Inspiration

Posted on Jun 11, 2011 in from the heart | 1 comment

Meet Whitney and her family. I have been brewing on this post for about a year. I dont know that i will EVER be fully ready to say all i want to but here goes.

She is inspiration. She has cancer…and i dont want to get into details but she is ill. She is suffering through it but only she is not suffering as i would expect one to suffer. She is strong. she is brave, nurturing, sweet, kind and so HUMAN. She is a lot of who i would like to become.

I met her at a friends birthday party long ago and asked a few questions about why the hat and no hair…chemo. She opened up to me and told me so much. I grew up with her older brother…coincidence. I fought tears trying to treat her as i saw her…normal and even stronger than those not ill. I feel that we often treat illness as not normal when it is isn’t it? its just different. We just dont know how to act. i treated her as i would have any friend, and we became friends instantly. That night i went home and told jon all about her through tears. not sad ones, but “i-feel-braver-and-more-able-to-do-anything” tears. She shared with me her private blog in which i scoured through. I just love her. I feel like i have known her forever and yet so little have we talked.

She had me shoot her family shots this spring saying that she was about to start chemo again and was not really sure what the future held for them. When you picture an ill person you dont picture strong, happy, optimistic person…she is. The sun was not out all that week, and i think we rescheduled 3 times maybe??? but we decided to push the weather and TRY it out ~ and the sun popped out and the rain stopped until we finished!

As some of you know i started a chapter of Flashed of Hope this past year to shoot non-profit and FREE shots of children dying/battling cancer…it was wonderful/awful for me to shoot them that summer. I am not sure that my heart was strong enough. I cried all the rest of that day i think. But with a lot of help we shot 260 kids in northern idaho that year. None of them paid anything…and all of them recieved prints reminding them how beautiful they really were, and to the families: a life lasting photo of thier babies to remember exactly who they were if they should go home…because photo’s are not on the top of the mind when illness hits … until they leave. This program is sooooo fantastic! But i fell off the wagon because my heart was so achey about it.

After talking and shooting with Whit i remembered how hard/and how worth it photo’s are! So…whitney ~ for you and all those battling what you are i vow to try again with Flashes of Hope and raise 2,000$ so that we can again next summer shoot the children in idaho as a gift to them and their families.

So watch for my invites going out…i got something up my sleeve!   thanks Whit for being my friend and being so dang cool!