15 Practical Ways We Learned From Our Own Fight
My son Pipe fought brain cancer for five years. He was diagnosed when he was two, and he passed away in 2020, when he was seven. Those five years were the hardest of my life. They were also, somehow, five of the most beautiful.
The reason for that isn’t complicated. We were never alone.
No matter what moment of that fight I go back to — a diagnosis, a relapse, a surgery, a birthday, the last day — there is always someone else in the memory. A friend. A stranger. A delivery driver. A biker gang. My family never had to carry this by ourselves, and that made all the difference. That’s the whole reason Pipe’s Brave Brew exists: so that no child, no parent, and no family ever has to fight alone.
If someone you love is walking this road right now, here are 15 things that actually helped us — not theories, things that really happened to my family.
1. Just show up
Don’t ask if it’s a good time. Be there. If it’s a bad time, we’ll tell you, and we’ll still remember that you came. I once had two friends I hadn’t seen in ten or fifteen years show up, out of nowhere, for one of Pipe’s surgeries. Our relationship had cooled off long before that. I hadn’t spoken to them in years. After sitting with them for an hour, I finally asked why they’d come. One of them looked at me and said, “I came here for your son. I read about him on Facebook, and I came for you, man.” I never saw either of them again after that day. It’s been almost eight years. I still think about them.
2. There’s no wrong way to show up
Some people show up loud. Some people show up quiet. Some people show up late, or awkward, or not knowing what to say. All of it counts. One of my closest friends now was actually distant during the first couple of years Pipe was sick — he just didn’t know how to handle it. He showed up for the very first day, and then he disappeared for months. Then one night at nine o’clock, while I was in Houston for a follow-up and had to leave my baby son behind with his grandmother, this friend sent me a photo: my son, asleep, safe in his crib. That was his way of saying I care, I’m here, even if he couldn’t say it out loud. It wasn’t the way I expected. It was still exactly what I needed.
3. Say something, even if it’s the “wrong” thing
People are often afraid they won’t have the right words. Here’s the truth: nothing anyone says is going to fix it or make the fear go away. We know that. We’re not expecting you to say the perfect thing. I once had a woman at a business meeting tell me how much I reminded her of her best friend — who, it turned out, had also lost a son to cancer. She realized what she’d said mid-sentence and looked mortified. It didn’t hurt me. I knew she meant nothing by it. Talk to us like you’d talk to anyone else. We don’t have a “handle with care” sticker on our foreheads.
4. Follow up the next day. And the one after that.
The first message matters. The second one matters more, because it means you didn’t just react — you kept thinking about us after the news stopped being new.
5. Send your prayers, your energy, your thoughts — and say so
It doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not, or if we are. When people told us they were praying for Pipe, sending good energy, or simply thinking about us, it helped. Every time. Even a Facebook comment. Even a like. It all reached us. I used to read those messages out loud to Pipe. I don’t know if it was the words themselves or just watching my face light up while I read them, but he loved it. Every single message we received became a small moment of joy for him.
6. It’s never really about the item
Food showed up at our door constantly — sometimes three or four deliveries for the same meal, on days we weren’t even hungry. We came to understand that people weren’t really sending food. They were sending I love you. They were sending I’m thinking about you. I wish I could do more. The bag of coffee we sell today isn’t really coffee, either. It’s the same message, in a different shape: bravery, hope, strength, gratitude, a shoulder to lean on.
7. Bring food, send food — but know what it’s standing in for
One local restaurant delivered to our house so many times that the driver eventually asked, gently, if something had happened to our family. I told him my son had passed away the day before. He got teary-eyed and hugged me right there. A few days later he came back one more time, and told me this delivery was from everyone at the restaurant — they’d wanted us to know they were thinking of us too. A stranger, doing his job, became family for a few minutes. That’s what a meal can do when it’s carrying something heavier than food.
8. Show up for the long haul, in the unglamorous moments
The dramatic gestures matter, but five years is a long time, and the quiet, repeated presence matters just as much, maybe more. One of my best friends kept showing up for years without ever being asked — taking my kids for ice cream, doing the grocery shopping, handling things around the house when I was traveling for work and Patty needed help. My kids started calling him Tochi, after his last name. He wasn’t just a friend anymore. He’d become part of our family. He’s fighting his own battle with cancer right now, and he is still part of our lives today.
9. Let a community do something bigger than any one person could
It was about a month before Pipe passed away, in the middle of COVID, when my cousin posted on Facebook asking a local biker group if they’d consider doing a birthday drive-by for her nephew, who was fighting terminal brain cancer. We set up a little tent and a couple of chairs in front of our house, expecting maybe a handful of bikes. Three thousand people showed up. Bikers, police cars, firefighters, race cars, ambulances, first responders. They made Pipe an honorary member of more clubs than I can count. I still have the patches, the hat, the vest. It was his last birthday, about a month before he passed away. I will never forget it.
10. Help with real, tangible logistics
Support isn’t only emotional — sometimes it’s a place to sleep. When we first arrived in Houston for treatment, we were kicked out of our hotel during a Super Bowl weekend with nowhere to go. I was in a Target parking lot buying diapers, out of options, when someone shouted my name behind me. It was a college friend I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, who happened to live near the medical center and had reached out on Facebook hoping we might be headed his way. He walked me through a nearby apartment complex that same day. He didn’t stop there — he became our guide to Houston over the months that followed, showing us where to go and who to trust in a city we didn’t know. His son Patricio became Pipe’s first friend in the US.
11. Help with money, directly, without making it complicated
That same week, we learned Pipe could start radiation treatment — but only if we could deposit $142,000 by 5:00 p.m. the next day. I remember sitting with Patty, eight months pregnant, both of us stunned. My boss called to check in, and I told him, half-joking through the panic, that I needed $142,500. He didn’t laugh. He told me to check my bank account before 9:00 a.m. the next morning, and said words I will never forget: “If we’re going to lose this, it’s not going to be because of money.” The money was there the next day. I’m certain that treatment is part of why Pipe had as much time as he did.
12. Don’t wait to be asked — offer to take something off their plate
That same week, my brother flew in on short notice, toured an apartment with us, and quietly told me that he and his wife had decided we had enough on our plate — they signed the lease and handled it themselves. His wife also set up a GoFundMe, something I’d never even heard of before, which helped carry us through months of unplanned expenses while Patty and I weren’t working and our second son was born far from home. None of it was asked for. It was just decided, and handled, so we didn’t have to.
13. Cry with us, if you need to. It’s okay.
Some people who came to see us were embarrassed when they broke down, worried they were making things harder for us. They weren’t. The day Pipe passed away, one of my closest friends came to me, and before he could say anything, he broke down crying on my shoulder — the opposite of what he’d probably planned. I told him it was okay. He loved my son. I loved my son. We cried together. That’s not a burden. That’s love.
14. Talk to us like you’d talk to anyone else
Don’t tiptoe. Don’t disappear into careful, distant politeness. We’re still us. We’re scared and angry and exhausted, but we’re still normal people who want to be talked to normally.
15. Never disappear for good — even if you don’t know how to come back
One evening, a man I had never met rang our doorbell. I don’t know how he found our address. He handed me a small statue of the Divino Niño and said he wasn’t sure if we were religious, but he wanted us to have it, and he wanted us to believe in a miracle. I didn’t say anything — I don’t even know what my face looked like. He just opened his arms. I fell into them and cried. I never saw him again. Ten years later, I read on Facebook that he had passed away. I still think of him, and I always will.
We were never alone
I could tell you a hundred more stories like these. Every single one ends the same way: someone showed up, in their own imperfect way, and we were not alone in the fight.
That’s why Pipe’s Brave Brew exists. Every bag we sell is a way of doing what all of these people did for us — showing up for a family in the middle of their hardest fight, in whatever way we can. No child should face this alone. No parent should either.
If you know a family in this fight right now, don’t wait for the perfect words. Just show up.
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