A beautiful tribute was given to this woman who lived her life fully, cohabitating with this thing called Multiple Myeloma (cancer of the bone marrow) for 8 1/2 years. So yesterday….we gathered together to say goodbye to another member. I received so much more than I ever gave.

My answer, consistently has been this……it was/is the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. Wasn’t it depressing? Wasn’t it awful to have to go to so many funerals? (I’m guessing I’ve personally known at least 100 who’ve died, may be more? I can’t be for certain….) So many times I was asked why I worked with people with cancer. Yet, this strong, wise, loving, and beautifully flawed group of cancer survivors welcomed me into their group as a student intern and allowed me to learn from them what it was like to live with uncertainty, yet fully LIVE each day! I was a young mom, an even younger social worker, so many aspects of my life were uncertain and so much of what I was doing I felt I was inept. I met them at the time when I had just had my first-born, my Dad was acutely sick with his cancer and recovering from his first (and preparing for his second, though I didn’t know it at the time) bone marrow transplant.

Now, I wasn’t a child when I met them, but in some ways I feel like I was. Yesterday, I was surrounded by this group of men and women I’ve really had the pleasure to grow up with over the past 16 years. Today, I want to write about the “dash”….Have you heard of it? So why do we live as if our moments are infinite, when in fact, other than taxes death is the only certainty we face on this earth.īut the “dying” and “loss” and “grief” part isn’t what I want to write about today. That statement sits somehow uncomfortably with me because it presumes the rest of us who aren’t diagnosed get a pass from the certainty of death, when in reality, none of us knows when our last breath will come on this earth. Working with people with cancer, the possibility of someone dying is omnipresent. Over the course of the 16 years I’ve been working for or volunteering for Gilda’s Club, I’ve lost count of how many funerals I’ve attended.

The dash by linda ellis poem