I lost my best friend to breast cancer...

So where do I begin....this past week has been a week from hell. My best friend Stephanie was diagnosed with breast cancer. I feel like I'm standing still and things are just continuing on around me. I'm so sad, angry, and frustrated. I feel so helpless, like I should be doing something and I can't do a thing but be there and I don't feel like it's enough. I try to talk to people but they say things that quite frankly just piss me off.

Let me go backwards for a minute...she has been my best friend for over 14 years. She keeps me going when I feel I have nothing left to give. Through everything I've been through (good and bad) she's been there. We talk on the phone 50 million times a day...seriously I'm pretty sure we're the reason Verizon has unlimited calling plans. When I'm down, she's up and when she's down, I'm up....we balance each other and are like the same person. We talk too much all the time.

When she told me the news I felt like someone punched me in the stomach.



This was a post I started in May 2011. And didn't have an urge to ever finish until now.


I lost my best friend to breast cancer on July 25, 2016. My eyes fill up just typing that.

I'm writing this now to try to help not only myself but anyone who may be going thru something similar.

I have so much I wish I could say to her...

That feeling of being punched in the stomach when you were first diagnosed now feels like someone rolled a boulder over top of me. 


I feel like time has stood still since the day you died. But moved so quickly all at the same time. I feel like I talked to you yesterday but also feel like it's been a million years. I pick up the phone to call you every day, sometimes more than once. I miss you. I feel like I lost a part of myself the day you died. At times, I feel like no one on this earth knows me like you did. Sometimes I think you knew me better than I know myself. It hurts. So badly.

Sometimes I forget you're gone, just for a second and then it hits me all over again. I have so much to tell you and hate that I can't. Sometimes I talk to you anyway. It still doesn't seem real. It's so unfair. You fought so hard and we're stronger than anyone I've ever known. You were forced to go through so much that you never deserved. Some days I feel like a ping pong ball bouncing back and forth from happy, to sad, to angry, to broken, to okay again. 


Today I'm trying to focus on the good things: 


I'm grateful that I had you for my best friend for over 20 years.

All of the priceless memories that sometimes make me laugh and other times make me cry.

How lucky I am that my son was able to know you and love you.

How grateful I am that I had an extra 5 years with you all because you fought as hard as you did.

The little "signs" that remind me of you and make me believe you're watching over us.


That I'll never forget all of the things you taught me or reminded me of, like to stop being so hard on myself, to never stop being there for others, that you can't have sunshine without a little rain, that Christmas Shoes is a nice song (you'd be proud, I didn't change the station when it came on the other day), that sometimes bad things happen to good people, to be kind, that life is precious and not to be taken for granted.


Some days I have to try with everything I have inside but I'm doing it. Little by little. One day at a time. 


I miss you. I love you. You'll always be my person.