FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS • The chance at immortality came to Julie Wier when she was grappling with death.

Cancer was going to kill her, a doctor said in May 1983. You will be gone by Christmas, she remembers him saying.

The 33-year-old mother of six resisted the push by doctors and family to take chemotherapy. The idea of losing her thick, waist-length hair was too much. She cherished it. Giving it up would be giving up her identity.

But she kept thinking about her family. The thought of leaving her husband, Jack, to raise their children alone was too much to bear. She gave in.

The chemotherapy worked on the tumor growing in her chest. She lived to see Christmas and the New Year. Doctors said she was in remission although clumps of the hair she feared losing were found each morning on her pillow.

A pixie-style haircut would become her new look, the one she was sporting a year after her diagnosis when she read about a contest to find the typical St. Louisan. The winner would have his or her likeness cast in bronze and displayed outside the soon-to-be-open St. Louis Centre.

The contest was part of the hype that the shopping center was generating for what would become at the time the largest enclosed urban mall in the country.

Wier had no intention of entering the contest until newspapers started publishing some of the entries as they were coming in.

"They are so weak," she remembers thinking. "I can do better than that."

She sent her entry in on the final day of the contest, which attracted nearly 500 applications. Of the 20 finalists, she was the only one from Illinois. She wrote her submission in the form of a poem.

"The diagnosis was cancer

On May 22, 1983.

Here I still am — alive and well

Who'd of thought it could be?

Seems that I'm the survivor type

That's why the statue should be me."

And with those words, Wier became the bronze prototype of a St. Louis citizen.

In the frenzy and fanfare of the mall's grand opening in 1985, Bob Hope cut the ceremonial ribbon. A BMW was given away. And newspapers and television stations documented every line of Wier's supporting role.

Then her likeness was left to its quiet perch.

It would sit there through the mall's good years, greeting the bustle of shoppers outside the mall's entrance. Wier would pass by occasionally as well.

At times, the figure that embodied her life with cancer became a kind of trusted confidant. At times, she saw it as a lesson in vanity and a reminder of how short life can be.

The statue stuck around through the bad years, as stores and shoppers abandoned the retail center. When the statue, like the customers, disappeared, Wier was among the few who paid attention.

She, too, had moved on.

Mostly.

llama love

Inside the barn on the Wier's 33 acres, alpacas and llamas jockey for position in front of fans. It's here, 25 years after the much ballyhooed mall dedication, that Wier, now 61, can be found on any given day. Nearby will likely be one of her seven grandchildren, feeding carrots to the 120 or so animals that have become Wier's passion.

She was keeping two llamas for a friend when she got her cancer diagnosis. Too weak to care for the animals, she had to return them.

"I missed them; if you're sad, they sense it and put their head on your shoulder," Wier said. "I told my husband, 'If I get better, the only thing I want is a llama.' He said 'If you get better, you can have as many llamas as you want."

On her dining room table is a plastic container filled with hats she began making this year from llama and alpaca fleece she spun.

The walls are filled with family photos. She points to each one and tells a brief story. Her smile fades as she stops at the one taken of her shortly after her cancer diagnosis. It's the photo that was sent to sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr. so he could begin working on the facial features of the bronze statue that would be placed outside St. Louis Centre.

"It doesn't look like me," she says of the photo.

The hair is shorter — she now wears it at shoulder-length. And in the photo she is thinner. But she looks happy.

On the same wall is a photo of the statue. Wier's smile returns, but this time her eyes get a little misty.

"She was the symbol of my wellness," Wier said. "The statue says to me: 'You made it.'"

Wier was flown to Johnson's home in Nantucket, Mass., to meet the artist and have photos taken for the sculpture.

"I was very impressed with her. Quite a fighter," Johnson said. "She just had a really spiritual quality to her."

When the statue arrived in St. Louis, mall officials asked Wier whom she wanted to invite to the unveiling. The list was long, but there was no flinching. Three buses were sent to St. Clair Square not far from Wier's Fairview Heights house to pick up the relatives and friends she wanted to share in the moment.

She wanted to be with all those who had helped her through cancer. All those who paid for months of diaper service for her three toddlers.

"In my lifetime, I cannot repay that kind of kindness. My thought was if I'm chosen to be the statue, I could say it represented the people of St. Louis and its pioneering spirit. The wagons encircled us for a year and took care of us."

'part of me'

In the coming years, the statue served as a sanctuary for the young mother dealing with mortality. When she needed a break, Wier would visit the statue.

"Sometimes I would do a drive-by to make sure she was OK," Wier said. Other times, she would sit next to the statue to see how people responded to the art.

Some would claim to their friends to know the woman in the statue. Some would read the first few lines of Wier's contest poem etched into the statue and assume she had died.

"Sometimes my kids would be with me and say 'No, that's my mom and she's right here!'"

Wier would hear stories from downtown workers who said the statue was their lunchtime companion on nice days. Wier even dressed up the statue for the 1985 World Series, with a St. Louis Cardinals cap and beads.

"It was like she was a part of me," Wier said.

But as her health improved and doctors said she was out of the woods, visits to the statue waned.

"Time passed and I didn't need her any longer," Wier said.

The successful battle against cancer sent Wier in directions she is certain her life would not have gone otherwise.

She went back to school, completing a communications degree at St. Louis University when she was 40. Her pack of llamas and alpacas continued to grow. She became a professional clown. For 15 years, she would make appearances, known as Simple the Clown. But that ended when one of her daughters had 43 seizures over three days, spending six months in the hospital and altering her health permanently.

"Nothing was funny anymore," Wier said. "Just because you survive cancer, life isn't a float. There are other challenges, and cancer prepares you for the next challenge."

The latest came in May 2007 when Wier's husband, Jack, was impaled by a small tree while clearing a spot for a new pond. Jack, a financial adviser, survived, flown by helicopter to the hospital with part of the tree still lodged in his abdomen.

statue goes missing

Wier looks back at her struggles with a certain detached gratitude.She has often joked with friends that she outlived the $177 million mall. And she wasn't supposed to have been around to see it built.

Even so, the statue was always supposed to be there.

Then it went missing.

She first noticed it gone a few years ago. By then, the mall was all but empty. The St. Louis Centre turned out to be a tremendous failure and sat largely vacant for most of the last decade. After many false starts, renovation began in May on the old mall. Its new life will be a parking garage with street-level shops.

For those connected to the statue project — like Ron O'Connor, who handled publicity — the failure of the shopping center is crushing, given how much hope it had once carried for revitalizing downtown.

Instead, all the expectations, all the work, all the attention had resulted in little more than a dead mall and a lost sculpture.

The first time O'Connor noticed it gone, he suspected metal thieves had stolen it.

Tracking it down never felt like a priority for Wier.

O'Connor even offered to help her look for it. The two met by chance at a Cracker Barrel restaurant a few years back.

He told Wier he would make some inquiries.

"He said that he could probably get it for me," Wier said. "What would I do with a 500-pound statue of me?"

So he never pursued it.

For most of its public disappearance, the statue known as "Competition" sat in storage. It was purchased in February 2008 by Chesterfield Arts. Sachs Properties and Drury Hotels pitched in with donations, but no one had a clear plan for displaying it.

Then Wier's likeness re-emerged in June, newly cleaned, in front of the Samuel C. Sachs branch of the St. Louis County Library in Chesterfield.Eventually, a reading garden will be created next to the library. The statue will be the centerpiece.

Wier said the library setting fits with the sculpture, which shows her writing in a notebook and sitting next to a newspaper.

Wier makes regular trips to West County to visit her son, Joe, his wife, Sherry, and their four children. She could easily take a detour to the Chesterfield library 10 minutes away from her son's Ellisville home. But she hasn't done so.

"I guess if it was important to me..." Wier says, collecting her thoughts. "It doesn't mean I won't ever."

She explains that her frequent trips to spend time with the statue served as therapy. Now when she looks at photos of the statue, she sees an old friend. Immortal yes, but never changing. Always stuck in a time she has passed by.

"The statue is just a statue. It doesn't change your life to be a statue. There is no discount at McDonald's. It doesn't do your laundry."

And yet, the nostalgia of it all still beckons.

"It was a glorious thing. An absolutely glorious thing."