What Connor Wanted Others to Know
November 24, 2025
Connor and Jen didn’t accept “there’s nothing more we can do.” Instead, they focused on what was still possible. Not only for themselves and their two young boys, but for every family navigating this devastating disease.
[A note from PCNA]
[We are grateful to be sharing the lived experience of Connor and Jen who have documented their personal journey with pancreatic cancer up until Connor’s passing in October 2024, to help other families cope with the challenges of this disease.
This blog article is from a series of content pieces written by these remarkable people.]
A Letter That Became a Legacy
Before Connor passed, he wrote a letter to our young boys, sharing what he had learned in life about gratitude, self-esteem, hope, legacy, purpose, and friends. On hope, he told them:
“Hope is powerful. It can turn a negative outcome into a positive one. Hope can make you live longer, it helped me. Hope gives you something positive to think about and act on. Don’t worry about being hopeful about something that ends up not working out. There’s no penalty for hoping and there’s no prize for guessing you’ll fail and then being right.”
With his purpose focused on time with our kids and family, Connor carried this hope until his last breath. As a testament to his courage and kindness, he spent some of his final conversations sharing his vision for a legacy fund.
As his wife and partner of more than 20 years, I am grateful for the opportunity to carry on his legacy of helping others, sharing hope and advocacy. Together with Pancreatic Cancer Canada, we are setting up the Connor Page Fund for Improved Access to Clinical Trials, where we will share, as he so aptly called it, Connor's "Playbook" for navigating clinical trials.
How Our Story Began
We were your average busy working couple with two young kids, then 5 and nearly 2, when Connor started to experience abdominal discomfort on Christmas Eve 2021. His age and lack of known risk factors put cancer at the bottom of the list. Four months and several endoscopies, biopsies and ER visits later, at age 39, he was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in April 2022. From day one, he faced his cancer head on. He asked not to know the prognosis and his approach to treatment was simple: no stone unturned.
Learning How to Advocate for Care
Just a few days after his diagnosis - while we were diving into clinical trials, supplements and research - Connor said to me, “Can you imagine doing this on your own as a single parent or with English as a second language, or without a support system?” The answer was no. We quickly became aware of the time and effort required to advocate for care. From pushing for tests, emailing questions, raising what felt like mundane symptoms, to asking the “silly” questions and coordinating across multiple medical teams, Connor’s kindness and gentle humour helped him build relationships and maximize the care he received.
He was always thinking ahead. At diagnosis, he insisted on additional biopsies so we could get genomic testing, knowing it might inform his treatment options. When the pain team recommended he stay in hospital until he could tolerate pills, he worked with a forward-thinking palliative care practitioner and family member to go home on a pain pump. We learned not to worry about “bothering” his doctors and nurses. They wanted to help and could do so better when they understood our goals.
Searching for Options Beyond Standard Care
While Connor was still receiving standard chemotherapy, we were attending virtual and in-person appointments and joining lengthy wait lists at hospitals in the United States. When his disease progressed and his health changed rapidly, we were grateful to be prepared. To the shock of his oncology team in Toronto, he was accepted at a lesser known U.S. hospital running the same sought after trial as some of the larger, more expensive U.S. institutions.
A year after his passing, our boys, now 8 and 5, often bring up the memories we made in the time we consider ourselves lucky to have had. Some of that time came from his response to treatment, but much of it came from his determination to live, and our determination to maximize his quality of life through medical and lifestyle interventions beyond the standard of care.
Connor’s Commitment to Helping Others
It was very important to Connor to help others advocate for themselves. He became a pillar of support for friends of friends who were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His compassion and humility made him an easy sounding board, and it brought him immense joy to help two others enter the same clinical trial. He also shared his journey more broadly through blog posts with Pancreatic Cancer North America.
Carrying His Legacy Forward
Connor wanted others to feel less alone and to have the same opportunity to receive the care and treatments that we fought hard for. Carrying on his legacy by helping more families navigate clinical trials feels like the right way to honour him.
