In the spring of 2025, I was living a life that most would probably describe as ordinary but full for a 46-year-old woman. I was a high school art teacher finishing up my 24th year in the profession, a wife of 19 years, and the mother of two young daughters, ages 13 and 8. The last day I remember feeling completely healthy and living the life I just described was the day of my youngest daughter Charlotte’s first Communion. After weeks of preparation, our family celebrated with the same enthusiasm we brought to every important milestone: surrounded by loved ones, excited for the day, grateful for the blessing of Charlotte’s sacrament and, in hindsight, blissfully unaware of how dramatically our lives were about to change.
Just days after that celebration, I began feeling under the weather. At first, I blamed the exhaustion on a busy season of teaching, coaching, commuting, parenting, family celebrations and travel. But in the days that followed, my health deteriorated rapidly. What began as fatigue soon became debilitating exhaustion, nausea, rapid weight loss and an inability to function normally. After several weeks of worsening symptoms and an initial misdiagnosis of mononucleosis, I became acutely ill while standing at the front of my classroom teaching a group of high school students, who instinctively ran to the nurse’s office for help.
Within the hour, I was rushed from school by ambulance to a local community hospital. After a rapid succession of tests in the emergency room, I found myself meeting with an oncologist, who told me bluntly that I needed to prepare for a cancer diagnosis, which she believed was likely some form of lymphoma. To describe this news as shocking is an understatement. There are no adequate words to convey a moment like this, when life as you know it suddenly ceases to exist. Yet, in hindsight, I know that deep down, as the words left her mouth, I already knew that something was terribly wrong. The first thoughts that raced through my mind were of my daughters.
“I have two young girls,” I told her. “And I have a lot more life to live. So just tell me that there is another side to this hill, and I will get myself there.”
The magnitude of this moment was as traumatic for my daughters as it was for me. They watched their mother leave for work one day, as she had their entire lives, and return home weeks later with a diagnosis of Stage 4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).
What followed over the next five months was a whirlwind of hospitalizations, including an extended time in the I.C.U. fighting for my life. The ongoing treatments, once I finally made it out of the hospital, were intense and required six rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, which caused an array of side effects from treatment and months of upheaval and uncertainty for my family. Then, in the fall of 2025, we received the news we had been desperately hoping for: my PET scan showed no evidence of cancer. We celebrated what felt like a miracle, and we began to breathe a sigh of relief.
That relief lasted 33 days.
Just before Thanksgiving, an M.R.I. shockingly revealed more than a dozen malignant lesions throughout my brain. I was admitted to the hospital immediately and underwent a craniotomy to biopsy one of the lesions. The same aggressive form of cancer I had fought so hard to defeat throughout the rest of my body had returned in an even more frightening form. It was a rare occurrence that affects fewer than 5 percent of patients diagnosed with advanced stages of DLBCL.
When my oncologist called with this news and told me that I needed to head to the hospital immediately, my thoughts once again turned to my daughters.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’ll pack up and be there this afternoon. But first, I have to talk to my girls. I can’t blindside them again like I did in the spring.”
My 8-year-old Charlotte’s reaction, above all else from that day, is etched forever in my soul.
“Wait, are you saying that you have brain cancer?” she exclaimed. ”I thought you said that you were cancer free!”
I don’t recall ever finding a way to respond to her questions that day. What I do remember is that we hugged, she buried her head in my lap and we wept. I assured her it was going to be okay. We beat this cancer once and now we just had to do it again. Then I headed back into the city for another hospital admission.
Treatment for CNS lymphoma required repeated inpatient admissions every two weeks throughout the winter. As a mother, the logistics and emotional toll of this treatment plan felt overwhelming. How could I take care of my daughters while spending this much time in the hospital? Life as a mom in healthier times already felt overextended and difficult to stay on top of; this endeavor felt downright impossible. Yet somehow, one treatment at a time, one admission at a time, we carried on and made it through.
By January, after my fourth round of treatment and a markedly challenging hospitalization complicated by acute kidney injury and a host of other debilitating side effects, I returned home physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. It was late at night when I arrived back home, so my girls were already asleep. It was the next morning when Charlotte awoke to find me home and delivered her poem to my bedside.
Since the onset of my illness, greeting me with handmade cards, drawings and encouraging notes had become one of Charlotte’s favorite ways to communicate her love and support to me. Throughout the past year, those creations have multiplied and now line the windows and walls beside my bed. But this poem was different.
That weekend at home ended up being an ordinary, event-packed time in our house. Charlotte had a soccer tournament she had been looking forward to for weeks, and my older daughter Addison had her freshman orientation for students accepted at the Catholic high school she had dreamt of attending since kindergarten. Every part of me wanted to stay in bed. I was exhausted, sick and completely depleted.
Yet I got up, took a shower and walked out the door, one step at a time. Not because I felt strong, but because I felt grateful: grateful for the gift of being home, for the gift of my daughters and my ability to be present for these milestones in their lives, grateful for the gift of my own life and grateful for this poem: