These photos were part of a slideshow presentation at YANA’s annual fundraising event. My family was deeply supported by YANA when we faced having a critically ill child and after capturing our journey, I have been telling YANA family stories for 17 years. These images are a gift to YANA and a gift to the family I capture. It is an honour to be trusted to create these and thank you to this incredible family for welcoming me, and the community into their story. Meet Penny and her awesome sisters and beautiful parents.

Happy Thanksgiving from my family to yours. Thank you for the connection we have. Now, off to cook. I didn't grow up with Thanksgiving, and the preparation, for me, is as wonderful as the feast. We won't have the usual group of family here, it will be our small family, but we will eat well, drink wine, and toast the land we are grateful to live on and our community ❤.

Today the community came together to celebrate superhero Chase, who has Leukemia and his sidekicks, his mom and dad and his siblings (and we all know how important the superhero sidekick is -right?). There was an endless stream of cars, including RCMP and Comox Valley Fire. There was a military flyover by 19-Wing and a helicopter.

At 23 weeks, Natasha went into labour, and five days later gave birth to Rikley in the fall of 2016. Yana was there to offer their help. Natasha and her husband Paul didn’t need YANA’s help because this part of their story, sadly, ended very quickly. Rikley had 8 heart attacks in his 7 1/2 hours of life, and Natasha and Paul had to say goodbye to their first son the same day he was born.

I started documenting sickness when it was for someone really close to me, as a way for the family and child to be able to look back and process their journey. I have always wondered why, in society, we just photograph the easy joy? Isn’t it what we experience and how we walk when we are “in the trenches” that is a substantial part of who we are and where we find our growth? So I hoped the photos would be a gift – one that would help them celebrate their hardship in a different way and allow them to later look back and realize how much they travelled through.

“You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother. You don’t owe it to your children. You don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female.”