I always thought a breaking heart was a bad or sad thing. But my heart has been broken open by love countless times.

Despite having “flown the nest,” a few breeds of birds, like nuthatches, continue to feed their young post-flight. I find that so tender. 

It turns out this shortness of breath wasn’t caused by fluid in my lungs; it was 1.04 liters of fluid in my heart!

“When the heart speaks,  the mind finds it indecent to object.” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Alan Alda says, “Doorways are where the truth is told.” At some point, we all find ourselves in the doorway from this earthly plane to the next. Some of us are closer than others.

t#16: When I have a smooth customer service transaction, I never take it for granted and ask to speak to the supervisor to report it.

This interior glimpse will yield two words that I wish were different: progression and swelling. My tumors are squatters, sprawled out, feet up on the table, defiant, undaunted by previous attempts to evict them.

“She died,” I heard three different times this month. Now, I know I will die from my disease. What I did not realize was the number of friends I would lose along the way to Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, including most recently Charlotte, Maureen and Brooke.

I see parallels between this Slacker Pie Crust recipe and my odyssey with cancer.