Friday, November 21, 2008

Janice Pinney


I know you through knowing your father, who is a member of the TSHA, where I worked from 1981 until just a couple of days ago.

The TSHA is moving to Denton, and I had known for several weeks that I would not be moving with it. I thought about who I would send my very last TSHA e-mail to, at the very last moment before I turned my office computer off. I thought there would be a lot of good energy in that e-mail, because I would concentrate in it all the good that was in those 27 years. I would send it out into the universe to somebody special who could use some good energy right now. I didn’t even have to think about who that would be. I was going to send it to Erin Buenger by way of her father, whose e-mail address I had in my office address book.

Then, unexpectedly and mysteriously a few days before my last day at work, all the e-mail all over the office collapsed. Some came back, but mine never did. That e-mail collapse was a disappointing trick of fate.

But, when I got home on that last day of work, I found on my home computer—at Erin’s Home—a message about The Erin Project.


So Fate knew what it was doing, because now I have something significant to contribute to The Erin Project. It is much better this way, and now I am glad my e-mail crashed when it did. Because now I can bowl my contribution out into the heavens at the same time everyone else is sending theirs out.

I didn’t know of you until the first week of September 2008. Somebody at work told me that Walter Buenger’s little girl had cancer and that it had progressed a little, and chemo was going to be necessary. This person also said that the little girl had a website where her mother kept people up to date on things. I found it, Erin’s Home, and started reading. And then I got interested in your life, and very deeply touched by your story. At first I was pulled in by the story of a young girl living with cancer. I checked in every day, at least once, and sometimes more often, as I read through all the posts from the very beginning. And I began to feel as if I knew you as a person, and then what compelled me was the story of a young girl with a talent for life and a resolve to live every moment of it to the very fullest. I became a silent fan, and I suspect I am one of many like me: those who keep up with you and pray and quietly lend their spirit to your enterprise. I think of us as making a huge, fine-stranded net that sparkles with brilliant colors as it catches your remarkable, unstoppable life-force and concentrates it and sends it back to you even stronger, for those times you need something extra to get you where you want to be.

I see in you a forging of a remarkable character, such a one as might someday be the president of the United States.

My favorite pictures of you:

1. Driving your plasma car down the hospital hallway in your leather moccasins and with your jaw firm, your IV rolling along behind you out of the picture.

2. Just gotten up late at night to give your mother the vase you painted for her birthday, sleepy-eyed with your slightly crooked smile and bed-head hair.

3. Helping TotallyErin’sDog Karaoke-sing “Stop in the name of love.”

4. Any picture of you and your good friend Chet Edwards, but especially the most recent one, where you are looking at each other with such mutual admiration and respect.


I think about you every day, and speak of you to my friends and family (my sister Susie’s Sunday School class in Memphis Tennessee prays for you). I will continue to keep up with your story, and to quietly keep my strand of the many-colored net strong and resilient.

Wishing you the very, very best in all of your endeavors, and especially in your fight with the interfering neuroblastoma.

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