Today a young friend and musician, a man of great talent and grace passed away after battling leukemia for 5 years. Joe Fan was only 29 and though he was expected to die soon, we did not expect that it would be so quickly and a day after we met with him in a local park. He was weak and struggling but with his friends around he gathered his strength to be present and to give what he could to us. He gave us his heart and his presence. A remarkable group of young friends, many of whom were survivors of cancer and only too aware of their own brush with death.
Joe was an exceptional musician and music teacher, dancer and photographer. He trained as a cardiac scientist. Here he is with the You Can Make Some Noise workshop group at the QUT Recording studio in December 2023. Joe was part of the intitial YCMSN pilot workshop in 2022 and worked with the group under Danny Widdicombe’s mentorship and later in 2023 with Topology musicians who are working with The Stairwell Project and You Can Make Some Noise workshops. The record has been mixed, we will have a final listen and edit this Friday and release the record sometime in the first half of 2024. It would be good for it to be dedicated to and in memory of Joe Fan.
I met with Joe and his partner Ainslie Plumb – a leukemia survivor and You Can Make Some Noise participant – in the blood cancer 5C ward at RBWH on Thursday, the day he heard the news of his impending death and the day he was discharged. I sat with them for a couple of hours and said I would write him a poem. He was anxious about dying, about what he would find on the other side. I assured him that it was love and grace and beauty that he would meet, not judgement and fear. I wrote the poem and took it with me to the park yeserday and gave it to him. In his usual dry wit he said: “Well that was a quick turn around! Thankyou.”
The presence of death is only too real in this world at the moment, in this world of violence, inflated male egos and tribal posturing. But a quiet death, a death unwanted and unwarranted in a hospital ward of one person in a busy city in Australia has impacted many and it has impacted me. This is now the third artist friend – and all young to middle aged men – that I have lost in the last 6 months to cancer. This poem is as much for me as it was for Joe and Ainslie and for whoever else reads it. But it does not heal cancer or open doors on treatment. Joe was getting the best and under the best oncologists including Dr Glen Kennedy who has been a strong advocate of The Stairwell Project and You Can Make Some Noise. We live in a broken and beautiful world that demands intelligence, determination and compassion. On this day of raw grief for the loss of a friend, my hope and prayer is that more advances are made on cancer treatments. My hope and prayer is also that live music and music making and story telling will be taken seriously within policy that delivers funded programs and a better world for staff, patients and the general public in hospitals and cancer wards where people like Joe Fan can be both treated and be involved as part of the healing pathways. #reimaginingclinicalspacesandpractice
Peteskibreen's Blog 