Caregiver Tools

One gorgeous October day after the next comes and goes, and the moon now wanes after filling the eastern sky with magnificent moon rises these past evenings. Ellen has endured increased pain and discomfort, and her caregivers adjust this and that to find the best way to ease her journey. We wonder how much longer […]

Generosity in the Quiet

This week continues the pattern of quiet.  Many hours of resting, drifting, eyes opening to acknowledge who’s sitting with her, sometimes a smile, and always response to what’s funny. And the big blessing, much less pain.  Some discomfort, but usually shifting and adjusting this or that makes things ok. But the real story I want […]

Quiet Days

Ellen is having quiet days generally. One nice change we’ve seen since a week ago is Ellen being more active and alert and doing a bit (a bit) less sleeping and resting with eyes closed.  Perhaps this is because it’s now been a month since she’s had a chemo treatment.  She’s also doing a bit […]

Fifty Years Plus

Two days ago was Ellen’s 50th birthday, a bittersweet marking on the calendar of her life.  How immensely grateful we are that she was born on that special day in 1966. Gina baked and brought over the spectacularly delicious chocolate cake you can see in the photos.  Ellen did enjoy a bite of the cake, which is […]

Shifts and Changes

Things have shifted quite a bit for Ellen in the last two weeks, with notable further cognitive decline (mentioned in her previous blog post) and turning inward.  Ellen spends most of her day resting with her eyes closed and will open them in response to a greeting and sometimes engage a bit with whoever has […]

Death Straight Talk (by Eric)

When your wife has stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, and has been hospitalized once for an upper extremity DVT, once for pneumonia, another time for malignant pleural and pericardial effusions, has had small pulmonary emboli, and then gets diagnosed with leptomenigeal carcinomatosis, and you also live in a world that has Google, so you can […]