When Karen walks through the doors of Wellness House, she’s not thinking about herself. She’s thinking about her daughter, Avery, and her son, Benjamin—about giving them something strong to stand on while everything else in life feels uncertain.
Diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, Karen is no stranger to complexity. Her care has taken her across the country, from clinical trials in Los Angeles to long stretches at the Mayo Clinic. But even while navigating her own treatment, her focus has always remained steady: make sure the kids are okay.
And they are. Thanks, in part, to Wellness House.
It was Avery’s second-grade teacher who first suggested Wellness House—a teacher who had lost her own mother to cancer and remembered how much the children’s programs meant to her. “She said it gave her and her siblings a safe place to land,” Karen says. “That’s what I wanted for my kids.”
From their very first visit, it was clear they’d found something special. “They just love it,” Karen says. “They push to go. They feel seen there. And I know that if the worst happens… they’ll have a place to go. A place where they’ll already feel held.”
Weekly kids’ groups have become a constant in the family’s life. Every Thursday, after Avery and Benjamin join peers who understand what it’s like to have a parent with cancer, Karen and her husband talk about the visit with them over dinner—gently opening space for conversation, healing, and connection.
In those moments, Karen says, the heavy things feel just a little lighter.
“There’s so much about this that can feel isolating. Even when you’re surrounded by support, it’s easy to feel alone,” she says. “But at Wellness House, my children see other kids going through it too. They understand they’re not the only ones.”
Karen calls cancer “a forced march”—brutal, exhausting, relentless. But even on the hardest days, it’s her children who ground her. “They’re full of joy,” she says. “Some days, it starts as me trying to mask the struggle, but they pull you into the joy. And eventually, you’re reall- y in it.”
She hopes for more time—more adventures, more days on the couch with their old dog Pepper, more Thursday nights. But in the meantime, she finds comfort in knowing that Wellness House is here, not only for her, but for the ones who matter most.
“This place,” she says, “it gives my children what I can’t always give them right now. And that means everything.”
