National Breast Cancer Month: A Tribute to Renee

“There are things that we don’t want to happen but have to accept,
things we don’t want to know but have to learn,
and people we can’t live without but have to let go.”
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I have spent today and part of Monday writing a grant for partial funding of the writing and publishing of Renee's Book of Love. If you happen to be unfamiliar with Renee, you'll find the background below, part of an attachment I just finished so that the grant reviewers can better understand why Renee's story should be written.
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This is a fitting privilege for me during National Breast Cancer Month. Because I will be required to be accountable to the grant administators (I'm requesting $ 2200.00)I know that if this money is awarded, I will write this book in a form worthy of Renee and her family.
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I will include Renee's beloved illustrations and art, her family's favorites of her posts, her thoughts and observations about cancer and living and dying, and love letters from us, her blogging friends, who learned from her how to say 'I love you!" outloud and for real.

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I had planned to direct you to Yahoo Shine!, where there is an article on twenty wonderful purchases you can make that will also contribute to breast cancer awareness and research. Please find your way there if you have the means and ability to do so.
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But mostly today, I want this to be about my friend Renee. I haven't written my own love letter to her yet; I've tried and it's been too hard, but I'm glad I could write this background.

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When I need guidance or a special favor these days, I ask my Father and I ask Renee. She called me one time when I was grieving my own loss, and she told me none of it was my fault. I'll never forget that.

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Background
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In her third year of a very terminal illness, Renee Khan of Winnipeg started a blog.

She was determined to leave her voice behind for her family and for the grandchildren she feared would not remember her. Almost daily, she would write stories about them on their birthdays and anniversaries; share her ‘Then and Now’ journals about cancer and dying and marriage and angels and goddesses and ‘those fucking bats’ that refused to leave her stomach alone. Once a week she would select and offer up three paintings or illustrations, calling them “Breakfast, Lunch, & Dinner’, and she would encourage her visitors to interpret them. Periodically she would print rules from a 1950’s book called How to be a Good Housewife, and she would delight in demonstrating how she failed in every single catagory.

It was not unusual that Renee would receive a hundred or more comments on the blog posts she wrote. But was unusual is that so many of her commenters literally and completely fell in love with her. In some amazing way, her legacy is that she taught them how to love, and how not to be afraid to say so.

Renee did not know when she started her blog that it would be followed and embraced by several hundred blog-friends throughout the world, and in her irrepressible and loving way she would befriend each one of them, individually, through back and forth blog comments, emails, letters, cards and little gifts. She also did not know that she would give and receive such comfort and astonishment in the relationships she formed.

Renee also did not know that in the fifteen months from the day she began her blog to the day the fucking bats took her down for a final time, her twenty-five year old nephew would develop and die from a rare form of stomach cancer; his Mother Jacquie, who was Renee’s sister, would days later be diagnosed with and paralyzed by inoperable brain cancer; and, weeks before Renee agreed to go into the hospital for the last time, their Mother would be dying and die, all this while Renee and Jacquie were knee deep in their own illnesses.

For all this unfathomable tragedy to happen to one family was almost beyond belief. Still, Renee never stopped talking about living and loving. All of it, every test, every crisis, every moment of temporary reprieve was followed and felt by a blogging community that came to love this woman named Renee Khan in ways clearly magical if not logical.

Renee’s remarkable story and spirit is embedded in the pages of her blog; in the comments and letters to and from her to hundreds of genuine friends, and through her children. Hers is a story that is too rich and too real to not be shared.