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Showing posts from September, 2020

On Death and Surviving Survivor's Guilt: One Decade Without Zellie

 Late August /early September 2010 was a huge milestone for me. I had survived one year being cancer free after a huge struggle to recover from my cancer-curative-partial gastrectomy surgery (as you all know, I had the rest of my stomach removed in 2019) . My partial gastrectomy recovery was ROUGH. I spent 5 months essentially starving as my esophagus did not work. My face spent more time in the toilet than with friends if the visit had anything to do with food. Meanwhile, though, I still somehow got into grad school. But as I recovered, my friend suddenly deteriorated. And then she was diagnosed with lung cancer. And then she died. Her name was Jennifer Wille, but after college, she went by her pen name Zellie Blake. She was 27 years young. Zellie was a free spirit. She was funny. She was creative. She was happy. She was silly. She was tall 😊 (approximately a foot taller than me- in college I called her my “Foot Taller JenTwin).  She had a child-like innocence. She never stopped pl