Chris and I became fast friends when he moved to New York, bonding over art, photography, nature and my queer community. A year later in August 2014 he began having stomach and chest pains. After an emergency room visit and three weeks into a battery of tests I received a phone call from Chris. He gave me the bad news- a diagnosis of stage four colon cancer with a less than 5% chance at life for two years. I asked him what the good news could be? Chris said that he would be my first Bardo ∞ Project artist collaborator. He was one of very few people who knew of my desire to start this challenging project, and I hadn’t been able to gain access to hospice culture. I soon became part of Chris’ cancer journey until the end with he and his partner Zeke; together we would ensure that he make his legacy work.
The couple moved back to Portland, Oregon for medical care. We shared in his intense output of creativity throughout his 16-month cancer battle, enduring palliative chemotherapy, waning energy and rapidly declining health. Chris chose to face death by making art non-stop, even if it taxed his health. He was also determined to edit all of the landscape work he made while living in New York, and, to make a new legacy body of work. He enjoyed a newfound confidence about his talent, exhibiting and selling his work, being published and even met his photography idol Mary Ellen Mark. In April 2015 of Chris visited NYC to take an International Center of Photography class from Mark. She loved his work and the two bonded over landscape photography and shared cancer in common. She invited him to come to Iceland that summer to take her landscape photography class. Chris and Zeke legally married in June 2015 and then honeymooned in Northern Europe on the way to Iceland. But sadly, Mary Ellen Mark succumbed to cancer shortly before her photography workshop trip. In spite of this news, Chris still wanted to go to Iceland, he said that he still had much to learn from Mark.