Alice Pyne is 15 years old and she is dying.
As Salon details in a recent article, “Alice Pyne is a typical 15-year-old British girl. She likes Cadbury’s chocolate, her friends and her dog. She also has terminal Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Earlier this week she began a blog. ‘The cancer is now spreading through my body,’ she wrote. ‘It’s a pain because there’s so much stuff that I still want to do.’ And she wrote down what they were.”
The first item on Alice’s bucket list? “Make everyone sign up to be a bone marrow donor.”
TechCrunch’s Paul Carr may be cynical about the Internet community coming together in favor of a good cause, but what’s amazing about Alice’s story is that she is just one girl with a blog and a Twitter account, yet she was able to gather the attention of a massive number of people in just a few days. Alice’s sister has raised over £30,000 for cancer research. Alice’s blog has thousands of comments. With so many causes and people with cancer in the world, the question remains: why are people jumping to help Alice? What makes her different?
I like the answer given by Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Wiliams: “There’s so much we can’t do. That’s why it feels amazing when someone gives us the chance to do something we can. To send a card. Bake a lasagna. Donate a pint of blood. Raise a little money for research. It’s not just because the sick need it, but because we all need it. In our most grief-laden moments, we search ferociously for meaning and purpose, and we cling to them for dear life.”
Want to help? Check out 100k Cheeks to learn more about how easy it is to become a bone marrow donor.