Back then, when it was all happening, I didn’t know about Barbara Abercrombie’s book, Writing Out the Storm. But somehow, that’s what I did. It was the summer of 2007, the storm was cancer, and I wrote through it.

Rewind to May, 2006. A dear friend—we’ll call her Sarah—called me at 10:00 on a Saturday morning and upended my world with the news that had already upended hers: she had ovarian cancer. Stage 3. Metastatic. She’d found out the day before. She knew ten o’clock was early for me, but she didn’t want me hearing it from anyone else.

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