Eyes wide, hand reaching for mine, Chris Grundner offers a warm greeting as he gets up from a chair behind his desk, then finds a seat at a mahogany picnic table near the front door of his large office on Water Street along the Wilmington Riverfront. He settles in and starts talking about the event he’s working on, then about the events that led him to the event he’s working on.

“The biggest thing is awareness,” Grundner says. “People don’t talk about the disease. People who’ve been affected don’t share their stories. People aren’t educated about it. We’re where breast cancer was 25 years ago.”

The disease is brain tumors, an illness with vague symptoms and more than 120 variations that often eludes blood tests, making it difficult to diagnose. As of mid-March, more than 550 walkers have signed up for “Get Your Head in the Game,” the first-ever brain tumor awareness walk in Delaware that’s being sponsored by Grundner’s nonprofit organization, the Kelly Heinz-Grundner Brain Tumor Foundation. The walk is scheduled for Saturday, May 3 on the Riverfront.

Beautiful, tomboy-ish, and not one to complain much, Kelly Heinz-Grundner was Chris’ wife of seven years. They met in Colorado in 1992, married five years later, and moved to Delaware in 1999. In April 2002, Kelly began experiencing chronic headaches, often going to bed with one and waking up still in pain. Other symptoms appeared: blurry vision, loss of coordination, vomiting. Was it something she’d eaten, maybe stress boiling over from her job as a caterer? Doctors’ visits only furthered the checklist of possibilities. Seasonal allergies? Nope. Thyroid? No. Pregnant? No. Cancer? Negative.

In doing some online research, Kelly and Chris learned about brain tumors. Their doctor was skeptical; since only about 25 percent of brain tumors reach the bloodstream, an MRI was the only way Kelly could be diagnosed, and doing so would be expensive. Chris persisted, and the doctor finally agreed. When the results came back, in September 2002, Kelly learned she had a tumor the size of a golf ball in her brain.

Two weeks later, she had aggressive surgery to remove it, surgery that left her paralyzed on her left side. She had to be taught how to sit in a chair, how to keep herself from falling over. “We had to literally sit her in front of a mirror to show her what she was doing, as a kind of rehab,” Grundner says. Kelly made progress, eventually learning how to walk again, and she underwent chemotherapy. But the tumor came back, and would only keep coming back. In September 2004, at age 31, Kelly passed away.

Prior to his wife’s death, Grundner was a senior vice president at JPMorgan Chase, crafting marketing strategies in the company’s credit card division. One of his biggest deals, with Disney, took JPMorgan Chase to a new level in the banking world. But once Kelly got sick, the success, the salary, the nice office—none of it mattered.

Grundner took seven months off to be with his wife. After the funeral, he was restless. He stayed up late. He tried going back to work, but it wasn’t the same. “My life as I knew it was over,” Grundner says. “That chapter was done, and that included work.”

Within 30 days of Kelly’s passing, Grundner was working on forming an organization dedicated to fighting brain tumors. Wracked with hindsight about what he could’ve done to save his wife, Grundner decided awareness was the key. He bought a Dummies book on how to start a nonprofit, and with money from his savings, formed the Kelly Heinz-Grundner Brain Tumor Foundation in September 2005.

Support has been strong from the start. A launch event at the Delaware Center for Horticulture drew 175 people—most of them knew Kelly and Chris—and raised $45,000 in one day. Friends and family were mostly behind the project, but some thought it a bad idea for Grundner to make a new career out of his grief.

“People didn’t understand. They didn’t get it,” he says. “Everybody processes grief differently. Some people hadn’t been through what I was feeling. And other people who had losses, the way they dealt with it was to repress it or move away from it. But it was a daily part of my life. I had to follow my heart.”

Two years ago, Chris ran into an old friend of Kelly’s, Susan Broody, who’d recently gone through a divorce. They’d each been invited to a Super Bowl party at a friend’s house in New Jersey, and decided to drive together. The hour-long trip gave them plenty of time to talk, and they soon realized how much they had in common. “Neither of us was trying to impress the other,” Grundner says. “I remember telling her things and thinking, ‘I don’t tell anybody this.’” Last year, they got married. Two months ago, they welcomed their first child, a baby boy named Cooper. His middle name is Kelly.

Before she died, Kelly was working on a book about overcoming her brain tumor. It was going to be called Whatever It Takes, an inspirational, Lance Armstrong-style tome. Chris has tried finishing it, but can’t seem to get far. “I’ll start writing, put it down; write, put it down,” he says. “So many things have happened since I last tried writing it, and I think they’re all part of the story that needs to be told. I don’t want to finish it too soon.”