Christopher Pendergast, 71, Dies After 28-Year Fight With ALS

Christopher Pendergast, a retired elementary school teacher, author, poet and family man who turned his Lou Gehrig’s disease diagnosis into a campaign to foster awareness and fund research for nearly three decades, died from the illness on October 14. He was 71.

Surrounded by his loved ones, the driving force behind ALS Ride for Life — an annual wheelchair ride across Long Island that has raised more than $10 million — died after several days on home hospice care in Miller Place.

Just 24 hours before his death, he had entered his 28th year living with ALS, a devastating, incurable neuromuscular system disease that has an average survival time of approximately three years.

While the disease took his ability to speak about a year ago, his mind remained sharp, his humor witty and his emotions unbarred. He both communicated and wrote through an eye gaze computer, allowing him to pen “Blink Spoken Here: Tales From A Journey To Within” with his wife, Christine, one blink at a time.

“I refused to simply wait to die,” he wrote in an email interview with The Express News Group in August. “With Gehrig’s grit, I chose to live with ALS, not die from it.”

From his motorized wheelchair, Mr. Pendergast led the first ALS Ride for Life in 1998, five years after his diagnosis. The ambitious, 15-day odyssey to Washington, D.C., started near Yankee Stadium before moving closer to home in subsequent years, once starting or stopping in Montauk before moving once again further west.

The money the ride raised has funded a variety of ALS-related research, patient and caregiver services, education about the degenerative disease, and numerous programs, including the Christopher Pendergast ALS Center of Excellence. The center opened at Long Island’s Stony Brook University over a decade ago, and continues to provide a level of services that were previously only available in New York.

“Knowing I have lived so far beyond expectations makes me thankful and joyful. It also leaves me with a tremendous sense of responsibility,” Mr. Pendergast had told The Express News Group. “Over those years, I estimate 150,000 patients have died. I should have been one of them. In a sense, someone ‘gave up’ their seat in the lifeboat of survivors for me. I feel obligated to pay this precious gift forward.”

Mr. Pendergast is survived by his wife, who was his high school sweetheart, their two children, Buddy Pendergast and Melissa Scriven, and their grandson, Patrick Scali. A socially distanced group of mourners gathered for a memorial service on Sunday night at O.B. Davis Funeral Home in Miller Place, where his son gave a eulogy.

“I came home Thursday night, walked up the stairs, my bedroom door was shut, which it never is. And the one reading I contemplated wanting to read had blown across my floor, around my couch and was half under my door,” Buddy Pendergast said, his voice cracking as he shook his head.

“You can’t make this up. And I stood there and I was so confused, I said, ‘Did I leave this here?’ I didn’t. I thought for a moment, I retraced my steps, and it was lying there at my feet, staring back at me. And I knew he answered my question of what I should read tonight. So he made this a lot easier for me, as I’m doing so great.”

Fighting back tears, Mr. Pendergast recited the breathtaking words of his father, a poem that captured his love of nature and its resilience through the changing seasons.

“We all live our season and it’s the cycle of life,” Mr. Pendergast said in conclusion. “We were blessed and fortunate to share a very long season with him, longer than any could have imagined, and that’s something to be eternally thankful for.”