“I have to talk about it. It’s not that far off, you know.”

Yes. Kay knew.

She stares at the picture of her parents on their wedding day over fifty years ago, looking into each other’s eyes with blatant adoration. Her mother, in dark lipstick and a puffy veil, and her father, in a dark suit with a skinny tie, are obviously madly in love.

The photo sat upstairs, framed on her mother’s bedside table, until the day she died.

All her life, Kay had hated looking at it. Yet when the time came, she couldn’t bear to throw it away.

Maybe it was better to hang onto it, she decided, as a reminder never to get too close to any man. You’d only end up alone and brokenhearted.

“The old saying is wrong. It’s not better to have loved and lost,” her mother used to rasp in her cigarette voice. “Believe me. If you don’t love, you can’t lose.”

Kay took those words to heart. In her formative years, she had casual friendships, even a date here and there . . . but managed to avoid the risks that come with real relationships. Now, when she wants companionship, she finds it online, and when she needs a creative outlet, she posts entries on her blog.

That’s how she met Meredith and BamaBelle and the others—how many years has it been now?

She used to be able to keep track of things like that. But a lot of details about the past have become fuzzy lately.

Too bad she can’t choose which memories to keep and which to let go. There are a few that persist in haunting her waking hours and dreams, and she’d give anything to banish them forever.

You left me! Why did you leave me?

I didn’t leave you, Mother! I’ve been right here by your bed!

Kay turns away from the photo and leaves the room.

Even with the windows closed, there’s a depressing chill in the air this morning, just as there was on the gloomy spring morning her mother died. Now, as then, the house is filled with rainy day shadows.

Kay forces herself to turn on lights to brighten the rooms as she goes downstairs. Meredith, a true believer in the physical healing benefits of an optimistic attitude, frequently wrote about surrounding yourself with positive energy.

In the dining room, Kay stops and turns on the old tabletop radio, tuned to the upbeat oldies station. Meredith wouldn’t want her to wallow in the gloom.

After flooding the kitchen with overhead light, she dumps her cold tea into the sink and turns on the flame to heat water for a fresh cup.

Waiting for it to boil, she reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the windowsill and shakes out the pill she takes daily to keep cancer at bay.

Meredith, whose cancer, like Kay’s, was hormone fed, was on the same chemical regimen. They used to compare notes. She never dreamed the drug had stopped working for her friend until Meredith shared the news with her privately not long ago. Her cancer was back, Meredith told her, and spreading. Her days were numbered.

Kay was stunned. She knew her upbeat friend had her share of problems. Meredith had written blog entries about her husband’s job loss, about never having enough money, that sort of thing. She always made light of her troubles. But this, she’d kept to herself.

Please don’t tell the others, Meredith wrote to her. I’m going to reach out to them one by one, here and there . . . but I’m not comfortable sharing with everyone just yet.

I won’t say anything. I promise.

Kay kept her word. She didn’t tell, and she won’t tell, not even now that Meredith is gone. Not even if it means lying, the way she did just now when she was messaging with BamaBelle.

She turns on the faucet and lets the water run, a lifelong habit.

“You never know what’s lying around in these old pipes,” Mother used to say when she was a little girl. “Don’t take a drink from the tap until you’ve washed it all away.”

“Washed all what away?”

“You know. The toxins.”

Kay wrote a blog about that once. About Mother, perpetually veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, wasting time worrying about negligible issues, devoting not nearly enough energy tending to the things that were actually within her control.

That post generated more comments than most; her online friends related to the irony.

Kay grabs a tall glass from the cupboard above the sink. She fills it, turns off the tap, and swallows the pill, along with a couple of ibuprofen.

She has a headache again. It happens a lot lately. In her levelheaded moments she assumes it’s probably just middle-aged eye strain, spending too much time on the computer. Maybe she needs a stronger prescription for her reading glasses.

But other times, paranoia and pessimism get the best of her and she’s sure it’s the cancer—that it’s back, spreading tumors into her brain.

After all, the preventative medication didn’t prevent cancer’s death march through Meredith’s body. It didn’t work for Mother, either, during her own brief remission, or for Whoa Nellie or countless other bloggers who had lost their battles.

Why should it be any different for her?

But if the cancer ever does return, it’s not going to ravage her until she draws her last anguished breath. No, she’ll put an end to it before that can ever happen. She has the means, tucked away upstairs in her nightstand drawer. It could all be over in a flash.

Please, please, let it have been that way for Meredith . . .

With a trembling hand, Kay sets the glass into the sink and goes back to glumly waiting for the teakettle to whistle.

The Day My Life Changed Forever

It was a Wednesday: August 24, 2005.

Rain was pouring down as I drove to the doctor’s office after dropping the kids with a sitter. I was about to get the results from a routine biopsy that had been done after a routine mammogram showed something that was probably nothing, according to my doctor.

Probably was the key word there, but I wasn’t really worried. Not even when they called me in to get the results in person.

I wasn’t worried, either, when I heard on the car radio that the tropical depression out in the Atlantic had been upgraded to a tropical storm and named Katrina. I remember that the meteorologist reported that it would likely impact the Gulf later in the weekend, and that he had that breathless anticipation of a child discussing the prospects for a white Christmas.

Looking back, I’m struck that I paid so little attention to the forecast; that I failed to interpret the gloomy weather as a harbinger of catastrophe looming out on the water, much less inside the obstetrician’s office.

—Excerpt from Landry’s blog, The Breast Cancer Diaries

Chapter 3

During the height of her cancer battle, Landry learned that sometimes going through the motions of a normal day can almost convince you that you’re living one.

So she forces herself to embark on her morning ritual: take a shower, get dressed, make the king-sized bed, and transfer the contents of the master bathroom hamper into a wicker basket.

With every task, she thinks about Meredith. What happened to her? How can she be dead?

She was so content with her life. It was obvious from every post she wrote that she loved every minute she had on earth.

So what wasn’t she saying?

After her electronic conversation with A-Okay earlier, Landry had gone back through Meredith’s blog posts for the past several months, trying to read between the lines. This time she thought she detected a bit more wistfulness than usual; perhaps a melancholy undercurrent here and there . . .

Maybe she was just seeing what she needs to see, though, in her retrospective search for rhyme and reason.