Why I'm Doing This

So what, right? Well, these are the traits that prompted me to say yes when Jason Sissel invited me to help him raise money for pediatric cancer research by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with him. As a fellow Chicagoan, I was interviewing him for The Local Tourist about his foundation, Endure To Cure. It's all about pushing yourself with the belief that there are No Limits on what you can accomplish if you put your mind to it. It's also about the seemingly insurmountable struggles that children with pediatric cancer face every day of their young lives. By voluntarily pushing up to and beyond our physical capacity, we try to empathize with their involuntary limitations. While complete empathy is impossible, we can at least begin to understand their courage and hopefully bring awareness to the need to combat this cruel, selfish disease.

One of my grandmothers survived breast cancer, yet I've never done any fundraising for Susan G. Komen or any of the other incredibly amazing foundations that focus on it. My other grandmother died from leukemia, yet I didn't volunteer to combat that specific form of the disease either. The first funeral I attended was my step-aunt's, who died from ovarian cancer when she was only 35, and my grandfather had lung cancer and brain cancer, and while I mourned, I didn't take any action.

Why, when I finally did decide to do something about this damn disease, did I choose one that I had no personal experience with, and to make such a dramatic statement by climbing a mountain?

One reason is that so many of my relatives have been affected by cancer and each one was different. How could I decide that one deserved more attention than another without feeling like I was choosing one family member over another?

Another is that children should never have to experience the pain and the wasting this disease inflicts upon the afflicted; their lives should be filled with swing sets and fireflies and blowing bubbles and ghost stories and muddy knees and grass stains.

But why climb a mountain? Especially when it's the tallest free standing mountain in the world and I have no experience doing anything of the sort? Well, that's precisely why. It's something I'd never considered and there's a symbolism in that. No one, especially a child, factors cancer into the equation of life; it's not even considered. But when it comes, it's there and you deal with it and you fight, you climb every day to get back to what your life was like before it made life a schedule of treatments and struggles and fears and hopes. Truth is, you don't get back to what your life was like, because if you climb that mountain and come down the other side you are changed forever.

Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro is going to be the hardest physical act I've ever attempted. I'm 39 years old and my job requires hours of sitting in front of the computer during the day and socializing amongst rich food and alcohol at night. But you know what? I WILL climb this mountain. I WILL reach the summit. And I WILL raise $20,000 to help find a cure so that no child will have to contemplate the next round of chemo instead of the next time at bat, or the next slumber party, or the next...