Dillon Hill is a filmmaker from Sacramento, California. He runs “Live for Another,” a crowdfunded documentary series about helping others. This is his God Shot.

When I was a freshman in college, my best friend, Chris called me on the phone and nonchalantly told me that he was dying. I don’t remember my exact words, but my response to this news was equally low key. Nothing earth shattering or transformational was said. There was no movie moment. We had been here before. And here we were again.

Chris was first diagnosed with leukemia when we were in the 5th grade. At the time, we really didn’t understand what was happening. He was just my best friend, who happened to be in a situation where he could play video games way more than usual. Naturally, my job was to join him in that pursuit, so every time the hospital allowed it, I was there hanging out with my buddy. Eventually, Chris entered remission, but that experience stayed with me and it ended up being incredibly rewarding to our friendship. 

Maybe it’s because we had walked this path before, and the bond formed by our 10 year old selves was strong, but neither one of us said much about the new diagnosis. The last time Chris was sick, I was there for him, so it made sense that this time I would be, too. “How are we going to do this?” Was my only question.

Luckily, Chris and I could always speak freely and honestly. We knew the absolute importance of bringing humor into serious situations. Together, we decided to accept his prognosis as true and to spend the last year of his life doing awesome things. If he was going to die, we didn’t want it to be boring. Being given a year to live was frankly, pretty lame. We weren’t going to be lame. Instead, a death sentence was finally going to be the excuse we needed to do the stuff we always talked about. First up, a road trip.

To clarify, it’s really hard to take a road trip and fulfill a bucket list when you’re a full time college student and low on cash. My solution was to drop out of school. Putting my academic future on hold might sound dramatic, but it was seamless and almost as instinctual as taking a drink of water. If my best friend was dying, I couldn’t sit in a lecture hall 20 minutes down the road, while it was happening 

As the generation that grew up on the internet, we were always drawn to peoples real life stories. With that in mind, we created a website that listed the things Chris wanted to do before he died. Then, we put together a video of our friendship and didn’t hold back. We were brutally honest about our situation and shared openly about the things we’d gone through and of the dreams we hoped to accomplish. We posted it on YouTube and had about 30 followers, mostly friends from high school. On a whim, I uploaded it to Reddit and within the first 24 hours, we got half a million views. 

What followed was the most mind blowing time of our lives. People went beyond just viewing our video. They went by the hundreds of thousands to check out Chris’s list on our website. We never could have anticipated that a simple list would tell the story of our friendship the way it did. There were some big dreams on it, but it was the smaller more doable actions and experiences that we wanted to achieve that really seemed to communicate who we were and what was truly important to us. I think people connected with that and it motivated them to take action.

Individuals that neither one of us had ever met reached out with resources. Whether through financial or emotional support, or networking, complete strangers made it possible for us to fulfill pretty much everything on Chris’s bucket list. Time after time, we were contacted and told about a friend, of a friend, of a friend that could help us. We’d be somewhere and out of the blue, a person would approach us and say something like, “I know a guy that can help you with number seven.”

“My Best Friend’s List” had taken on a life of its own and the momentum of people supporting us was breathtaking. Some of the magical things we were able to do included feeding homeless people on Thanksgiving, touring SpaceX, being guests on talk shows, and flying a plane. It’s impossible to describe what it was like being on the receiving of such goodness. We were two self deprecating, ordinary guys completely out of our element. It didn’t take long for us to conclude that even though Chris was terminal, we didn’t deserve all these gifts. We were humbled beyond words.

If only our gratitude and appreciation were enough to change the medical reality in front of us. Chris was still dying. He had been undergoing chemotherapy the entire time, but his cancer was moving faster than expected and he needed a bone marrow transplant in order to survive. In other words, time was not on our side. Luckily, that’s where breaking a world record came in. It was otherwise known as, number four on the bucket list. 

We set our minds to breaking the world record for the most bone marrow donor signups in a single day. I’m not sure if it was our egos, or the cold hard medical facts, but we knew that we had to at least try and find Chris’s genetic match. Nothing about our story had ever been in our hands. We were carried by others the entire way. Why should this be any different? Why not shoot for the moon? Maybe we couldn’t save Chris’s life, but if we challenged our followers to sign up, others could potentially be saved.

After coordinating with the National Bone Marrow Registry, “Lemons for Leukemia” was born. It was based on a simple question. How do you make your lemonade when life hands you lemons? In our case, life handed us the lemons of terminal cancer. We made the lemonade with our bucket list. We challenged people to bite into a lemon and commit to registering. Seriously, just bite into a lemon, film it and then challenge three friends to do the same. It spread like wildfire and on our selected day, we had over 10,000 people sign up. We didn’t break the world record. We destroyed it.

That was in March of 2018. One short month later, Chris had a match. He was treated in August of that year and has remained healthy and in remission ever since. But, there’s more to the happy ending.  A year later, it was brought to our attention that because of our campaign, 25 people had received bone marrow transplants. Quite literally, 25 people are now cancer free because we asked people to bite into lemons. It’s mind-boggling and totally insane!  But, boy does it put into perspective the connectedness of us all. 

There will never be a way that adequately expresses the gratitude, love and sheer astonishment I felt when “My Best Friend’s List” took off. But along with all of that good, there were strong feelings of guilt and confusion. We really weren’t special. Yes, Chris was sick, but me? Why was I in that position and not somebody else? Our story was proof of the limitless possibilities that are born out of the kindness of strangers. There was absolutely no reason that others couldn’t have those experiences. If I really wanted to be of service and give back, I needed to figure out how. 

My journey with Chris brought out my inner storyteller and allowed me to discover that my passion for helping others was exactly how I was meant to be a part of this world. “Live for Another” is a video series that I created about doing just that. I get to show how helping others is awesome, but doesn’t need to be generic or depressing. It can be a blast. The obvious implication in the title is that you live for another person, but that’s only partially true. It’s also about living for another day that excites you and allows you to grow and connect.

There’s a lot of nuance to life and I have learned that all of us can accomplish meaningful things even when it seems impossible. When in doubt, I think about how 25 people are alive today because my best friend called to tell me that he was going to die. Nothing could have seemed further from a God Shot at the time, but today there’s nothing but clarity. We can all do good. We can all make a difference.

 

                                                                                                       

                                            Chris and Dillon, best friends since childhood.

 

 

 

 

Dillon today working with his organization, “Live For Another.” Check out the incredible work he and his crew are doing.

 

https://liveforanother.com