VANCOUVER -- In late 2012, Brice Royer was lying on a bed in terrible pain, thinking about how to kill himself.

Today, the pain is still there and the malignant tumour in his stomach is no smaller. But he has never been happier.

A year ago, Royer, 31, decided to give and receive freely without the use of money in an effort to build community. Since then, his message has reached millions around the world after several of his Internet postings went viral, including a real estate ad he wrote on Craigslist advertising unconditional love for $0. He has personally transformed the lives of dozens of people, many of whom were strangers.

Ready to give up

When Royer was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2012, he and his fiancé, Oi-Ngor Pan, were in denial because they were so preoccupied with his other health concerns. Royer has multiple food sensitivities and gets severe headaches, rashes, difficulty breathing and heart palpitations, among other symptoms, when he eats certain foods. There are only about five foods he is able to eat.

These symptoms are not related to the cancer and doctors have been unable to find a cause, Royer said.

As the reality of living with cancer set in and the pain became increasingly severe, Royer found it harder and harder to get up each day.

“One morning I told myself, ‘I don’t want to get up,’ and I was thinking about actually planning suicide,” he said. Royer, who was born in France to an Ethiopian mother and a Vietnamese-French father, considered using his European passport to travel to a country where assisted suicide is legal, but he was too weak.

“It was just too much work to figure out how to die,” he explains. “I told myself, ‘I’m going to live for just one more minute.’ I would look at my watch and I would time for one minute. For one minute I would just sit there and breathe and just be aware of the pain. And after the minute passed I would look at my watch and I’d say, ‘I’ll stay alive for two more minutes now.’” He continued this in increments of five or 10 minutes. “After one hour, I just decided to stay the whole day.”

Thinking he was staring down a death sentence, Royer decided to take a vacation. He and Pan went to a cottage in North Vancouver for a month and Royer used the time to research and reflect on the causes of illness. Toxins in the environment. Loneliness. Stress.

“The root cause (is) a lack of love in our society,” Royer says. “A lot of the problems that we have today — anything from the housing crisis in Vancouver, how expensive things are, to working at a stressful job, making ends meet and not having much time to have community or friends — all these things I feel led to a lot of health problems and in my case, can aggravate cancer.”

Royer researched where the healthiest people in the world live and the lifestyle they practise. Places such as Okinawa, Japan and Ikaria, Greece.

“They all take care of each other. They all have big families and small communities and they all have something called the gift economy ... they give freely and they receive freely. They are isolated from the market economy ... and they make things themselves,” Royer explains. “I wanted to experience this in Vancouver.”

The gift economy

Royer suggested to a friend that they practise this within their own circle using a Facebook group. People gave away things like kayaks, cruises and graphic design help with no expectation of anything in return.

“It was a struggle because I had to swallow my pride and be humble enough to ask for what I need and this was hard for me because the habit is that I can provide for myself. I don’t need you. I don’t want to owe anybody anything. And so money is an easy way ... for me to isolate myself,” he explains. “I needed to ask for what I needed, even though I could afford that, because buying that was the problem.”

One of Royer’s biggest obstacles in his efforts to live without money was finding free housing (right now he lives with his fiance’s family). True to philosophy, he offered to pay someone else’s rent or mortgage for a year instead of his own. The woman he helped was a chronically ill single mother in Pennsylvania whom he had never met. He wrote a cheque for $4,800 out of his own personal savings.

He helped another stranger, a war veteran with an autistic son, by paying her dentist to remove the mercury amalgam fillings from her teeth that were making her sick.

“I don’t know what happened with that, how this continues to pay forward. I never find out,” he says. “But I know it comes around full circle. After I started giving unconditional love to strangers, gifts came back to help me, sometimes in very unexpected ways.”

Sometimes the gifts came in the form of carrots, the only food Royer can eat in any quantity without getting sick. (Shortly after Royer posted the Craigslist ad, people all over the world started posting pictures of themselves with carrots to show their support, using the hashtag #EatCarrotsForBrice.)

Surrey farmer Jas Singh, who grows food for the hungry, offered Royer as many carrots as he needed through the gift economy before the two had even met in person.

Singh said he felt an instant connection to Royer, and he became like family right away.

“He gives off an energy,” says Singh, who created a garden named after Royer to grow food for cancer patients. “He draws people toward him.”

One thing Royer has not been able to find through the gift economy is a family doctor willing to make house calls. Royer tires quickly and does not have access to a car, which means he is unable to travel to a doctor’s office.

The biggest payoff, he says, is the community he’s built and the love and support he gets from friends. It used to be difficult to find people to help him with errands or take him to the hospital. Now, he says, he writes a note on Facebook and someone shows up.

Power of a hug

One of those people was Maria Avendaño, who read an article about Royer and was moved to contact him on Facebook.

“I thought he was making a big change in a lot of people’s lives, the way they think about loving your neighbour.”

She met Royer in person when she went to his house to help him peel carrots.

“I experienced something that I’ve never experienced before and that was the healing power of a hug ... so much love and so much good energy to that hug that I felt I was a different person when I came out of that house,” she said, wiping away a tear.

Pan, who has been with Royer for five years and is his caregiver, says she is in awe of the way he is able to take care of people and offer unconditional love to strangers.

People often tell her Royer is lucky to have her taking care of him, Pan says, “but actually, it’s the other way around.” Royer spent the first year of their relationship just listening to her and helping her with her problems, she says.

“I never see him complaining, ‘Why me?’ He always has this positive energy in him,” she said over carrot soup at a restaurant in east Vancouver.

The Lotus Garden is the only restaurant where Royer is able to eat, and he eats there for free. The owners opened their doors on a day they are normally closed to Royer and a small group of friends.

They did not charge anyone for their meal.

tcarman@vancouversun.com

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