Pieternella Gall honours her late daughter by giving back to the Alberta Cancer Foundation.
By Fabian Mayer
Pieternella Gall still remembers the first time she thought about legacy. It was in 2016 and her 35-year-old daughter was going through treatment for stage 4 bone cancer. She asked Gall to lie down on the bed beside her. Gall was more than a little surprised when her daughter asked: “What is my legacy?”
“At that point, I was in my early 70s and I hadn’t even thought about what my legacy would be. That encounter with her made me think, ‘what is something I can do? What is something that I believe in and I think it makes a difference?’” Gall says.
Sadly, Gall’s daughter passed away a few months later, 18 months after her diagnosis. The exact origin of the bone cancer was never determined, but her doctors thought it may have started in the bladder and spread. This heartbreaking experience inspired Gall to think about what she could do for future families that would inevitably face similar situations.
“I thought about how many hundreds of hours I sat with my daughter getting chemotherapy at what was then the Tom Baker Cancer Centre and I was very impressed. I was impressed with my daughter, I was impressed with the care the nurses and doctors gave and everything that was involved,” she says.
So, Gall scheduled a meeting with her financial planner to decide how and where to direct her money. Her late daughter was very interested in cancer research throughout her treatment, so giving to the Alberta Cancer Foundation was a natural choice. As well as being an annual donor, Gall has included a donation to the Foundation in her will.
“We need to help people understand that cancer just jumps at you. Very few of us expect it, and when it happens, it’s important that we have great research and facilities here in Alberta,” Gall says. “The facilities here are top notch and it’s drawing people to come do the research in this province and keep working to make things better for families.”
Gall’s support of the Alberta cancer community goes beyond financial donations. She is also supporting multiple friends as they go through cancer diagnoses of their own. Nearing 80 years old, Gall walks the roughly 35 minutes from her home to the Arthur J.E. Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre (Arthur Child) to visit a friend receiving treatment for lung cancer.
“I visit her every second day and we sit and talk. I think it’s very important to keep a sense of their life and just listen,” she says.
“It’s not always easy, but you just have to keep up the spirit. I think retaining a sense of community is the most important thing.”
—Pieternella Gall
As for what she hopes her donations will accomplish, Gall takes further inspiration from her career as an educational consultant with the Calgary Catholic School Board and her late husband’s work in academia.
“My husband was a professor and a psychologist, and we were always around universities and academics. Research is very important from my perspective and so this is where my hope lies,” Gall says. “From what I’ve been told and what I’ve seen at the Arthur Child, people are coming together and working on a problem collaboratively. It’s a gathering spot and I think it’s the beginning of a change in the health area that’s really promising.”
