A place to talk death and dying issues
Comments
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Thanks for the info for the caregivers here at BCO Stephanie. I know this will come in handy for some of my people to know about.
They know how much this site has helped me. As usual, very insightful post as well. Thanks again. loving kindness to you too.
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Longtermsurvivor, thank you for these resources! Very thoughtful!
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Hello Ladies,
I am seeking out help to understand when the end stage of life is near. When does hospice come into the picture? Whose decision is it? An ER doctor, Oncologist, patient? I have a friend who is stage iv. Thank you.
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gtgirl - below is a link that might be a better fit for your questions - "If you're not stage IV but have questions". There are also threads for caregivers.
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gtgirl, you may also find this section helpful: Planning Ahead: End-of-Life Issues
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Hi gtgirl,
Referral to hospice is usually done by a patient's primary doctor - might be primary care, but if being treated for cancer, likely to be the oncologist. If the patient is in hospital, then the doctor(s) who see her there can make a referral if they think she has 6 months or less left to live and she is willing to give up curative treatments for the disease that she's expected to die from.
Patients and our caregivers are wise to assess the local hospice options before need arises. In general, the non-profit hospices provide better services than the for-profit businesses. But I've heard of at least one non-profit with inadequate medical care/staff, so you'd want to ask about that.
Here's a great list of questions/concerns to explore when looking at hospice care organizations.
https://www.bkbooks.com/blog/what-ask-when-looking...
The moderators are right about good places for you to post your questions, but this is a great topic to read! Plenty of information and resources along with personal stories about end-of-life.
warmest healing wishes, Stephanie
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Thank you, I apologize for posting here.
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gtgirl, no need to apologize. Your friend is lucky to have someone like you in her life
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gtgirl I second that!! Your friend is lucky to have you asking for her and being there. Good luck to you both.
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A beautiful photoessay on dying grandmother.
https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/my-grandmothe...
I've many personal stories to share, but need to focus my writing energies today.
loving kindness for all, Stephanie
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Stephanie that was just beautiful. it reminded me of my Grandmother dying of breast cancer at age 75. My Mother and I bathed her and took care of her. I remember how honored I felt to participate in her care. It's a beautiful photo story of her love that piece. Thank you for sharing that. I am reading a book now that I hope to share a bit here. Not finished yet - still reading. Chemo brain and fatigue has kept me fuzzy minded.everything takes me longer, plus DD3 needs things off and on.
Much lovingkindness to all Stay cool. It's supposed to be 97 today!! Heat in the Pacific North West!!
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A few weeks ago, my friend Gilles, a professional artist, photographed me again - this time to capture images of a dying someone.
It's an honor to recognize my beauty and presence shining through a tattered body.
This week, I happened upon the moving photo essay linked in my previous post and also these photographs by Jade Beall:
Beautiful Bodies of Elders
http://www.jadebeall.com/index/G0000X5SqNA3d_78
She usually photographs pregnant and nursing women and those body positive photos moved me too.
It's so important that we re-imagine different bodies as beautiful and worthy of great love and affection - our own and others'.
Thanks for helping to widen the field of beauty.
warm love, Stephanie
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Last week went to a friend's memorial service, ovarian and bladder cancers for 20 months. Want to share this "Death Is Nothing At All" by Henry Scott Holland.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jz-gNKXdh4&sns=em
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cling- Death is Nothing at All was a beautiful poem. Thank you for sharing that.
With the summer drawing to a close and the heat on, chemo brain and fatigue has sapped my energy and mental capacity to post. I find myself mulling over ideas and thoughts and unable to come to some conclusion or make sense of them. I have been reading the book "The 5 Things We Cannot Change" David Richo. 1-everything changes and ends 2- things do not always go according to plan 3- life is not always fair 4. pain is a part of life 5- people are not loving and loyal all the time. It seems to me that being a cancer patient one gets a healthy dose of the "big 5" whether we like it or not. We are being hunted from within destroyed by our own body's inability to turn off defective cells that eat us alive. How does one reconcile being consumed by self? ugly concept. No one plans for cancer. It isn't fair and it's a "pain" on every level from literal to figurative. As far as people go... the range of reactions is as wide as the sky. People can smother you, disappear or change in how they relate. As anyone dying knows that folks generally avoid dying/death like it's a 24 hour stomach flu. I don't feel picked on that I got cancer since it is so common. I would rather I have it and die then anyone else in my family.
But yesterday on the news they showed the miserable town of Alepo in Syria. Assad /Russia and the insurgency rebels are fighting for control at all costs. The 300,000 people who live there are being mowed down as the price of war and "control." The only children's hospital was destroyed and the children lined up bloodied and bewildered, crying and dazed. Their lives are meaningless in the war to regain control of who runs Alepo. By the time both sides are done there will be nothing to save. How can you make sense of rulers who bomb you to death, shoot your family, blow up your street, school and hospital, starve you out, destroy the water and prevent you from leaving? Neither side seems to care about the lives of the citizens of Alepo. How do you make sense of life in war? How do you make sense of life with cancer -internal war? It is not fair. It is painful in extraordinary epic proportions and people are not predictable and can kill you. Your sense of innocence is forever gone. Your body will destroy you and is no longer safe; you can't leave your body except in death.You can't leave or escape. In war your town is under attack and no longer safe and those who rule may kill you. Maybe you can't leave or escape, not if you are a child certainly. Those are my thoughts.
I pray for these folks nightly and for those of us all over the planet that deal with cancer and disease. May we find peace and loving-kindness towards each other. May war stop. May peace prevail. May the smart scientists find a cure for cancer.
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Hi Cling,
Thanks for that poem - loved the images that went with and felt that the poem was true on one level and threatening on another level.
It seems to prescribe an acceptable reaction to death and loss that won't make sense for everyone - not the dying and not their survivors.
A few years ago an extended family member, a mother in her mid-30s with a pre-teen daughter, died unexpectedly, leaving the child motherless and her husband a widower. It's been a hard road for her survivors and I'm sure the daughter would have appreciated her mother's presence as she navigated growing up and junior and senior high schools.
Another extended family member may have metastatic breast cancer and her teenage disabled daughter would be confused, not comforted by this poem.
Lately, I often feel the great advantages of having a body, even one in pain and suffering in various ways. I can see, say, touch, type and reflect. I can join, communicate, connect and love through the body and my soul-spirit is satisfied to continue.
Do I expect immortality? No. Well, I do hope to be remembered by my "survivors" who will all eventually die too. I nurture love through my bodily presence.
Grief is real and I no longer believe in grief suppression or admonitions to remember and rise above grief.
Sometimes, loss just really, really hurts.
Sometimes we need to meet and even dive into the pain that comes with loss and tragedy.
I think everyone in the metastatic breast cancer community will face personal loss of bodily function, autonomy, security and more. And we who meet others with MBC will experience loss when our friends suffer and die. That's the nature of compassion (literally, suffering with).
Here are some links that helped me to grow in compassion and understanding.
Everything Doesn't Happen For A Reason
Tim J. Lawrence
OCTOBER 20, 2015
http://www.timjlawrence.com/blog/2015/10/19/everything-doesnt-happen-for-a-reason
Stupid for Phrases for People in Crisis
September 28, 2015
https://communicatingacrossboundariesblog.com/2015/09/28/stupid-phrases-for-people-in-crisis/
If you're interested in meeting up with other people with cancer and more resources for being with people in crisis/grief/loss/change/whatever, go to:
https://www.smartpatients.com/conversations/17327
(free registration required)
Not to be a naysayer, but needing to widen the field to include a wider variety of experiences and reactions to death and "loss".
warmest healing wishes for all and loving kindness, Stephanie
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just came across this, and thought some might enjoy
"It's dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it's the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That's why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered."0 -
Stepping back somewhat, looking at the larger process of many aspects of living and relating to others , I found this from Kathryn Schulz, On Being Wrong:
"...I've spent the last five years of my life thinking about … why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us, and how we behave when that happens, and what all of this can tell us about human nature.... [M]ost of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. We get it in the abstract. We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. The human species, in general, is fallible -- okay fine.
But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window -- and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about. And the thing is, the present tense is where we live…. effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything.
I think this is a problem. I think it's a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it's such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make.
So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right? One reason, actually, has to do with a feeling of being wrong. So let me ask you guys something -- or actually, let me ask you guys something, because you're right here: How does it feel -- emotionally -- how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing -- thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong? …Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny.... But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything.
I'll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine -- he's a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what's funny -- at least if you're six years old -- is that the coyote's totally fine too. He just keeps running -- right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air. That's when he falls. When we're wrong about something -- not when we realize it, but before that -- we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.
So this is one reason, a structural reason, why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness. I call this error blindness. Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late. But there's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well -- and this one is cultural. Think back for a moment to elementary school. You're sitting there in class, and your teacher is handing back quiz papers, and one of them looks like this. This is not mine, by the way. …So there you are in grade school, and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper. It's the dumb kid, the troublemaker, the one who never does his homework. So by the time you are nine years old, you've already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits -- and second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes.
We learn these really bad lessons really well. And a lot of us -- and I suspect, especially a lot of us in this room -- deal with them by just becoming perfect little A students, perfectionists, over-achievers. Right, Mr. CFO, astrophysicist, ultra-marathoner? (Laughter) You're all CFO, astrophysicists, ultra-marathoners, it turns out. Okay, so fine. Except that then we freak out at the possibility that we've gotten something wrong. Because according to this, getting something wrong means there's something wrong with us. So we just insist that we're right, because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe.
So let me tell you a story….[a story about a woman who has surgery on the wrong side of her body.] …When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting. He said, "For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient."…. The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous.
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy. So this is a huge practical problem. But it's also a huge social problem.
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots….They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. So this is a catastrophe.
This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring. The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't. We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this. And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong.
1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about "I think therefore I am," this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote "Fallor ergo sum" -- "I err therefore I am." Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. It's totally fundamental to who we are. Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.
Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life.... [A]t some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong. And my first thought was, "I've lost it. I've become the crazy wrongness lady. I just imagined it everywhere," which has happened. But a couple of months later, I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass, who's the host of the show. And I mentioned this to him, and he was like, "No actually, that's true. In fact," he says, "as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. And the crypto-theme is: 'I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead.' And the thing is," says Ira Glass, "we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work." And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong.
But, you know, our stories are like this because our lives are like this. We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead. George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East. And something else happened instead. And Hosni Mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life, until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son. And something else happened instead. And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together. And something else happened instead. And I have to tell you that I thought I was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize. And something else happened instead.
I mean, this is life. For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us….
So..... We come up with another idea. We tell another story..... The theme of this one....is the rediscovery of wonder. And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong."
http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong/transcript?language=en#t-306000
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Flaviarose, I am deeply grateful to you for sharing that poem. It has helped to quiet my mind, soothe my troubled heart, and lift my spirits.
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Stages of Grief
I've recently been reviewing my personal grief history and see how I've emerged from a feeling-aversive family and culture (1950s and 1960s Catholicism). From there I jumped into Buddhism, but the feeling-denying type that sought emotional and worldly detachment (rather than a more mature non-attachment).
Jump, jump, jump from emotional ignorance to growing emotional intelligence in being with grief and other feelings.
In the early 2000s, I was a volunteer
hospicehospital chaplain well-tutored in being supportive but non-attached to suffering and frequently dying patients and their loving carers. My self-care included meditation, study, journaling, time in nature and good times with my loved ones.But then I got sicker myself and my closest friends became ill, several dying, so I stopped extra duties of caring for others.
As the deaths of others accumulated, so did my grief. But I had few ways to be with monstrous shadow - so I fell into despair, rather than emotional fluidity. I wouldn't let go into the stream of grief, because I thought I had learned and practiced Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief for the dying - denial, anger, bargaining, depression/sadness and acceptance. Surely, I couldn't jump from the safe banks of acceptance into grief's flowing stream.
Or could I?
In late 2011, I found myself in yet another life-threatening situation and several more friends had just died or were in the process of dying. I also found the work of a local therapist and ritualist, Francis Weller https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/the-inevitability-of-grief-and-the-art-of-living-well/
http://www.francisweller.net/the-book.html
http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the_geography_of_sorrow
Within days, I joined a grief ritual (came from the after-death, at-home vigil for a long-time friend) and found a passion that would be mine for years - grief rituals that loosened my inhibitions and allowed my grief to flow within the banks of the larger river of all human experience, including that of the ancestors.
Freeing my frozen feelings and tears was the right medicine for me then.
And I shared the grief ritual medicine with members of my care circle during a private grief ritual. I realized that I intentionally held back my feelings and the seriousness of my situation from my closest intimates, because I didn't want to burden them with more grief than what they already carried and had shared with me. That ritual revealed their strengths borne of suffering and sorrow.
Gradually, I entered the current of emotional fluidity, becoming ever more friendly with its flows, eddies and swift running water.
I've since learned that others have their own reactions to my suffering and those feelings and behaviors are seldom about me. I am not responsible for causing their suffering, but can be a trigger for releasing long held and buried emotions. I now accept their anticipatory grief and present-time grief without feeling responsible for their feelings or process!
I am deeply grateful to be comfortable with a wide range of feelings/emotions – to neither shut-down or be submerged by them.
This makes dying easier and more interesting – I can have warm interest in my experience.
As certain aspects of my life decrease (energy, activity, engagement), other aspects increase (warmth, joy, sleep, pain and my liver size). To stand witness to developments and to grieve and mourn for myself and others are huge gifts at this stage.
I've not arrived at the end of grief, but am grateful to confidently swim in my emotional streams.
Friends, I hope this is helpful if you ever choose to contemplate dying, death, living and life.
Warmest healing wishes, Stephanie
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I'm a fan of the Zen Hospice Project – The Zen Hospice Project works to bridge medical and social models of care in effort to provide the finest palliative care available. This necessitates a broader multi-disciplinary approach to caregiving and offers a model for the synergistic integration of arts and sciences. This also opens new possibilities for lay/volunteer and professional training and scholarship.
Here's a podcast by Frank Ostaseski, co-founder:
At Once Here and Disappearing
Episode Description: In this dharma talk, Frank Ostaseski shares stories of how ordinary people found the resources, compassion and capacity to meet what seemed at first impossible in terms of facing death, to finding powerful life lessons through the process of dying.
He includes the idea that you can't really be alive without maintaining an awareness of death. "It's kind of ridiculous to imagine that at the time of death, we will have the strength of body, the emotional stability, and the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime." However, he states, "The really good news is that you don't have to wait until the time of your dying to learn the lessons that it has to teach – we can do this now."
https://www.upaya.org/2016/08/ostaseski-disappeari...
And a podcast by current director, BJ Miller, MD
Dying: Exploring the Terrain
BJ Miller, MD, talks with Michael Lerner about his life, his disability, and his role as executive director at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.
http://tns.commonweal.org/podcasts/dying-exploring...
and BJ Miller's famous TED talk:
What really matters at the end of life
At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? For many, it's simply comfort, respect, love. BJ Miller is a palliative care physician at Zen Hospice Project who thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients. Take the time to savor this moving talk, which asks big questions about how we think on death and honor life.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_ma...These aren't Buddhist-specific recordings, but hopefully helpful for a wide audience.
We are all mortal beings. Or as many say, spiritual beings having a human experience.
healing and loving kindess, Stephanie
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LOngterm.
Thank you for sharing. I learn so much from each post. The fine art of dying - you bring deep and meaningful insights.
Nel
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This long entry comes as I end my first millennium at bco.
This is my 999th bco post and I want to celebrate with my first, best local neighborhood, the Death and Dying community.
I was a green sapling when I began posting last December and though my roots were deep in the nurturing soil of cancer history, support groups and life experience, I knew next to nothing about bco cultures and subcultures.
I was also one month into hospice life and turned toward sky, sun and stars - soul-spirit release from this bodily envelope. I was ready to exhale.
Instead, other bco members have passed into from this existence.
The catalpa tree outside my cottage windows was bare in winter, then it leafed young green in spring, blossomed deep throated cream and lavender flowers, developed long, hanging seed pods. The leaves are now yellowing and yesterday, a cool breeze sent one rattling past my window.
Like the catalpa, I expand and contract in rhythm with the cycles of gain and loss.
Several members of this D&D neighborhood have died. Some I met later, through their writing. Others stayed with us for a time then pulled up roots and disappeared.
Neighbors, I've felt so welcomed here, in Forum 8 for mets folks and at the acknowledging center where I and others take great solace in beauty and what we love.
Thank you, you are the air I breathe, the birds flitting between trees, the breeze and cycles of light and dark.
Together we continue to weave and grow supportive community.
All that's happened here, while completely unexpected, feels natural, easeful.
Thank you, you are also the trees with deep roots, sharing soil.
It brings joy to call you my friends, Stephanie
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(((HUGS))) Stephanie
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Woodylb just updated Hope's thread.
"Ladies i just spoke to her husband Hope lost the use of her hand and langs, she cannot talk much , but she understands , the hopice people are coming three times a week and i believe she is getting ready for her last trip. It is with weeping heart that i tell you this . I am losing my friend for this ugly and stupid disease. God be with her and with us."
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Poem from http://writersalmanac.org You can listen to it there.
Ars Poetica II
I find, after all these years, I am a believer—
I believe what the thunder and lightning have to say;
I believe that dreams are real,
and that death has two reprisals;
I believe that dead leaves and black water fill my heart.I shall die like a cloud, beautiful, white, full of nothingness.
The night sky is an ideogram,
a code card punched with holes.
It thinks it's the word of what's-to-come.
It thinks this, but it's only The Library of Last Resort,
The reflected light of The Great Misunderstanding.God is the fire my feet are held to.
"Ars Poetica II" by Charles Wright from Appalachia. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
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This is a GREAT topic. Thanks for being there. I will write more, but I have to think about what to say. LOTS of chemo brain this week...I'm sure you all understand.
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Hope is a really super person and a great Mom/Wife. She inspires me and I learned so much from her posts. I hope her final journey is a peaceful one and she doesn't suffer. Blessings and great love to her family and husband who loves her. Blessings and great love to all of us whose hearts break and weep each time another sister leaves. (((hugs to all))) rosevalley
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This essay starts out slow, but ends with a punch to the gut and heart-opening reassurance that friendship heals even dying and death:
Much healing love, Stephanie
PS, I'll post a little personal update at the acknowledging forum. Essentially, my physical being is slipping away, but spirit still shines strong through me. I am so grateful.
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Gentle hugs to you Longtermsurvivor
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Stephanie, I hope you can feel us all surround you with love during this time. You've had a big impact on many lives. Mine included.
JJ
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