Illness and Death
On January 11, 2007, Healey underwent surgery to remove metastatic tissue from both lungs. In the previous eighteen months, he had two sarcomas removed from his legs.
On March 2, 2008, Healey died of cancer at St. Joseph's Health Centre in his home town of Toronto. He was 41 years old. His death came a month before the release of Mess of Blues, which was his first rock/blues album in eight years.
Healey is survived by his wife, Cristie, and two children. A tribute concert was held on May 3, 2008, to benefit Daisy's Eye Cancer Fund, which, according to Cristie Healey, had helped make major strides in research and future advances for people born with the same genetically inherited retinoblastoma which led to her husband's blindness at eleven months of age. Cristie and Jeff Healey's son was also born with the same disability.
In 2009, Healey was inducted into the Terry Fox Hall of Fame.
In October of 2012, Jeff's family launched the 'all-new' official Jeff Healey website at jeffhealey.com
Read more about this topic: Jeff Healey
Famous quotes containing the words illness and/or death:
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)