 years ago thanking townspeople for the minivan: “Your generosity has given our family a legacy that can be passed on from our children to our grandchildren,” he wrote.
“It struck me that this is what we 'Thies Kids' are doing right now,” Mary said. “I would like to think he would be very proud.”