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I was at work when news of James Van Der Beek’s death broke. Deeply saddened by his passing, as many millennials were, I walked to the bathroom for a quickie corporate cry. It felt like a piece of my childhood died along with the actor who played Dawson Leery, but it wasn’t just a parasocial relationship that had me weeping next to the soap dispenser.
My husband, four years younger than James, also has cancer. And like James, we have a 4-year-old. (James, who died at 48 of colon cancer, had five other kids, as well.) Even when my husband is doing well, the worst possibility sits in my mind like a hangnail I can’t stop picking. The night James died, I went to bed with the sensation of ash filling my chest. In the morning, I awoke to a GoFundMe started in the Van Der Beek family’s name. Internet backlash came quickly. As someone outside of the celebrity world, I have little in common with Kimberly Van Der Beek, who quickly shared the link to her Instagram story. But I did think publicly asking for financial help was brave.
My husband has acute leukemia. Of all the cancers, leukemia with a stem cell transplant (which my husband will hopefully have this spring) is ranked as the most expensive, followed by brain cancer, and then advanced lung cancer. Leukemia patients experience bankruptcy at three times the rate of the general population. Even with health insurance, which we have, bills can be in the high five figures, not counting lost income and caregiver costs. We’ve been thinking about starting a GoFundMe.
When my husband was first diagnosed, family, friends, and kind co-workers asked what they could do to help. The truth was that the best thing most people could do was give us money. But it felt gross and unnatural to ask for cash. Also, we aren’t poor. It doesn’t feel morally right for us to ask for help when we could, in theory, sell our Los Angeles condo, withdraw our son from his private preschool, and, hopefully, cover everything we’re going to be up against in terms of medical bills. But in the richest nation in the world, isn’t it enough that we are terrified for my husband’s life? Cancer treatment is physically and mentally brutal, and we are navigating this difficult path with a very young child. It also doesn’t feel morally right that we have to be scared about losing our home and child care setup, too. The state of health care in America is shameful. James Van Der Beek’s family reportedly purchased a sprawling $4.8 million ranch in Texas just before he died, a property that they had previously rented for years. It’s where James lived out his final days, and probably the home where his children—his younger ones, especially—have the most vivid memories of their time with their father. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to fight to maintain some sense of normalcy, even if their “normal” has more square footage than most? Are we all supposed to live our lives spending as little as possible in the first place, so we can be prepared to be absolutely walloped with unexpected medical bills?
Money is truly one of the few things that can help families maintain stability. And yet, what has held me back from starting a GoFundMe is embarrassment. I’ve donated to plenty of GoFundMes but never thought I’d have a reason to be the subject of one myself. When I contemplate it, I think about the mothers at my son’s preschool, people I work with, wealthier friends, and wonder if they would find requests for money to be cringe. I worry that doing an online fundraiser would reveal that I’ve only ever been cosplaying as upper middle class, that my grip on financial security has always been one emergency away from slipping. A Meal Train seems more acceptable in certain social circles, maybe because giving a meal implies that the family is “too busy dealing with a crisis to cook”—not that they are struggling to afford to pay for the crisis itself, or that they find the pileup of bills difficult to deal with. I worry that if I respond honestly to offers of How can I help?, if I tell people that money would be the thing that could make a difference, I’d be putting my own financial choices under a microscope.
I certainly have not always been perfect with money. When I first started working in the advertising industry more than 10 years ago, the entry-level salary for a copywriter was $45,000. When I worked my way up to $90,000, I legitimately thought I was rich. That was more money than I’d ever expected to make in my life. So did I increase my 401(k) savings rate? Hell no. My young and wildly financially uneducated ass took myself to Gucci. I figured I’d never own a home or retire—why not have my dream bag? The only money rule I knew then was “Don’t overdraft your bank account.” Sometimes I get mad at myself for not becoming financially literate sooner, that maybe we wouldn’t need to consider a GoFundMe now if I’d learned to budget (let alone invest) sooner. But how could I have known that one day I would need to pay for my husband’s cancer treatments? Cancer requires more than a simple emergency fund. Does anyone go into adulthood truly understanding the toll of seemingly endless medical bills?
When the Van Der Beek GoFundMe hit half a million dollars, the goal was raised to a million, then a million and a half. The total donations are climbing toward $3 million at the time of this writing.
Some people online declared a renewed hope in community. A country that couldn’t agree on anything could still come together to help a family navigate the hardest challenge of their lives. Others labeled Kimberly Van Der Beek a MAHA mommy grifter, citing a Trump post she liked in January about childhood vaccines and a Rolling Stone article from 2022 titled “James Van Der Beek’s Influencer Wife Is Peddling Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Instagram.” One commenter called making a donation to the Van Der Beeks a “Reverse Robinhood: taking from the poor to give to the rich.” The donations kept pouring in, passing $2.5 million. People who aren’t famous go through this every day and aren’t given millions, went the argument against supporting them. “Something isn’t adding up,” came another angry comment. If people donated to us, and one day saw me out at dinner with my soon-to-be-vintage Gucci bag, would they think, Why did I give her my hard-earned money?
I can see, logically, why worrying about that stuff isn’t worth my time. So why am I still so resistant to starting a GoFundMe for my own family? It’s in the DNA of so many Americans to “pick ourselves up by the bootstraps” and not ask for help. One of my grandfather’s most repeated stories was about a nun who gave him a new school uniform because the other kids were making fun of how small and worn his old one was. His mother hit him for accepting the clothing and made him return the items because “our family doesn’t take charity.” Ultimately, am I afraid of disappointing a ghost?
Maybe it is a fear of failure: If we vulnerably put ourselves out there, as a family in need, and don’t raise enough, our missed goal will hang out for the whole internet to see. Is crowdfunding a popularity contest? A beauty contest? Both. I’ve found myself calculating the social risk, itemizing what would work in our favor. My husband is beloved in the niche world of roller hockey, and that community has been very supportive already. Another for the positive column is our super cute, outgoing kid. I would like to think I’m well liked and have made a lot of friends in my career over the years. But are we fund-cancer-treatment popular? In this dystopian health care system where a platform invented for fundraising causes has primarily become a personal-medical-bills donation site, do you need to be a celebrity to “win” the financial cost of cancer?
I’m still working out whether I’ll crowdfund for my own family, but in the meantime, I donated $20 to the Van der Beeks’ GoFundMe. The site said that donation put me in the top 20 percent of highest donors, which means that despite the headlines about big celebrity contributions, mostly the money was raised by a lot of regular people who could only afford to give a little bit to thank a person whose life had meant something to them. James’ lasting legacy, for me, wasn’t any of his acting roles, but the videos he made about navigating cancer and working toward being the best parent he could. Making a small contribution to another family felt good—and the outpouring of generosity to the Van Der Beeks gave me hope. I fantasize about all of us sending small donations to each other, picking a new American each week to fund until everyone in the lower and middle classes is freed from the Ponzi scheme of American health insurance. Maybe, instead of being upset with the help given to a celebrity family, we should demand more help for all of us.
