Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SHEPHERD, Mich. — When Sarah Cox, 12, was diagnosed with cancer, her family didn't know what to expect. Sarah, a bookworm and straight-A student, was told three years ago that she had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, and her father Mark says she took the news as well as she could.
"She has always been a mature kid," Mark, a musician and professor at Central Michigan University, told KSL.com. "The doctor asked (me and my wife) how she should tell Sarah that she had cancer. We just said, 'Be honest with her.'"
Mark added that it very much helped when Sarah told she was eligible to be a "Make-a-Wish" kid.
"Sarah immediately locked onto that idea, which is what I think helped Sarah stay positive through most of the ordeal," he said.
The Cox family, including mother Mary Jo and Sarah's little brother Liam, ended up spending seven days at Disneyworld, Universal Studios and Seaworld, through the Make-a-Wish foundation.
Even though Sarah went into remission just a month later, she was subjected to cancer treatments for the next several years. Mark said he wanted to take photos to remember the experience. His photo series, titled Strong, shows Sarah's three-year journey from before she was diagnosed to remission.
"The project was for our own private use," Mark said. "I did not want to sensationalize it."
The first photo in the series is one he took before they found out she was sick. The picture shows Sarah happily jumping on her grandparents' trampoline. Mark says her back hurt at the time, and they would later find out it was a symptom of the cancer.
The next photo shows Sarah smiling up at the camera in the hospital bed in a tiger hospital gown and a brightly colored hat.
"I titled this photo 'Hope' because it's the day before Sarah got diagnosed in June," Cox told Yahoo Shine. ""She was in the hospital waiting to have a spinal tap and her former teacher was visiting and gave her a squirt gun and that hat. They colored it together with magic markers."
Mark told KSL.com his favorite picture in the series is the black and white photo where Sarah has a bathrobe over her head. Sarah was sitting at the table during dinner with her family. She was cold and her father got her a bathrobe. Sarah wrapped it around her head to stay warm. Mark says she looked so beautiful that he ran to get his camera to get a few shots.
"This is when she was at her sickest. With all of her hair gone, weak from the medicine, tired of all the hospital stays, shots, and pokes, she still was a beautiful, strong, young lady," he said. "She didn't ask 'Why', she just knew it had to be done."
Sarah's favorite picture is the black and white one where she is sitting in the fire truck with a mask on.
"It shows what's going on," Sarah said. "And you can see the look in my eyes. It shows both the inside and the outside."
Sarah encouraged her father to enter the photos into a contest.
"The only reason this became a project was that I wanted to enter a competition in Grand Rapids. I didn't know what I wanted to do, until Sarah made the suggestion that I do this project," Mark said.
He is funding his project through Kickstarter and it is almost halfway to its $2,500 goal. Once the project is completed, Mark says he would like to hang the pictures somewhere for people to use as inspiration.
For now, the pictures of Sarah hang in the hallway stairs of their home that lead to the second floor. Sarah likes having them up in the house.
"(Sarah) said they remind her that people can always have it worse than her," Mark said. "For the rest of us, it shows us what a beautiful girl, inside and out, she is, and how fortunate we are to have her."
For more information on how you can help the Strong project, please visit Mark's Kickstarter page. You can view the complete series in the photo gallery above.
