You don’t have to know what to say.

In June 2011, weeks after I brought my first baby home, I was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I spent the next year and a half in treatment — chemotherapy, radiation, and finally a stem cell transplant that worked.

From the chair, I noticed things. Which words helped. Which ones quietly wounded. Who showed up, who went silent, and what the people who carried my family actually did. Not one of them said anything historic. They came. They kept coming.

I survived because of medicine and luck. But my family got through because of people — the freezer stocked before my transplant, my sister matching her love to a radiation schedule, the texts that asked for nothing back. This book is my way of paying them forward. Every script in it is something somebody’s love taught me from the receiving end.

I wrote it for the person lying awake tonight, typing and deleting. You don’t need perfect words. You need a system — and the nerve to keep using it.

One day at a time — and sometimes that is one hour, and one minute, at a time.