Mary Katzke

Notes from the field in Year 3 of facing metastatic breast cancer.

Show us how much you care. Be the light in our tunnel. Your support sustains us.

Love puts the salve on the hard things we face. Which makes just about everything that life hands this mother bearable.

Sometimes we’re more insistent than our providers would prefer. We are frantic and desperate to just not die. Can you blame us?

Mine is not a role chosen nor winnable. It is a one-way trek up a mountain from which there is no satisfying or rewarding view at the top.

We can hope one day this will all be in our rearview mirror. Not only the pandemic, but the disease of breast cancer as well.

The uncertain summer yawns before us. Yet our real investments — past travels, bonding, wellness of today — continue to serve us.

I pulled into a local gas station recently and was stopped in my tracks by a poster advertising that every bottle of water sold here would “support local breast cancer charities.”

An act of kindness is easy to perform and elevates both the giver and the receiver.

Mary Katzke's film explores the healing power of integrative medicine, by which we become consciously involved in our own wellness.

Recent news of a known community member’s arrest has got my head and heart spinning. Controversial or not, I have equal concerns about the adult in question, whose story is only known to us third-hand at this point, as I do about the 14 year-old and his parents. I am a colleague of one, and … Continue reading Parents, keep watch: Some internet doors lead to dark places

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When I was introduced to Chugiak's Thillman Wallace to discuss helping with his memoir in the final months of his life, the kindred feeling was immediate.