Home

Home isn’t simply bricks and mortar, or where you keep your possessions, or a civic address. Home is much more than where you sleep.

Home is where you come from, where you belong. Home is connection. Yesterday in a sense, I was home. I returned to my roots. Today, I am also home, truly home. I am with my family, my friends, and my professional colleagues with whom I have shared over half of my life. Home feels good.

Six weeks ago I dipped my foot in the Atlantic Ocean and started to pedal eastward. It has been an extraordinary experience which will always remain with me. We pedalled in the sun and we pedalled in the rain, on good routes and in mud. There were days filled with joyful travel, great beauty, the sun on our faces and the wind at our back, and quite frankly there were days of discouragement, when it seemed as if the rain and wind,  and the hills and mud, would never end, when all I wanted to do was rest. I cannot however recall a day which didn’t have great meaning and purpose.

This journey has been many things to me. It has been a voyage of discovery, with wonders and beauty appearing almost around every corner, it has been a physical challenge, and it has been a wonderful occasion to spend time with the doctors who saved me, with friends and with my wife with whom I have shared a wonderful life. We have enjoyed joy and laughs and great food and drink together. Most of all, however, this journey has been a tribute to the triumph of science over sickness, the triumph of hope over despair, the triumph of faith and most of all the triumph of life over death. Life is everything, its fragility demands that we make the best of it, that we take every opportunity to live meaningful lives, to do what is right and important and to make a difference. I ask all of you to take time today to appreciate the majesty of life, and to do something, no matter how small, to make someone’s life better.

I would like to leave you with three last pictures. This photo is my grandmother Margaret with me (yes that really is me on the right) and Maryse at our wedding, which was the year before her death. Her memory remains alive within me, and even twenty years after her death, my grandmother remains an important part of who I am. I was very surprised how emotional my arrival in Hungary was. I never really reflected on my Hungarian roots, but clearly roots run deep.

This photo is me and Julianne, several weeks before I was diagnosed with leukemia in September 2004. If things had turned out differently, this is the father Julianne would remember, and if memories exist in the beyond, this would be my memory of Julianne.

Finally, this is home today. The fact that I took this picture this evening is the miracle of survival.

This is the end of my blog, but it is not the end of my journey. I will go on and try to celebrate every day and embrace the miracle of life. I hope I can help others survive and give others hope.

Thank you for reading this blog, thank you for supporting my cause, thank you for being my friends and colleagues and companions. May the goodness and miracle of life continue to shine on all of us.