Kids, Cancer, and September

Another year, another opportunity to remember that kids get cancer too

Ana, age 14 (with Pepper)

Did you know that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month? For the first time in a decade, I totally forgot about it. Then I logged into Facebook and saw that my friend Laura had posted a photo of her son Benji with a gold ribbon in the frame. Gold is our color because it represents something precious, our children.

Benji died from leukemia in 2017, the same year that my daughter Ana died from inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor (IMT). Benji had just turned 9. Ana was about six weeks away from her 16th birthday.

I used to write an essay for Childhood Cancer Awareness month every year and fill it full of statistics. This many children are diagnosed with cancer each year, this many die, this many survive with terrible complications, this (painfully small) amount of money is allocated for cancer research. I tried to paint a picture of what it’s like for families facing a child’s cancer diagnosis.

I knew statistics couldn’t tell the whole story, so I unspooled Ana’s entire cancer experience from her diagnosis to her death in a second-person essay that was published in the Washington Post. I tried to communicate the impact that losing a child has on families and what it’s like to live with this loss…