This Man Needs To Lose His Beard. Stat.

This is Jim. He has a beard.

As you can see, the beard is kind of his signature look. I have never seen Jim without the beard. I literally cannot imagine Jim without the beard.

The beard needs to go.

Now, one other thing you should know about Jim: He’s a doting godparent to the Meyer children. In fact, before they could speak, they used the sign for “beard” to refer to Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim is an axiom in the Meyers’ life; Uncle Jim shows up for dinner a couple times a week, does emergency spillover duty when one of the kids needs to be picked up.

Unfortunately, for the Meyer kids, their sister Rebecca is no longer an axiom in their lives.

You may remember Rebecca during the painful year-long period where I kept blogging about her, and her brain cancer. The cancer was horrendous on every level; the constant rollercoaster up of hope and then the crash down into the latest results, the stream of decisions as to what treatment would be right for this, the stream of fights for the Meyers to be good parents to all their children when poor Rebecca was rightfully occupying so much of their attention.

And also, this is America; if the Meyers hadn’t had good insurance, Rebecca’s death would have bankrupted them.

If you’ve ever read my book Flex, Aliyah is pretty much Rebecca. I didn’t set out to immortalize her; it’s just when I wrote a book with a scrappy, fearless, and funny kid, I cribbed notes from the scrappiest, the funniest, and the most fearless kid I knew. And I watched as the cancer spread through her brain and took her from us on her sixth birthday.

That’s why Jim’s beard needs to go.

Because Jim will be shaving his head for St. Baldrick’s charity to raise money to help fight childrens’ cancer, as he does every year. (As I would every year, but I decided I looked better bald.) And he’s put his beard on the line; if he can raise $5,000 by this Saturday – a big ask – he will shave that beard that Rebecca used to once tug.

He’ll do it because he knows what it’s like to lose a beloved child to cancer.

Which is why I ask you: please help raise $5,000 to shave Jim’s beard. It’s a big ask; he’s got a long way to go. But every dollar you donate goes to finding better ways to help save kids with cancer – and believe me, that’s one of the best uses for your spare dollars you can imagine.

The link is here. If you can donate, I ask, please. Do.

(And if you can’t donate this time around, may I ask that you share this page with your social media to help spread the word? Thanks.)