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BC Action, Breast Cancer Advocacy, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Pinkwashing, Susan G Komen Foundation
Pink Ribbons & Forever Chemicals.
I can already feel it, the encroachment of October, breast cancer awareness industry month. It’s been ten years since since a doctor diagnosed me with invasive breast cancer and told me I was simply one of the eight women who will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime, ten years since I started paying attention to the epidemic that will kill about 43,600 women in the United States this year, ten years since I learned that men get breast cancer too – in fact, about 2,650 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in men in 2021. This year, we anticipate 281,550 new diagnoses…
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a poem for ireland, a poem for the world . . .
Where I have been living since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no mailman, but I still check the letterbox in the front door every day. To send or receive a letter, I drive about a mile to a shop on the carraterra between here and the lovely little village which has begun to return to a kind of normal after 18 months of on-again-off-again lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing protocols, new vaccines, new variants, and head-turning debate about all of these. It’s not officially over. The virus itself will always be around, and even as variants wreak havoc in many places, in others it appears to be…
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After death of a spouse, Aging, Being a Widow, Bellaghy, Castledawson, Death and dying, Dennis O'Driscoll, Derry, Dispatch from the Diaspora, FInal wishes, Funeral, Grieving, Keeping Going, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Mourning, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Postscript, Rituals, Seamus Heaney
Walking on air . . . for your birthday
The girl with her head in the clouds should never have doubted the man who kept her feet on the ground too. Not for a second. All that's left of him now is love - to give away. I am walking on air.
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Actors, Art, Children's Books, Gary Shteyngart, HBO, James Gandolfini, Maurice Sendak, Memoir, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Sopranos, Themes of Childhood, Where The Wild Things Are
thinking about james gandolfini ~ forever with the wild things
I’m watching The Sopranos. Again. This time I’m watching it with the man I love who loves it when I don’t tell him what’s going to happen next. Unthinkably, he’s never seen The Sopranos. The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sat there for years among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever. Once upon a time, at the same time every night, my late husband would come into my office and ask me with a wink “Well? Are…
