Christi the Capybara

Here’s a SNEAK PEEK! This isn’t the final cover quite yet, but Rachel’s getting close and I couldn’t be happier. She’s toiled over these illustrations for more than year in her spare time (which is NOT much, with all the hats she wears!) and I’m so grateful for both her incredible talent and her enduring friendship.

Let me tell you the story behind the story of Christi the Capybara so you can see why it’s so near and dear to my heart.

If you’ve never watched someone you love go through a journey with cancer, it’s harrowing and horrifying, and I would not wish it upon anyone. I’ve seen friends and family through chemo and/or radiation for lung, breast, throat, pancreatic, and prostate cancer, just to name a few. But watching my young niece jump through every hoop necessary to try to eliminate alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma - an aggressive soft-tissue cancer that arises from skeletal muscle cells - was indescribable for me, so I cannot imagine what it was like for her parents and younger siblings.

Ultimately, we lost Christi from this earth just days after her 18th birthday. This was not due to lack of fight. People often refer to cancer as a battle, to ‘winning/losing’ a fight, but I can’t see it that way because this little girl was strong, brave, had a positive attitude, and did everything she needed to do. Yet, she’s gone, and the rest of us were left to try to make some sort of sense of what happened, why it happened, how it happened, and what came next.

This was hard enough for the adults in the situation, but as I mentioned, she had three younger siblings. (STILL has three younger siblings, they’re just growing up without her physical presence in their daily lives.) When I began writing children’s books, my main objective was to create tools to help caregivers instill the values of love, kindness, acceptance, and inclusion into the younger generation and, as a subset of that, my Animals with Issues series introduces difficult topics. As I have tried over the years to find different ways to honor Christi’s memory and help leave a legacy on her behalf, I thought about how many children in the world are on a cancer journey every day - maybe not their own, but that of someone they love. What better way to honor my niece than to use my platform and her name to help other children navigate this journey? (After all, she wanted to become a nurse to help others!)

Of course, there are a number of children’s books about cancer out there - I firmly believe that there should be more, in fact. It’s important to talk to children about tough things, initiate conversations, ask if they have questions and then answer them. This is true across the board, which is why I write about subjects like bullying, anxiety, depression, worth, purpose … cancer. This world is filled with joy and wonder and fun, but it’s also filled with flaws and pain and sadness, and we need to have the tools to be open and honest with children at age appropriate times and in age appropriate ways.

I very much hope that you do NOT know a child who is going through a cancer journey in any way. If you do, though, I hope that Christi the Capybara brings them some understanding and some joy along the way.

Not a day goes by when I don’t see Christi’s shining smile in my mind and wish that she were still here with us.

I hope this story makes her smile even bigger.

SJS