yeah ☹️

anyway, my bff laura was an amazing person and i miss her constantly. cancer sucks. tell the people in your life that you love them while they're still here. i don't have any profound insights, just that it's been 10 years and i sometimes feel like i just talked to her yesterday. 8/8

she just cherished the life she had left, every precious second of every precious day. she was always her, funny and smart and weird and generous and just so full of life right up until she wasn't. 7/?

mostly though she simply lived while she could. she had gotten married to the love of her life only 8 months before her diagnosis. it was terribly unfair. everything about it was terribly unfair. but she left the anger to me and her husband and her parents. 6/?

she handled her diagnosis with her typical wry sense of humor, total fearlessness, and love for planning. she did bucket list things like seeing paul mccartney perform live and taking a trip to spain but she also wrote her will and her own obituary. 5/?

she got 18 months, roughly 15 of those pretty good months, which is more than many would get with similar diagnoses, thanks to radiation and chemo. i was lucky enough to spend memorial day weekend 2015 with her, tinged with bittersweetness because we both knew it was the last time. 4/?

until the week before her diagnosis her ONLY symptom was a mild cough that was diagnosed as acid reflux. it wasn't until she started experiencing numbness in her leg that anyone thought anything was terribly wrong. 3/?

when she was diagnosed in june 2014 the original tumor in her right lung, the size of a lemon, had already spread to her bone and, most devastatingly, her brain. she was dying before she even knew she was sick. 2/?

have a wonderful hibernation, darth!

when you try to be sneaky about your cheetos habit but something always gives you away.