About Beauty, Love, Cancer and a Van
I asked myself many times, “Why am I building this?”
I started writing and selecting photos about the previous three years in October 2022. I wanted to savour the good and organize my thoughts on the not-good. I also wanted to share the incredible beauty and amazing life that Ria and I were living.
This wonderful time cannot be understood without also squarely addressing the cancer we were living with. Mostly, it was distant thunder clouds on the horizon coupled with day to day management. Always present, usually manageable. It is my hope that sharing our story with others finding their way with disease will inspire ideas, tactics and hope.
I also wanted to share the ups and downs with friends and family. This format allows people to take in as much or as little as they prefer, in their own time.
For fellow van lifers or anyone thinking about van life, I wanted to share our experience, what we learned, our routes, our laughs.
I wanted to collaborate with Ria, inviting her to contribute chapters from her perspective. She decided contributing chapters was not her thing, but suggested that her poetry be integrated and started selecting and finishing some for inclusion. I looked forward to working on it together during our travels.
It was my hope that we would share this while still “winning” over cancer. When things went suddenly and perhaps mercifully wrong and Hendrika passed, the effort became a form of therapy for me, a way for me to maintain some sort of connection with her. It gave me purpose as I pawed through her poems. It was something I could keep busy with without feeling I was abandoning her.
The end product is intentionally highly eclectic. A love story, nature photos, a book of poems, an art display, tips and tricks for van lifers, a story of cancer fighters, a nerdy view of cancer treatments, a health policy critique, a travel journal, ideas for trips around Ontario and the Eastern US. Neither Hendrika nor I ever fit any particular mold. Perhaps this is one of the many things that made our relationship so strong.
Finally, one of the main motivations for this website is to raise funds for the Canadian Cancer Society which helps people live with cancer and supports research that will one day make it so that no one has to fear the disease.
You can help prevent other lives from being cut short by giving! No amount is too small.
And please share this site with anyone who might enjoy it or find it useful.
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