This article was originally published on June 26, 2024, and was last updated June 12, 2025.
- Tension: Illness narrows our world—but creativity and connection can expand it again.
- Noise: We glorify resilience as solo strength and overlook shared expression as healing.
- Direct Message: Healing isn’t just surviving—it’s witnessing beauty together, even in the hard moments.
This article follows the Direct Message methodology, designed to cut through the noise and reveal the deeper truths behind the stories we live.
A chemo journey illustrated through birds: The comic that captured quiet courage
In a world saturated with survival stories told in extremes—either heroic or tragic—it’s easy to miss the quiet, deeply human acts that help people stay tethered to life during illness.
That’s what makes Birding My Way Through Chemo, a comic collaboration between artist Andy Rementer and his father George Rementer, so resonant.
First released in 2024 and still circulating widely in 2025 across patient networks, birdwatching forums, and art therapy groups, the comic doesn’t aim to inspire in grand gestures.
Instead, it gently reframes what it means to endure—and to live.
The premise is simple but profound: while undergoing chemotherapy, George found solace and strength in birdwatching.
Andy, a well-known illustrator with a distinct, colorful style, turned that experience into a visual narrative that is both heartfelt and humorous.
What emerged wasn’t just a comic—it was a conversation.
Between father and son. Between pain and beauty. Between surviving and seeing.
From diagnosis to drawing: how a comic became medicine
The idea for the comic was born shortly after George’s cancer diagnosis.
For Andy, it was a way to process the unfolding uncertainty. For George, it became a way to reconnect with a passion that had grounded him for decades: birdwatching.
George had been an avid birder since the 1970s, often recalling early-morning walks with binoculars and a field guide tucked under his arm.
During treatment, when movement was limited and energy low, simply watching birds from the window became a grounding ritual.
It gave form to his days and, unexpectedly, to Andy’s illustrations.
The comic is structured around short, vivid moments—George’s musings on species like the ruby-throated hummingbird or the call of the northern cardinal, interspersed with scenes of hospital visits, fatigue, and quiet jokes about life under treatment.
It’s not sanitized. But it’s not grim, either.
One scene shows George laughing at a crow perched on a lamppost outside his chemo ward window. The caption reads: “Even the crows show up for roll call.”
It’s that kind of dry, resilient humor that made the comic stand out.
The deeper tension: illness is lonely—but creativity connects
The deeper story here isn’t about birdwatching. It’s about reclaiming connection.
When someone goes through chemotherapy, the world often retreats—friends don’t know what to say, routines are broken, and identity becomes consumed by medical terms and energy levels.
For many patients, even close relationships can grow strained by the emotional fog of treatment.
But Birding My Way Through Chemo flips that script.
By creating something together, George and Andy did more than cope—they built a bridge.
The comic gave them a shared language. And it did what clinical care can’t always do: it made space for emotional honesty, curiosity, and even beauty.
This collaborative art-making between family members during serious illness significantly improves emotional intimacy and reduces anxiety in both patients and caregivers
What gets in the way: the myth of solo resilience
Culturally, we’ve become obsessed with the idea of individual grit.
The common narrative around illness is deeply shaped by what sociologists call the “survivor script”—a linear journey of diagnosis, treatment, and triumph.
But real life doesn’t follow arcs. It loops. It stalls. It has moments of rage, then absurd laughter over a finch misbehaving on the balcony.
When we limit stories of healing to strength, we leave out the most healing parts: connection, humor, ritual, and reflection.
As George said in a 2024 interview, “Birds didn’t cure me. But they gave me a reason to look out the window.”
This echoes what author Anne Lamott once wrote:
“Laughter is carbonated holiness.”
In Birding My Way Through Chemo, that holiness is often feathered and ridiculous, and that’s exactly the point.
The Direct Message
Healing isn’t always heroic. Sometimes, it’s shared attention, absurd birds, and a son who decides to draw it all.
What this teaches us about meaning, art, and presence
The Rementers’ story is still making ripples a year later not because it’s unique—but because it’s so relatable.
In a time when more people are reevaluating what really matters—post-pandemic, amid rising diagnoses and stretched healthcare systems—Birding My Way Through Chemo is a gentle manifesto: that meaning doesn’t have to be profound.
It just has to be real.
It reminds us that:
- Art isn’t about talent. It’s about connection.
- Nature doesn’t ask us to be strong. It just invites us to notice.
- Family doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to show up.
And perhaps most poignantly, it offers a lesson not just for the ill, but for all of us trying to stay present in a noisy world.
As poet Mary Oliver once asked:
“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
George’s answer, in a way, was simple: watch birds, draw jokes, keep going.
