Full Donor ListOur fundraising goal is to raise $1,000 for each year of John Hanna's life, to celebrate him and also make a clear statement that colon cancer takes too many people away too soon. This is a disease that can be prevented, treated, and conquered!
My stepdad John was diagnosed with colon cancer in November 2002, and succumbed to the disease 20 months later. He was 64 years old. John was a wise and wise-cracking, authoritative and all-knowing, supportive and challenging force in my life. Although it has been almost 5 years since John's death, I often reflect on our relationship before, during, and at the end of his cancer battle. I think about my childhood and adolescent resistance to him and his quasi-parental authority. I think about how, as I matured, I instinctively came to appreciate him for his integrity, his insatiable intellectual curiosity, the incredible love he had for my mom; and also for the untraditional role he played in my life. When he got sick, I jumped head-first into caretaker mode, spending hours a day at the hospital with him. As he got sicker, and I began to accept the reality of his increasingly likely death, I opened myself up to loving him as unconditionally as one loves a blood relative. Had John been taken away from us in an instant, I never would have been fortunate enough to connect with him in the extraordinarily profound way I did in the last days of his life. When I think of any possible good to have come out of John's illness and death by colon cancer, I feel grateful for time. Though no finite amount would have been enough, I will always be grateful for what we were given. To this day I have been unable to find a word to best describe John's presence in my life. So "stepdad" has come to mean what he was, and will always be, to me: mentor, teacher, challenger, advisor, Mom's life partner, confidant, friend. Qualities rarely found in one person and that is something I will always celebrate.
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