Leaving Space for Wonder
November 13, 2025
While the work is difficult, Camara van Breemen, MN ’07, stresses that professionals who work with terminally ill children are not saints or angels—but people with skills and experience.
When Camara van Breemen was 21 and a new graduate, she moved to Texas as there were few nursing jobs in Canada at the time. She worked in pediatric oncology and found she loved it. Most of the children were cured and left the cancer centre—but some relapsed and returned.
She became aware of a room that few wanted to enter. Inside, was a family facing a reality so piercing and painful that most parents can’t bear to think of it. Inside the room was a terminally ill child, the one who would never go home.
Van Breemen was curious about that room and how she might be of service to those families. She learned all she could from mentors about providing comfort. After leaving Texas, she did some travel nursing and moved to Northern Ireland. She remembers sitting on her porch steps in the dark of early morning due to the time change having a phone interview to work at a new facility in Vancouver. Van Breemen was hired and has been at Canuck Place Children’s Hospice since the doors opened in 1995, marking decades of service to families experiencing the worst thing imaginable.
Canuck Place offers a creative range of services. A family might need a place to stay and rest while the child with complex medical issues is undergoing treatment or having follow-up appointments with specialists. Children in the program and their siblings and parents can attend recreation-therapy events and opportunities at the hospices, camps or in their community. Family members are supported in memory making and creating legacy for their child. After the death, the work with the family continues. They are not abandoned in their grief.
“I think it comes down to a few things about why I do this work, and partly I can do it because I’ve been taught how to do it and I work in a team. You know, there’s skills in this work. It’s not just about holding hands but being in the sadness and helping someone’s emotional and physical pain. I know words to say when a child is diagnosed with a serious illness. I have been trained to,” says van Breemen, a nurse practitioner and Director of Community Care and Provincial Outreach at Canuck Place.
Canuck Place is available to children under 19 who have a life-limiting or life-threatening illness. Van Breemen makes home or hospital visits along with a yellow Labrador-Retriever cross named Gaia. While we are doing a virtual interview, Gaia heaves herself up from her bed, thinking she is needed, and points her sweet face to the camera.
'You show up'
Van Breemen grew up learning from her mother that when there is suffering, you go and help. She was raised on a farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta. At the age of four, van Breemen remembers going to see her great grandmother in the old-age home. When her grandfather had a stroke, van Breemen was involved in his care. There was no fear or reluctance.
“You know, lots of people don’t bother going to visit the elderly or don’t have experience in doing that. But I was… my mom always said, you know, if there’s sadness or suffering, then you show up. That’s what you do.”
Van Breemen’s parents, including her father—who made gentle fun of her lack of enthusiasm for farming—insisted she attend university. After earning an undergraduate degree, van Breemen ended up taking the brand new nurse practitioner program at UVic. Van Breemen is still grateful for the flexibility of an online program that allowed her to nurture two babies while completing her Masters in Nursing in 2007.
Collaboration is key
One thing that stands out to her today is the fact that healthcare is and should be interdisciplinary. All the professions work best when collaborating. At the time of her training, nurse practitioners were treated as second class. That has changed, she says. Now van Breemen teaches healthcare providers about communication. She is a mentor to many.
Pediatric palliative care is very different than caring for dying adults, she says. For one, only about 300 children die each year in BC compared to about 30,000 adults. Parents often must fulfill their child’s complex care needs for years. The care for children is expansive and creative, she says. Canuck Place has a unique funding model, built on 60 per cent donations and 40 per cent public funding—which gives their team flexibility in approach.
While van Breemen may physically walk into “the room” alone, or with Gaia, she knows she has her training, and her team, backing her up. She says part of the issue of palliative care is that we immediately think of the bigness of it all, the suffering, and asking “What if it were me?”
“But being able to navigate the illness is actually being able to navigate the day-to-day.” She says she was recently driving to see a family whom she hadn’t met—and she knew the child was close to the end. She struggled with some anxiety, wondering how she could support them.
“And I have to tell myself I just need to enter and be with them. Where they are right now. I just have to see where they are right now. And think—how can I (we) help?”
All of us want to help those suffering, but often feel paralyzed. Instead of asking “Is there anything I could do?” van Breemen’s mother would perceive a need, say a load of laundry to wash—and do it. There are dozens of things needed in a family each day. For example, taking on pick-ups or drop-offs for an ill child’s sibling could be a huge help, she notes.
She believes we should all learn about palliative care—we will all face death—but for nurses, she recommends finding mentors. “Ask families what they need. Be curious and humble.” And seek out mentors to learn from, she advises. “Go into the room together.”
Self-kindness
Van Breemen’s work recently earned her the 2025 Courageous Provider Award from the Courageous Parents Network, an international non-profit group of parents with dying children. She says one reason she has been able to do such difficult work for so long is self-kindness. “I don't go, ‘Why me, why them?’ I say, ‘How do I help?’ ‘How do we?’”
She also gives herself space to be sad about what she sees. She realizes that she does not have to hold it all. The rest of her life includes her husband, her children and a boat named Mabel, after her grandmother. She enjoys hosting dinner parties and having house guests. She also does international work with a group called Two Worlds Cancer Collaboration.
“I really do see more love than anybody else,” she reflects. “I do see sadness, I do see suffering, but when you see a mom hold their child for the last time you’ve seen more love than you can even imagine. So that is restorative as well to people who do this work.”
Her work with the children is a story where the ending is already known. But we actually don't know the mysteries that are going to happen before that, she says. “I mean, medicine likes to be very sure of itself, but this is an area where humility and leaving space for wonder is actually really helpful, you know?”
She says in this case, the patient is in charge. “Dying is way bigger than us. You know, we shouldn't try and be in charge of it. So, all we can do is accompany.”
—Jenny Manzer, BA ’97
This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.
For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.