EASTHAMPTON - Looking back on it, there were signs. When she'd scrutinize ingredients on food labels and remove one item after another from her diet. When, even after cross-country practice ended, she stayed out there on the Williston Northampton School's fields and keep running and running, her auburn curls bouncing off her shoulders, her gaze unwavering, her weight beginning to melt away.

"I didn't think to be concerned - I was running too," said John Sheehan of Southampton, father of the late Tara Sheehan, who spent the first 15 years of her life riding horses, playing sports and stepping the dance of the Irish, and the next 10 fighting for her life against a demon that could not be exorcised - anorexia nervosa, which finally took her life in a Colorado hospital in 2002. She was 25.

"I thought she was just burning it off," Sheehan said of his daughter's incessant running, "but Maureen had the mother's instinct."

"She was losing too much weight," said Maureen Sheehan. "Relatives would visit and be shocked. We thought it might be leukemia."

After playing a key part in a New England cross-country championship for Williston that year (1992) the popular student was visibly exhausted shortly after, and the weight kept coming off. After months of tests, anorexia was finally diagnosed.

So, now we just get better, right? But that's the problem with something so miserably confounding. Anorexia has a mind of its own, with the ability to infect the healthiest of minds and pull them to the dark side. What may start out as an image-conscious attempt to lose weight soon spirals into something sinister.

"Play with this and a switch goes off in your brain and you have no control," said Maureen Sheehan.

"We took her to Boston, to Hartford, to New Hampshire, everywhere trying to get help," said John Sheehan. "But so little is known about it."

There have been some scientific breakthroughs, a chromosome isolated, a genetic factor proven, but of little help to the victim right here and now.

As with political prisoners on a hunger strike, the body crumbles. Since the disease strikes primarily in young women and adolescent girls, irreversible damage to developing bone structure and density is the first blow, before noticeable weight loss. The heart and its musculature grow weaker and smaller, pulse and blood pressure plunge. Heart damage, in fact, is the most common reason for the ambulance to be summoned.

Though often treated as if it's a voluntary condition, anorexia has the highest death rate of any mental illness, and a suicide rate 50 times higher than the general population. And still Tara Sheehan fought on.

Though her self-confidence waned as the disease overwhelmed her, Tara's sense of humor remained sharp. Tara and her father told each other so many jokes they ended up devising a numbering system. Rather than waste time telling a particular joke they both knew, she'd cry out: "Number 17!" or "Number 33!" and they'd roar at the implied punch line.

Tara Sheehan was hospitalized over 40 times during her 10-year ordeal. She'd leave programs fairly healthy, weight up over 100, then, once on the street, spiral repeats, be back down to 70 pounds in no time.

"She'd come out with great intentions," said Maureen Sheehan, "saying, 'I'm going to beat it this time.' The last few years she was so sure she was going to overcome it."

But food to the anorexic is like the crucifix to Dracula.

"They clearly cannot eat," Maureen Sheehan said of sufferers. "It'll be a salad or a yogurt for the entire day."

Her last hospital stay, the few weeks in Colorado in 2002, held promise, but in the course of a single Sunday, Tara's organs, one by one, began to fail. Her parents were advised by doctors to take the next flight out. At 6 a.m. that Monday morning they took off from Bradley, wondering the whole way if Tara was going to make it. But when they got off the plane and saw their son Sean there waiting for them, they knew.

A birthday quest

In the years since, the Sheehans have made it their personal quest to raise money and awareness to find hope for sufferers.

This Wednesday, Tara's birthday, on a crisp, cloudy day on Easthampton's Galbraith Field, the sixth annual Run/Walk for Tara got under way. Money raised by participants this year was earmarked for a scholarship in Tara's name at Walden Behavioral Care in Northampton, to assist eating disorder sufferers lacking health insurance. A good mix of serious runners, bundled-up walkers and lots of kids home from school on Veterans Day showed up. At a little after 10 a.m., 125 walkers set out on the same cross-country terrain that a 15-year-old Tara trod in her athletic days, followed a half hour later by 101 runners.

"Such a bright young woman with so much to live for, and that demon got hold of her," said Michelle Benoit, who runs or walks the course every year in Tara's memory.

Art Keene, retired cross-country coach at Amherst Regional, brought eight girls from the JV team, each with colorful running pants to outdo the other, just to give them one more race, he said.

"I love this race, the people are special, and I love the Sheehans," said retired schoolteacher Daniel Dodson, 65, of Methuen, who runs about 150 races a year and has run this one since its inception six years ago. "I was hooked from the very first time, when John made that talk about his daughter. Very personal, with tears running down my cheeks. I'm going to do this race every year until I can't walk," said Dodson, recognizable to runners mainly by the French Foreign Legion headdress, the kepi with the "couvre de nuque" that drapes down his neck.

The Southampton Community Chorus could be heard to the far reaches of the course, which stretched all the way down to the bocce courts in Nonotuck Park.

Family's presence

Brother Sean, 35, drove up from Arlington with his wife Jenny and son Owen, whose red hair is no more than a shade or two removed from that of his late aunt's.

"Ironically, our grandfather came over here from Ireland to escape the famine, and here's a girl who just won't eat," said Sean Sheehan. "Even 10 years later I can't completely understand it."

"Anyone with an eating disorder, the focus on food becomes so narrow," said Walden's Jennifer Smith. "Controlling intake makes them feel successful, accomplished. Every moment is tied up with 'How do I look, how am I going to purge?' The risk of heart attacks and kidney failure falls by the wayside. What the scale tells me is all that matters."

"What you see in the mirror is detached from reality, like a mirror in a funhouse," said Sean Sheehan.

Meaghan Sheehan, 29, who lives with her fiance in Hawaii, comes home every year for her sister's race.

Before Tara got sick, Meaghan used to tag along in whatever activity she was involved in. "You have a tendency to idolize people after they're gone, but she had such sensitivity, tuned into what was happening to other people. Even when sick in hospitals, she reached out to others."

One woman who shared a hospital room with Tara went on to become a nurse, based on Tara's urging. One of the cruel ironies of Tara's short life is that she desperately wanted to help heal others, but could never heal herself. The day before she died she was filling out applications for nursing schools.

"She knew what needed to happen, recovery was always near, death was not an option," said Meaghan. "But her body had been suffering for so many years."

As for the race, Ross Krause won it with a time of 17 minutes and 16 seconds. Rachel O'Brien was the first female finisher at 20:41.

But, ultimately, Wednesday was a way for a family to talk to their daughter, on a familiar field and fir-lined path. Tara's spirit is always near, said her mother, never more so than on this day, her birthday, when they come from all around.

"I'd give all of that for a real, live hug, but her presence within me is what sustains me," said her mother.

Bob Flaherty can be reached at bflaherty@gazettenet.com.