Father Daughter Cancer Collab
I’m starting this blog in memory of my dad, Steve Stitzel, who I took care of during his final months. I promised him I’d make sure his battle with brain cancer would be a story I’d help him share after losing the ability to speak, read, write, and think clearly. As an artist and designer with a long career in designing packaging and consumer goods, I wanted to help him start an online store. While he was alive I was consumed by his daily needs and trying to keep my own life on track, so we didn’t get very far. He wanted to spread awareness, and I needed a way to generate income, especially after I had to be at home with him instead of going on on an adventure of my own.
My dad and I had a very complicated relationship that I didn’t understand until now. I took out decades of supressed pain and anger on him for burdening me with his care, but I don’t regret it no matter how much I felt like it ruined my life this year. I’ve learned so much about our personality types and generational trauma that I hope can be an inspiration to family members who struggle with relationships. Providing care in his final years was not something I was willing to do for him over a decade ago when I moved to California. I wanted to live my life experiencing new things like he had prided himself on, but it drove a wedge between us. He took off to Texas and we had limited communication while I lived in Marina del Rey. It wasn’t until I moved back to Ohio in the midst of divorce, career change, and Covid, that we began to reconnect through my new passion for writing. Four years later we’d reverse roles once he was no longer able to write and decided to take up painting.
Because he was not able to articulate his thoughts after the brain tumor was removed in April 2024, it was often hard for me to understand what he was talking about. He didn’t want to start selling his paintings, even though we were both desperate for money to support his care. I had a part-time freelance job for the past five years working for Splat, ironically what he started doing with paint and canvas. I had just finished the final stages of their collab with the new Beetlejuice movie and was able to pay off all my debt when he was diagnosed. My boyfriend took a job offer in the US Virgin Islands to help run the dialysis kidney centers when I realized my dad did not qualify for Medicaid because his retirement income was just over the limit, but he did not have enough for assisted living communities to allow me to move to the islands and just come back to visit. Needless to say, I was torn between two men, but ultimately decided to stay behind and take care of my dad during his dying days. It inspired me to go back to my childhood and try to resolve trauma that kept me trapped in a very lonely place where my work meant more than people.
My dad and I shared some very intense conversations during his final months that bring me so much closure to the past and insight for the future. He wished he had made different decisions, but sometimes you don’t know how your life will impact the people closest to you until it’s too late. It’s not too late for me, so I promised him that the time we spent together would be worth it for both of us. While he was busy painting out on the balcony at our apartment, I was inside illustrating a children’s adventure game. I have both projects ready to release which helps me find peace in knowing our efforts won’t be wasted.
Proceeds from our store will help pay off debt from his care during cancer treatment and be donated as I begin the journey of spreading awareness about brain cancer. I know it was such a humiliating disease that quickly took away his dignity as an educator, leaving him with the mental capacity similar to a three year old by the very end. We decided to keep his diagnosis fairly private so he wouldn’t be stressed out trying to communicate with friends and former students. I had to take on a level of care that I wasn’t experienced with since I did not have children, but I needed to learn not to be selfish. Like any parent, his habits, personality traits, and decisions had life-long impact on me. My decision to change my name to my mother’s maiden name, Travis, was a feminist statement, but mostly because I didn’t want to go back to being identifies as the shy, insecure little girl named Annie Elizabeth Stitzel. I’ve become a woman with a roar so loud that my dad was the one who was terrified of me, but in the end our journeys began to align. I just wish we had a little more time to spend together being happy and grateful for all the lessons we learned along the way. This blog will be my way of healing the inner childhood wounds that I didn’t even know were there until I had to start my life over. My dad’s life is over, but he didn’t have any regrets for all the experiences he had. However, the one thing that I noticed about how our brains are both wired is that we lacked desire for maintaining long-term relationships or experiences for reasons that I am now understanding. Perhaps this blog will be a psychological experiment as much as an art project.
