The Big Change

This post has been exactly 1153 days, 12 hours, 26 minutes in the making. Yes. I counted.

Since my world got flip-turned upside down on November 5, 2021 with the loss Zach to cancer, everything has been different. I am different, the world is different, how I think about life is different, how I think about people, relationships, friendship, love, the world, work, all so very, very different.

It’s not a journey I ever expected to be on, but here I am. I think a lot about time - hence the counting. I think about how I’m using my time, and what it all means now, and what it will mean later. What is the best use of my time? And how do I want to spend it?

I started to realize at 9:34 pm on Friday November 5, 2021 that I needed to change how I use my time. The idea took time to grow and evolve. In the past three years, that calling increased, and my need to expand how much time I spend working to help childhood cancer families grew. It went from a niggling idea, to a raging concept that I couldn’t get out of my head.

Then in the fall of 2024, it all came to a head. It just got to the point that I knew I had to change my circumstances. I knew I had to take the leap. And while I wasn’t pursuing a dream, but more assuaging a nightmare, and trying to help others going through what I did. I knew I had to do it. I needed to spend more time working on our nonprofit, Zach’s Bridge, and all the other related efforts I was involved in for pediatric cancer. I had to do it to honor Zach, I had to do it for families facing pediatric cancer, and I had to do it for me.

But I also loved so many aspects of my paying job. I loved the people I worked with, both colleagues and partners. And I loved so many of the things I had accomplished and was working on. I’ve been there 10 years, and we’ve grown nearly 10x in that time. At the end of the day, no one was ever going to remember how many presentations I did, or how many partnerships I worked on. Maybe there was a way to stay connected but still dramatically increase my time working on childhood cancer?

So I went for it. I asked my employer if I could stay connected to my current team, but change my role in 2025 and work part time. I didn’t know what the answer was going to be. I was hopeful given my track record that they would be willing to make that happen. But I was also prepared to walk away entirely.

I needed to make sure I could increase awareness of Zach’s Bridge, and help parents going through what we did get better and more access to peer support, because I knew first hand what a difference it could make and we had heard it from others. Most importantly, we were hearing it from the people we have been helping now.

I’m so grateful that the company that pays me came back and honored my request. They enabled me to increase the amount of time I can spend on pediatric cancer by 75%, and still stay connected to doing many of the things I have loved with many of the colleagues and partners I now consider friends.

So you’ll see a change on my LinkedIn profile as of today. Co-Founder and President of Zach’s Bridge moves to the top of my profile. It’s been there a while but it was buried at the bottom in the volunteer section. Now my new job at PrismHR is right below it. I’m going to do both. (I’m still a volunteer at Zach’s Bridge, but maybe over time that will change). I will be at PrismHR about 10 hours a week, and working on cancer for the rest of the time.

I’m lucky. Not lucky that I had to go through losing my son to cancer to get here, but I am lucky that my paying company is supporting me in making this change. And I’m lucky to have been surrounded by so many amazing work colleagues and partners who gave us unbelievable support when Zach was sick, and afterwards as we’ve continued to navigate our grief, while also building a unique nonprofit. I could list so many people at my paying job over the years that deserve thanks and recognition, but the list is endlessly long. I hope you all know who you are. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done to help me get to this point.

I’ve been chomping at the bit to get started on this. I’m so excited to see what my team at PrismHR does. But I’m most excited to see how much impact we can make to help families and children facing cancer. After all, that will be the legacy that I leave behind.