The boy who dreamed up a home.
"I'm sorry, it's cancer." Dan was seventeen, months from his senior year, when a rare bone cancer called osteosarcoma rewrote his family's life in a single sentence.
What followed was nearly four years of the hardest kind of work: eighteen surgeries, a dozen chemotherapies, thirty rounds of radiation, an experimental gene-therapy trial. Dan met all of it with humor, faith, and a stubborn love of life. He did not do self-pity. The one thing that made him angry was being told the odds and asked to quit.
Treatment for a cancer this rare meant leaving home. Over his fight, Dan spent more than four hundred days living away from his family, near hospitals, in hotel rooms and short-term apartments. At eighteen he was too old for the family housing that welcomes children, and too young for anything built with him in mind.
On the drives to Houston for treatment, Dan pictured something better. A warm, comfortable home where young adults could rest, gather, and heal without feeling so alone. An oasis. He did not live to see it built. Dan passed on December 12, 2009, at twenty years old. His family built his idea anyway.
With gratitude and love,
Dawn Kenneavy — DHOH President, and Dan's mom
