SAUGUS — Susan Lausier, general manager at TITLE Boxing Club in Saugus, lost her father to Alzheimer’s in 2018, now she’s helping the fight to boost research and find a cure through boxing.
“We do this event every year, and I believe this is either the fourth or fifth year. It’s June 21, Saturday morning, at our 9:30 class. It’s a boxathon to raise funds for Team Homer, which is my family’s walk team,” Lausier said. “It’s a fundraiser where we ask people to sponsor a bag when they come in for a class. It’s a suggested donation of $10. We have multiple trainers who come in and volunteer their time to break up the class… It’s an hour as opposed to our usual 45-minute class,” she said.
She and her family have been walking since 2018, when her father died.
The Boxathon for Alzheimer’s Research and Awareness includes raffles as another form of funding for the Walk to End Alzheimer’s.
Lausier has been a general manager at TITLE Boxing Club for two years, but she was a member before that for 10 years.
She spoke about how it felt watching her mother take care of her father, and the difficulty of watching her father struggle.
“Going through it as a daughter, as a caregiver… Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. You lose the person you know twice. First, they get Alzheimer’s, and you slowly lose them, and then you lose them again when they pass, and the caregivers are amazing because they don’t get enough recognition. I saw my mother get close to getting sick herself for taking care of him,” Lausier said.
With the help of her siblings, each one carried part of the load to help each other.
“I can’t imagine how hard it is for people who are alone or an only child. It’s super important to me that we find a cure, we find treatments that are better than what we have today. And there’s more now than there was when he was diagnosed, and I keep thinking why couldn’t he be diagnosed a little later,” she said. “We just have to find a cure.”
Lausier continued that by increasing research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, there’s a chance it could help with other brain diseases connected to dementia.
“The last day he drove, he disappeared, and he never came back. My sister and I were driving around looking for him, and we finally found him. It’s terrifying,” she said.
Lausier spoke about how Alzheimer’s had changed her dad’s personality, making him combative near the end.
When asked how it felt to see the community come together for the cause, she said, “It’s huge because it touches so many people even if you don’t have somebody in your family, somebody knows somebody who has a dementia type disease, or Parkinson’s, or something like that,” she said.
Lausier said she was lucky because even before working for the club, they supported her.
“The members come out of the woodwork and donate items, and I have friends who have never boxed before who come and support,” she said.
Lausier explained how the club wants to continue its outreach. Another thing they do is breast cancer awareness funding, as one of the owners survived breast cancer, and they want to continue fundraising for all types of things.
“We have a lot of outreach into the community. We started doing special needs classes for some of the schools, and it has reaffirmed that this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” she said.
Lausier discussed how boxing also helped her break out of her shell and provided a space where she could simply be herself.
“It’s the only thing I ever stuck with. I tried curve classes, and then I did spinning, and I did boot camps… Then one day somebody said, ‘Why don’t you come with me and try this boxing?’ It’s the only thing that stuck,” she said.
Lausier now teaches classes. “Years ago, I could never talk to anyone. I was super, super, super shy. It gave me self-confidence. I teach a class a week now. I teach a kickboxing class. Never in my life before boxing would I ever think I would do something like this,” she said.
She emphasized how supportive the community is, and new people are always welcome.
The Walk to End Alzheimer’s is scheduled for October, and Lausier’s team will participate in the Andover walk.
“My whole family goes up and does it. We invite anybody if they want to join our team… We do it every single year,” she said. “It’s great. People come out, and the Alzheimer’s community is just so vibrant,” she said.
She explained that five different flowers are given out at the walk: purple if you lost somebody, yellow if you are supporting someone or caring for someone with Alzheimer’s, orange if you support the cause or vision of a world without Alzheimer’s, blue if you have Alzheimer’s, and white. That white flower is the ultimate goal, which will be for the first survivor of Alzheimer’s.
“The white flower means you’ve cured it,’ Lausier said. “Every time they talk about it on stage before the event, whenever they talk about the white flower, it tears me up.”
She continued that she and her siblings are always sending each other articles when more research is released. She also emphasized how she hopes for there to be more for the caregivers.
“This is my passion. We just want to invite anybody from the community who wants to come in on that day. They can come in and try a class if they want. They can do a $10 bag sponsorship, or they can just come in and support by being here. We want a big group of people to hear about what Alzheimer’s is all about, what we’re trying to do to cure it, and have some fun while we’re doing it,” Lausier said.
“This is the other thing that helped me during my dad’s illness. This was the only time during the day that I could come in and not think about what I had to do for my mom, what I had to do for my dad, is my sister doing this, is my brother doing that… This saved me. Forty-five minutes I could have and didn’t have to worry about anything,” she said.
