Avalanna’s spirit Avalanna was only 9 months old when she was diagnosed

Jack Kerouac wrote that the only people for him were the ones “who never yawned or said a commonplace thing but burned, burned, burned like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding across the sky.”

Kerouac never met Avalanna Routh, but he would have adored her, and not just because she liked to hang out in some of the same Lowell pubs that Jack called home. He would have loved her for the same reason anyone who ever spent a moment with her did: She burned, she glowed, she laughed, she learned and she lived like we all should all live. She crammed more life into 6 ½ years than most people do in 75 or 80.


Avalanna was only 9 months old when she was diagnosed with ATRT, a rare and incurable form of brain tumor that afflicts about 30 kids per year in this country. It was the worst nightmare for her parents, a death sentence for their baby girl, but Aileen and Cam never gave any thought to sitting around and making Avalanna comfortable. That’s not what you do with fabulous yellow Roman candles.

Avalanna worked at a spa painting nails and at a pizza shop making pies. She went to Irish pubs and sang Irish songs with her family and friends. She rode horses until she could no longer walk, and then you know what she did? She went back to Ironstone Farm in Andover and rode some more. There were no excuses in Avalanna’s world, no limitations.

Avalanna loved Justin Bieber, but she didn’t just didn’t sit around singing his songs and kissing his posters. She played Yahtzee with him in his New York hotel room, and she joined him on stage at the Apollo Theatre in New York. Oh, she did one other thing with the Biebs: She married him.

It’s an old story now, but a good one: The wonderful people at the Jimmy Fund knew Avalanna’s dream was to someday walk the aisle with Bieber, so they did what they do every day at the clinic: They made it happen. While Avalanna was enduring another round of chemo, they went into action. Soon they had music and flowers and a cake and a cardboard version of Clay Buchholz with Biebs’ face taped to it. Because of her illness, she had already celebrated First Communion and Confirmation. Why not Holy Matrimony?

Avalanna became known at the clinic as “Mrs. Bieber.” The story spread quickly through social media, and soon the Biebs got wind of it. God bless the little megastar, he stepped up big, inviting Av to New York to just hang out. No cameras, no press releases. Just the happy couple. And he kept in touch, too. Yesterday Bieber tweeted to his 28 million followers: “just got the worst news ever. One of the greatest spirits I have known is gone.”

He got that right: There was a spirit to Avalanna that was almost eerie, like she knew, even at the age of 4 or 5, that this dance wasn’t going to last forever. Sometimes it felt like she was giving us all a wake-up call, like we should stop sweating the small stuff and start living like we were dying.

The last time I saw Avalanna, we were at the clinic on a busy Tuesday morning. Her legs weren’t working, and wires and tubes were hanging all over her. She was tired and she was hurting, but then her mom cranked up some Biebs and off she went, waving her arms and singing like she was back up on stage at the Apollo.

Avalanna Routh passed away yesterday morning, more than five years after her diagnosis. Cancer finally did what years of chemo and radiation and one bad MRI after another could not do: It doused the flame. It took away one of the great spirits we have ever known.