Building Resilience: When Children Find Their Circle

Tahreer Abd Su’ed, a science teacher and teacher trainer with Israel’s Ministry of Education, writes about the circles of impact created by Jeremy’s Circle after her young niece was diagnosed with cancer. What began as support for her nieces grew into something much wider, strengthening her family, inspiring Tahreer to become a volunteer, and showing her how shared pain can create bridges across Israeli society.

We are a very close-knit and united family. We always have been. Our ordinary lives were not so different from those of many other families, until that moment about four years ago when everything changed. In an instant, the sky fell in on us when my little niece, not yet two years old at the time, was diagnosed with cancer. The disease struck us like a devastating storm that no one could have prepared for.

My sweet little niece had to undergo very difficult treatments, at the end of which she lost one of her eyes. In the midst of this battle with cancer, I watched my sister collapse under the unimaginable emotional burden. A health crisis of this kind is like an earthquake: it does not affect only the patient, but everyone in the circle around them. I saw how all the physical and emotional resources were directed toward caring for the little one, and how, in the race to defeat the disease, the older girls, who were then in second, fifth, and sixth grade, were simply pushed aside.

My heart broke as I watched my nieces change before my eyes. The eldest, a girl who should have been busy with games........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)