I’ve been quieter here lately. Not because I’ve had nothing to say, but because life showed up, uninvited, and made a mess of things in that deeply painful way it knows how to do.
And yes, I chose life before Hive, with all my heart, no regrets. Some moments ask us to be all in. This was one of them.
My best friend, my little sister
We’ve known each other so long that I can’t really remember a time before her. She’s not blood, but she’s family. You know that kind of bond, part sister, part soulmate, part chaos coordinator.
She’d been having breast issues for years. Constant check-ups. She even joked that her family doctor had seen her boobs more often than her husband had. We laughed about it back then. Weird how those comments come echoing back now, heavy with hindsight.
IBC inflammatory breast cancer.
A sneaky, brutal version of breast cancer that usually makes itself known too late.
It started with fluid from the nipple. But menopause can do that too. So nobody really panicked. Not her. Not the doctors. She said it was annoying at parties but didn’t let it dull her spark.
Then came the redness, warmth, lumps. Infection, they said. Just an irritated mammary duct. Another round of treatment. Still, no real red flags. Or at least none that lit up loud enough.
We called each other almost daily. Mostly she talked, and I listened. Sometimes baffled by what could rile her up. But something shifted. She pulled back. The calls stopped. I knew something was off.
When we did talk, she was just... tired. “Netflix and chill,” she’d say. She thought it was grief, burnout. I could believe that too, for a while.
The visit that changed everything
A few weeks ago, I had to take my daughter to her rehab center. I figured if I drove a little further, I could stop by and see her.
I wasn’t prepared.
She was curled up on the couch, swallowed by a mountain of pillows that would put the Himalayas to shame. We didn’t say a single word that day. She just cried into my arms, for hours. I could feel how hard it was for her to breathe.
I came back the next day. Same scene. Until she moved her blanket and showed me her throat.
I’m rarely speechless, but in that moment, I had nothing. No words. She reached for my hand and placed it on her chest.
It didn’t move.
I touched her back. Same thing. It felt like she had grown some kind of shell, hard, unyielding. Like a beetle’s armor.
Her ribcage wasn’t moving with her breath. She was gasping, struggling for air, and still refused to see a doctor. COVID had shattered her trust in the medical world. She made me promise not to call anyone.
I left her that day with her mum, and we both knew this was bigger than us. We gathered a group of nurse friends and asked, begged, them to step in.
And then, grief doubled
After leaving her, I went straight to visit another dear friend, the one I'd been providing palliative care for these last months.
I arrived just moments after she passed.
There’s not much more to say after that, really.
Except this:
Be there.
Not in the way people say it to be polite. I mean really be there. Show up. Sit with the silence. Hold someone’s hand even when there are no words left.
We can’t fix everything. But we can be love in the middle of it.
That’s all any of us can do.