What Joy Looks Like
This artwork holds a beautiful reminder: joy can return.
After cancer, joy is not always loud or easy. Sometimes it is a small opening—a moment of laughter, a bright color on paper, a flower drawn with care, or the freedom to simply be playful again.
During a recent creative gathering, participants were invited to reflect on what they needed most. One participant answered with this wonderfully vibrant “Joy”—full of color, imagination, humor, and personality.
At Lee Lee’s Life Lessons Foundation, we believe joy is not an extra after cancer. It is part of learning how to live fully again.
Through Let Us Play™: Thriving With & Beyond Cancer, retreats, workshops, and community gatherings, we create welcoming spaces where survivors, caregivers, and families can reconnect with themselves and one another. We make room for creativity, meaningful conversation, reflection, learning, laughter—and moments of joy.
I am a Stage IV colorectal cancer survivor, positive psychology practitioner, and the founder of Lee Lee’s Life Lessons. I know that surviving cancer is not the end of the story. There is also the tender, courageous work of discovering how to live afterward.
This is one part of our answer: together, creatively, joyfully—one meaningful moment at a time.
Lee Lee’s Life Lessons Foundation is committed to making these experiences accessible throughout Western North Carolina and beyond, including for people whose financial circumstances might otherwise keep them from participating. Grant funding and community support help provide materials, skilled facilitation, retreats, gatherings, scholarships, and connection.
If this work speaks to you, I invite you to support Lee Lee’s Life Lessons Foundation. Your generosity helps survivors, caregivers, and families reclaim joy and the possibility of thriving with and beyond cancer.
