My family traveled. A lot. My mom and I have set foot on all seven continents together. But, before I was 12, before my dad got too sick, the three of us would pack a tent in the back of our burgundy Volvo 240DL and tour the country. I remember checking in at a campsite, and my father gave our surname, Canada. The attendant looked confused and asked, “How to you spell that?” My dad was gracious and spelled our name, and then added, “Just like the country.” That phrase stuck, and we started using it all the time.

My dad died when I was 27. He never smoked, but he had a progressive lung disease that showed up when I was only 7. I wanted to race him to the car after finishing some errands, and when he reached the car, he was so winded that he had to lean against the fender for a long time to recover. I don’t remember him running after that. His illness and continued debilitation defined my young life.

Now 35, I am a recently widowed mother of a three-year-old girl. My late husband had a glioblastoma multiform (GBM) brain tumor. He survived 22 months after his initial diagnosis. We discovered his brain tumor after he had a major seizure in 2014. At that point, we had known each other for eleven years, and we had been married for two and a half. Our daughter was 18 months old. Again, illness came to define my life–this time my marriage and parenthood. My husband has been gone for two months. Our daughter really cried about missing her dad for the first time two days ago. Her life, too, will be forever marked by this loss and this love.

I write for her.

Like the Country has come to stand for family – all the love, and hurt, and loss, and joy that a family experiences as it changes and grows. It also is a journey – physical and emotional – across the landscape of being human. The journey is mine, it is my daughter’s, it is my mother’s, it is yours.

4 April 2016