Our Cancer

There are so many special nooks and crannies up on the children’s cancer floors.  This area for the littlest victims of cancer is a state of the art center when it comes to medicine and science, but it’s also a place where a child can play basketball on a real-life size court.  They can huddle in […]

Do you ever really stop going through memories of a life once lived? One box leads to another and another and then opening a zipper to find a tape recorder, YES, A TAPE RECORDER, that spent a lifetime traveling the world in places most sane people would avoid.  That was my afternoon and once again, […]

I watched it happen twice today, perfect strangers sharing the cancer experience; talking, exchanging stories, and actually hugging each other when they part to enter an exam room where their doctor will meet them for a appointment. In the out patient center, an African American man, wearing a mask, bald from his chemo treatments but […]

There are no rules to follow, no handbook you can buy, that gives you real guidance on how to find a new ‘someone’ after losing a spouse to cancer.  In fact, some of us go for years without thinking about it.  We all have our reasons and there shouldn’t be any judgment one way or the […]

We really didn’t have a choice, we were going to stay and hope for the best.  We were journalists who were in the path of the hurricane, so not only were we going to stay through the storm, but then we’d leave what was left of our property and go to the worst of it […]

What is it about loss that makes us feel like we have to heal quickly and begin again? Really.  It’s expected of us to have our moment of sorrow and I’m not talking a ‘moment’, I’m talking many moments that take a long time, but I mean our family and friends think we’ll ‘get through […]

So, here I am; beginning again. Every time another year after honoring Leroy’s passing, I think about how I’ve changed.  How has this past year been different from the year before and the 8 before that? The first two years were foggy.  I really had to concentrate to get things done.  The legal documents that needed […]

I didn’t know it,  but this was the night before… Death had come knocking a few times and he had always been able to push it away.  His doctors had rallied and pulled him out of bad situations.  He’d had the strength and the will to go on.  There was so much to live for and death […]

She lived with cancer for 7 years. It was a real struggle some of the time, when the disease was fully present in her body and her treatment options were few.  That’s because she didn’t live here in the United States.  She lived in Kathmandu.  That’s in Nepal. Kathmandu is approximately 7, 907 miles away […]