Saratoga Springs, NY- Laura Marie Greco passed away July 13, 2024 after a valiant, nine-and-a-half year battle with lung cancer. She was 49 years old.

Though born in Hollywood, California, Laura grew up in Orange County, California. Except for a short couple of years spent in Connecticut when she was in her early elementary school years, Laura's childhood was filled with the golden sunsets that only the West Coast can offer.

After finishing her high school career as valedictorian, Laura matriculated to Georgetown University where she graduated with honors with her Bachelor of Science of Foreign Service (BSFS) degree in 1997. While at Georgetown, she also met Tillman Nechtman. At the time of her death, Laura and Tillman had been married for just shy of twenty-five years.

Laura returned to the West Coast for graduate school. Following in the footsteps of both of her maternal grandparents, Laura joined the Trojan Family, graduating from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in 2000.

As an attorney, Laura clerked for two judges in the Los Angeles Superior Court before taking a position as an associate at the law firm of Severson and Werson in Irvine, California.

In 2005, Laura followed Tillman to upstate New York when he took a position as a professor of history at Skidmore College.

In New York, Laura first worked for the law firm of Gordon Siegel before accepting an offer to serve as the Deputy General Counsel to the New York Consumer Protection Board under both Governor Elliot Spitzer and Governor David Paterson.

Laura concluded her legal career as a partner at the law firm of McGlinchey Stafford in Albany, NY.

Those who worked with her attest that she was one of the most sharply analytical and boldly assertive attorneys you would ever want to meet. An expert in matters of consumer credit and corporate finance, Laura found her skillset was particularly appreciated in the days of the financial crisis of 2008, after the passage of the Dodd- Frank Act that imposed new regulatory constraints on the financial industry after 2010, and in the wake of the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2011.

Laura was sought after for her legal expertise on these topics and as an author and a speaker.

But, everything about Laura's life turned on a snowy February day in 2015 when a freak car accident turned up an ancillary medical finding, a four centimeter mass in the lower lobe of her left lung. Non-small-cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). Having never engaged in risky carcinogenic behaviors and with no family risk factor for early-onset lung cancer, Laura and everyone around her was initially taken aback at the diagnosis. But, as the shock wore off, Laura and those around her came to learn a valuable, if difficult lesson. If you have lungs, you are at risk of getting lung cancer.

Laura saw her diagnosis as a mission. To education. To advocate. To change the status quo.

Her first mission was to educate anybody who would listen that lung cancer was the most deadly cancer out there, killing more people per year than the next three cancers combined. When she was diagnosed, some 433 people died a day from the disease. As Laura once noted at a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., 433 dead would mean every single member of the United States' Congress except two. And since 433 people die of lung cancer each day, those two survivors would fall victim the next day.

Lung Cancer, she argued, was a national emergency.

For nearly eight of the nine-and-a-half years she battled NSCLC, Laura's disease was Stage IV – terminal. She endured countless sessions of focused radiation therapy. She took chemotherapeutic agents on more than four occasions. She survived nine invasive brain surgeries. What others imagined as the hardest thing in the world – "Well, it ain't brain surgery." – Laura experienced as common. She often joked that after her tenth brain surgery, she felt her next one ought to be free.

Laura was willing to laugh in the face of death because she embraced the idea that she was a cancer warrior. She organized teams for local and regional walks to raise funds and awareness. With an inherent sense of competitiveness that ran deep, Laura loved going to those sorts of events with the biggest team, having raised the most money, and finishing the race fastest, despite having lost a lobe of her left lung.

Cancer messed with the wrong woman!

In the days since Laura's passing, one lung cancer friend has attempted to add up all the funds that she was directly or indirectly responsible for gathering into the fight against lung cancer. He stopped counting when the number reached the 10's of millions.

It was Laura who proposed that patients might fund raise and distribute grant funding to medical researchers of their own accord rather than waiting for government agencies and public charities to do the work for them. She found it absurd, if not worse, that drug companies wasted precious research dollars making medications that were molecularly too large to get effectively into the brain, even though a vast percentage of lung cancers will travel to the brain. Why not make it a basic grant-guideline that no patient funded grant would allow a proposal that did not account for how to deliver a therapeutic medicine to the brain as easily as to the lungs themselves.

Laura was a frequent face at medical conferences like the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). Few patients attend conferences of this sort, but Laura was an ardent advocate for the idea that patients must become active participants in their own medical care, as educated about their specific disease as any doctor and as able to introduce novel treatment ideas as trained medical professionals.

In her own battle against cancer, there were three instances when Laura was willingly the first patient ever to try new drug combinations. In two of those instances, she was able to help researchers determine new standards of care.

Laura will perhaps be best remembered in the world of lung cancer advocacy for the unapologetic doggedness with which she waged her war. Her constant refrain was "We deserve better." Her constant optimism emerged from her confidence that "We can do better." She suffered neither fools nor foolishness. "Am I supposed to sit around and wait to die, all the while hoping somebody else will come and save me," she often asked. "That would be insanity."

It was hard to be a slacker once you started working with and walking alongside Laura Greco. Laura considered her work for the Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Lung Cancer program the crowning achievement of her advocacy. Run through the DoD, the CDMRP is a set of budget line allocations that Congress puts into the DoD budget to fund specific projects like lung cancer research. The funds allocated for lung cancer by the CDMRP constitute the largest single pool of lung cancer research funds available.

In her earliest years with the program, Laura worked as a consumer reviewer of grant proposals. Over the years, though, Laura came to be a member of the larger oversight board that both reviewed and awarded grants. Each year, Laura also worked to sustain the budget line for lung cancer research. In one particularly dire year, when the funding found itself on the chopping block, Laura mobilized an army to see the funds restored. In her final year of life, Laura was able to secure an increase in the budge line for lung cancer that amounted to some twenty-five percent of the fund's original allocation.

Laura was a founding member and active participant in many lung cancer advocacy groups, and she was universally recognized as one of the smartest, most forceful, and most effective lung cancer advocates out there.

She will, no doubt, be best remembered for her "Die, Cancer, Die!" campaign, a partnership with the Lung Cancer Research Foundation.

When she went to any radiation therapy, Laura wore a t-shirt she had printed for herself with this short, brutal, and perfect slogan on it. After one such radiation treatment, she tweeted a photo of herself in her shirt in front of the SRS machine.

The tweet went viral, and a movement was born.

Laura had skin in the game. She wanted to live, and she was ever on the lookout for new ideas and therapies that might save her life. But, she also understood that she could use her own mind to help others better engage in their own fights against lung cancer. That her battles might result in new information for others gave her strength.

Above all, though, it was her family that motivated Laura's war on cancer. Even to the end, some of the final concerns she expressed to those around her were that Tillman and their two sons, Rhys (15) and Fletcher (12) would not be able to survive if she were to die. As clergy prayed with her in her last days – prayers for peace and for an end to pain and suffering, she continued to ask them to skip the prayers for her and to pray for her "three boys" instead.

Fletcher was only two-years-old when Laura was diagnosed with cancer. Rhys had just turned six. Laura's first determination was that she would do all she could to win the war against NSCLC so that the two young boys could grow up to know her. Nine years later, she has accomplished that goal.

A devoted mother, a loving wife, a cancer warrior, and an accomplished attorney, Laura packed more living into her short life than many pack into lives that are twice as long. She met a terminal diagnosis with family trips to far-flung places like Australia, Italy, and Alaska. She used the unshackled nature of the 2019 COVID pandemic to plan a cross-country road trip with Tillman and the boys, as well as with their family dog, Lucy. Despite their initial reluctance, Laura convinced the boys to go, and the road trip was on. One month later, the family had seen 26 of the 50 states that constitute the United States of America.

Knowing she held a bad hand, Laura knew she had to live her life compressed. She filled her days with bucket-list items. At one point, she asked her neurosurgeon whether she could go skydiving within eight weeks of her brain surgery. "Given how hard I am working to keep you alive," her doctor inquired, "why are you jumping from a perfectly good airplane." But, Laura understood better.

Every day is a gift. Live it to its fullest. Leave nothing on the table that you might regret when you are forced to move to a new context or new place. This is the lesson Laura taught those fortunate enough to be around her.

Laura is survived by her two sons, Rhys (15) and Fletcher (12). She is also survived by her husband of twenty-five years, Tillman Nechtman. Other surviving relatives include: her parents Steve and Mary Anne Greco of Irvine, CA; her two brothers Mark and Paul; and a host of other friends and family.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 11AM on Friday, July 19, 2024 at the Historic Church of St. Peter, 231 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. Burial will follow in St. Peter's Cemetery 150 West Ave.

Memorial donations in Laura's honor may be made either to: T he Lung Cancer Research Foundation at https://www.lungcancerresearchfoundation.org/get-involved/honor-a-memory/, Or, to: The Church of St. Peter in Saratoga Springs, NY https://www.stpetersaratoga.com.