It’s easier to forgive those who hurt you than those who hurt the people you love.
Cancer is messy and scary. You throw everything at it, but don’t forget to throw love at it. It turns out that might be the best weapon of all.
The last watch I wore felt like a handcuff. When I need to know the time, I check my cell phone.
No matter how I feel, I get up, dress up, and show up for life. When I do, the day always serves up more than I could have hoped for. Each day truly is a slice of heaven. Some days the slices are just smaller than others.
Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read ‘Peter Rabbit,’ I skip the part about Peter’s father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s pies. I also hid the book of ‘Grimm Fairy Tales.’ They’re just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.
We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren’t with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we’re sending out into the cybersphere.
Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an ‘Owner’s Manual’ to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
When I was 41, I found a lump the size of a grape in my right breast. I ended up bald, sick and exhausted from surgeries, chemo and radiation treatments. Ah, but I got to live.
When you hear the word ‘cancer,’ it’s as if someone took the game of Life and tossed it in the air. All the pieces go flying. The pieces land on a new board. Everything has shifted. You don’t know where to start.
There are few places you can find silence. Air travel could be the last fortress of solitude.
It’s sad that grandkids show up at the end of obituaries, way behind the list of work place achievements, social clubs and survivors. Why last? If you’ve got grandkids, you know they’re first when it comes to the joy in your life.
We’ve come a long way from having one land line that was forbidden to be answered during dinner. We had no answering machine, just a dad who barked, ‘Who calls during dinner? If it’s important, they’ll call back.’ He was right.
Too often, we get attention and sympathy by being a victim. If we’re invested in someone being our villain, we must love being the victim. We have to let go of both characters in the story.
The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn’t about keeping time. It’s about stopping it.
While journalists cannot right every wrong, champion every cause or fix every problem, they can – through the written word – lift someone’s burden for a day, make some elderly woman on a bus smile or let them know they are noticed by someone.
When you have cancer, it’s like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn’t want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of another person’s life or freedom? How many of us want to hold that kind of power in our hands?
I say we all take the pledge and stay home. Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks for what you have, not to save a few dollars to get more.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.