When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.~Ralph Waldo Emerson “I’m not saying you are going to die within the year, but I am saying you may not live to see your children grow up.” I am in a chair listening. I am thinking about my four young children. My surgeon is talking. We are discussing my prognosis and my pending surgery. My fortieth year is spinning into a mid-life crisis where eve...

Friendship isn’t a big thing — it’s a million little things.~Author Unknown Marianne was my best friend and she was dying. I had been blessed to be her caregiver. Cleaning up vomit, talking about death, and going to chemo or radiation, or to this test or that appointment every single day for three years had been a joy and never a burden. Marianne and I had prayed, laughed, and cried together ...

Cats do care. For example they know instinctively what time we have to be at work in the morning and they wake us up twenty minutes before the alarm goes off.~Michael Nelson According to my dictionary, a “muse” is any of the nine Greek goddesses who preside over the arts. This means that, as a writer, I not only get to work in my pajamas, I can also claim my own goddess who will answer my pra...

Here’s to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.~Author Unknown I didn’t set out to be a single mom. I didn’t dream of a life of setting mousetraps, shoveling snow, and stacking wood by myself. But in 2013, all those things became my new reality. I had been questioning whether I was happy with the path our marriage had taken for several months. I went alone to bask...

There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.~Walter Reuther In the spring of 1971, a lead story in Sunday’s newspaper magazine read “Men Needed.” The article reported that nursing was opening up to men and there would be a great demand for them in the future. My hus...