After a week of pure magic with my sons — laughter, pottery, tea, Christmas cake, and the kind of peace you don’t try to improve — the house is quiet again. Goodbyes are being packed into suitcases bound for France and Holland, and the echo has already arrived.

And then a bottle of red wine landed on the kitchen table. Not just any wine — the one that nearly cost me my life. The old favourite, the old trap. A reminder of the years I was held hostage…and how my family was held hostage right alongside me.

In this Morning Call, we talk about the sweet-and-savage mix of love, absence, medical realities, memory, and why we do not drink over any of it — not the joy, not the grief, not the ache of a life that’s still moving forward.

Feel it. Bless it. Let your heart hurt because you love well — and keep going. Not today, lady. Not today.