Hope: Turning Pain into Purpose After Childhood Cancer

The following is adapted from What Hope Looks Like by Eric Newman.

People who go through life-changing hardships respond in one of two ways once they make it to the other side: they either throw their experience away, never to speak of it again, or they embrace it and use it to help others.

I’ve done both, and the second path is far more rewarding.

When I was three, my mom took me to the doctor for a routine checkup. Seventy-two hours later, I was in surgery having a large mass and more than half of my liver removed. Then the doctor delivered news that changed our lives forever: “Mr. and Mrs. Newman, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Eric has cancer.” He gave me a less than 10 percent chance of surviving, but after spending two years fighting for my life, I showed no evidence of disease, and my family breathed a short-lived sigh of relief.

In a sad, crazy twist, cancer struck our family again a few years later when my cousin — my dad’s sister’s daughter — was diagnosed with leukemia. Like me, Shannon was the second child in her family, she was three years old at the time of diagnosis, and she went through treatment until the age of five and then showed no evidence of disease.

Fast-forward a few more years. My dad’s brother’s second child, Nicole, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor when she was three years old. We ended up losing Nicole within two years, when she was five.

Eight years later, Shannon’s leukemia returned with a vengeance, and she lost her battle at the age of seventeen. Three cousins, all second born, all three years old when diagnosed, and now there was only one. Me.

As I stood in the freezing cold on the day we laid Shannon to rest, I couldn’t wrap my head around why I was standing at the grave site of yet another young family member taken out by cancer. Then I was struck by a terrifying thought: The cancer is going to come back and get me. I suddenly felt like I was living on borrowed time. Rather than turn to my family and faith, I ran. I stopped talking about cancer. I stopped praying. I stopped reaching out to the people who cared about me the most. Instead, I began working hard, playing hard, and partying harder.

Over the next eight years, I started a couple businesses in lawn care and construction, made some real estate investments, and traveled and surfed all over the world. And did I mention I partied hard? I chased everything the world had to offer, and I succeeded in getting a lot of it.

Then in 2008 the economy took a horrible turn, and I lost everything that I had been chasing. In a matter of months, my life became a bad country song, the type that wins multiple Grammys. I lost my construction company, my fiancée, and my trucks — everything. I was extremely close to filing for bankruptcy, and I even had to move back home with Mom and Dad.

With $1,500 to my name, I did what any responsible twenty-six-year-old businessman living with his parents would do: I emptied my bank account and flew to Costa Rica.

I had all the essentials: bathing suit; faded, holey T-shirts; surfboard; and sunscreen. I even packed a journal, even though I had never journaled in my life. I spent my days in Costa Rica surfing, hiking, rock climbing, and otherwise avoiding the pain and fear inside. At night, when it was still and quiet, the thoughts would come roaring back as I rocked in my hammock. I had never felt so alone, so homesick, and so scared in my entire life. Several nights in a row, I opened my journal to write, but all I could do was stare at the blank pages, unable to convince my hand to put down a single word.

Then one evening, I prayed to God for the first time in years. Actually, I yelled at Him. “God, what the hell is going on? You got the wrong one! Shannon was so much better than me. Why am I still alive? What did I beat cancer to do? There’s gotta be more to life than this!”

After I prayed and wrestled with God (it’s okay, He can handle it), I turned to the middle of my journal and wrote one word: hope. I didn’t write anything else. Every night I kept coming back to my journal, to that single word. I just kept circling the word hope over and over until I almost blew a hole in the page.

When I was growing up, my dad constantly reminded me that I was a Newman, that Newmans are strong, Newmans are courageous, Newmans are smart, and Newmans don’t quit. At the end of every Newman chant, he would lean down and whisper in my ear, “And if you can beat cancer, you can do anything in this world.”

One night while swaying and thinking, I remembered my dad’s words. I had no idea what the word hope meant or what I was supposed to do when I returned home, but I was a Newman and Newmans never quit. I was broke but not broken.

A couple months later, someone asked me to help throw a fundraiser for our local children’s hospital, the same hospital that saved my life many years before. As a cancer survivor, I had the opportunity to present one of those massive cardboard checks to the oncology floor. I was a little nervous about going back to the place where I had received treatment, but decided to push through the fear.

While I sat in one of those child-size chairs waiting to present the check, I suddenly heard an awful noise, like a grocery cart with a really bad wheel. I looked up to see a three-year-old kid, bald as a cue ball, rounding the corner as fast as he could. His mom appeared right behind him, pushing the screeching IV pole that was attached to her son and trying to keep up. The boy stopped right in front of me, looked me up and down, and asked, “Whatcha doing?”

I don’t know what came over me. I hadn’t talked about cancer since Shannon died eight years earlier, but suddenly I found myself telling the boy’s mom the short version of my story. When I was done, she had tears in her eyes. “Wait right there,” she said. “I have to get my husband.”

I didn’t want to wait. I had just made this lady cry, and now she was going to get her husband. No, thank you! But I couldn’t move. It was like my legs and feet were frozen. When her husband showed up, the woman said, “Tell him what you just told me.”

So I did.

This time, Mom and Dad were both crying, and when I finished, the woman spoke the words that altered my life forever: “Eric, looking at you gives me and my husband hope that our son will be sitting in your seat one day, cancer-free.”

Hope. That word hit me hard. As soon as she said it, something clicked. I remembered the word in my journal. Hope found me again. At the time, I was as lost as they come. I never dreamed I could give someone else hope. Instantly, I knew that I wanted to create moments like this for other moms and dads dealing with their child having cancer.

Exactly how I was supposed to do that became clear a couple months later.

I had been picking up odd jobs to pay the bills, and one day, my buddy Keith called.

“Hey, man, I’ve got a job for you. My wife is on me about building a playset. My kids are about to mutiny against me. Please, I’ll give you four hundred bucks if you just come build this thing.”

I needed the cash, so I said yes and I recruited my dad to help me. After all, I could only afford free labor.

When I arrived, I found that the playset had been left outside for six months. The numbers and coding had all worn off, making it impossible to tell which piece fit where, and the thousand nuts and screws had all been dumped into one bowl. I appreciated the job, but I wanted to give Keith a good ole roundhouse kick to the head. Thanks a lot, buddy, I thought.

A couple hours and three gallons of sweat later, I growled at my dad, “I quit. This is not worth four hundred bucks.”

“You can’t leave,” my dad said. He nodded toward the house. “Look over there.”

When I turned around, I saw the eyes, nose, and blonde hair of a little girl peeking out from the bottom of a window.

“She’s been there for two hours,” my dad said. “I’ll pay you more. Just don’t quit on that little girl.”

Reluctantly, I went back to building, cussing the entire time. I can frame houses and pour concrete, but nothing has kicked my butt like building that playset.

Twenty-one hours later, we finally finished. As I was putting the last anchor in place, I told my dad, “That is the last time I will ever build a playset.”

Just then, the little girl busted out the back door, ran up to me, and gave me a giant bear hug. She stepped back, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Thank you for letting me play.”

After witnessing the pure joy of Keith’s daughter receiving her very own playset, I was reminded of the little boy at the hospital. He was full of energy and wanted to play, but many days he was restricted by the walls of the hospital and infusion IV poles. I turned to my dad with tears in my eyes and said, “What if…I’m supposed to combine the two major tragedies in my life, pediatric cancer and construction? What if I’m supposed to build playsets for kids fighting cancer?”

The one thing you never have to teach a child to do is how to play, and play is often the first thing to be taken from a child fighting cancer. I know that firsthand. My cousin Nicole was so swollen from radiation that she had to roll from one place to another. Because of her low immune system, it wasn’t safe for her to play with the rest of us. She had to sit on the back porch and watch.

No child should have cancer, period. They sure as heck should not lose out on the one thing that they can never get back — their childhood. Play is the backbone of being a child.

Roc Solid Foundation began that day, in my buddy’s backyard. That’s where I caught a glimpse of how I could take my pain and turn it into my purpose.

To learn more about turning your pain into purpose, What Hope Looks Like is available on Amazon.

Eric Newman is a passionate entrepreneur, speaker, and visionary leader. In 2009, he founded Roc Solid, an organization that inspires hope for every child and family fighting pediatric cancer. Roc Solid partners with more than seventy children’s hospitals to deliver Ready Bags for families and has built more than one thousand playsets for children throughout the country who need a safe place to play and a reason to smile. A husband, father, and pediatric cancer survivor himself, Eric understands the battle a family faces when their child is diagnosed.