Dear friends,
Three weeks ago, I decided to take a break from pretty much everything. I needed some time to think about a range of things from Covid-19 to Walking with Jane to Black Lives Matter to NET cancer and beyond.

It is increasingly clear that Covid-19 has scrambled everything on both the NET cancer fundraising and the Walking with Jane fronts. Both the PMC and the Marathon Walk have become virtual events. Most of our usual fundraisers have been shelved by social distancing concerns. As I wrote earlier, the current economic climate makes it difficult for me to ask our usual donors and sponsors for money they may not have or may need to commit elsewhere.

Some of you know I had planned to take 2021 off as a sort of sabbatical year to rest and recharge my batteries. The last ten years have taken an emotional, mental, and physical toll. But I am very much afraid that taking a two-year break would be tantamount to having to start everything from scratch.

So I have decided to make 2020 my year off. I suspended all Walking with Jane activities in March and stopped trying to keep up with the science shortly thereafter as I tried to get my head around Covid-19. I stopped doing daily detailed reading on that late in May because, honestly, it was too depressing. 

My plan is to return to Walking with Jane full time on or about March 1, 2021.

This plan will have no effect on my personal donations to Dana-Farber or NET cancer research. I will continue, as well, to match donations to both my PMC ride and Marathon Walk as I have in the past.

I have very mixed emotions about doing this. Working to support NET research has been a major part of my life over the last decade. Much of my social network is made up of others deeply committed to this work—many of whom I did not know when all of this started. 

But I am also painfully aware that some of what I have done has enabled me to avoid mourning Jane’s death. Much as doing so truly frightens me, I need to really mourn her at a level I keep resisting. There are tears I need to shed and things I need to find ways to accept. I hope this will provide the time to finally finish doing those things.

Thank you all for your help, your support, and your work over these past years. But most of all, thank you for your patience with me. I’ve not always said or done the right thing for any of you. For those moments—and there have been too many of them—my sincere apologies.

Pax et lux,
Harry