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“Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all”—So wrote Elisabeth Tova Bailey, author of the memoir, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010).

Once the author realized the debilitating implications of her chronic illness, with brief remissions tanking into relapses with hospitalizations and painful therapies, she took stock: she still had a need to be useful; she still had her keen mind, and with it, engaged in snail research, even publishing the results of her findings. From her fruitful imagination, she also composed short stories for academic journals.

Bailey’s productivity, under such handicaps, empowers me to do likewise, given the increasing symptoms of my terminal illness since its November 2019 diagnosis. At the time, I remembered feeling overwhelmed, then deciding to enlarge my hospice experience through daily blogs on heartwhisperings.com. Well-practiced in writing,

I would have company. I began, one word at a time, the continuing gift of my Inner Writer. Any subject was grist for the mill, given the altered perspective on my life, and slowly I could type ADL with RA without a miss-strike.

Change of seasons, prayers, holidays, Covid-19 and so much more have left traces of new learning upon my blog, despite scratching unlikely surfaces for material.

Never could I have imagined the tinge of yellow shimmering the forsythia shrub next to my front porch, but it is happening, and will probably produce another blog. LIFE is unstoppable until it stops. In the meantime, like Elisabeth Tova Bailey, I’ll continue dropping crumbs, as given to me to share.