How do we show up for a friend who's been given a serious health diagnosis? How can we be helpful and supportive of our friend, be sure we're not imposing, and feel certain that however we offer help, that we do so in a way that's actually useful? Moreover, what do we do if we just can't handle the challenges our friend is facing? 

These are just some of the questions we're tackling this week on Women Friends, as host Janeen Ellsworth is joined by award-winning author Lori Jakiela, a.k.a. the "Queen of the wise one-liner," according to author Stewart O'Nan. Jakiela's award-winning books, poems, and essays beautifully depict the heartache, pain, and the oftentimes bizarre hilarity of life. Belief Is Its Own Kind Of Truth, Maybe; The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious; Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker; Miss New York Has Everything; and other books in her repertoire, along with essays like "Except for the Cancer, I'm Fine," and many more, reveal Jakiela's personal journey through adoption and searching for her birth family, the mother-daughter relationship, the writer's life, growing up in the Rustbelt, and her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. 

Jakiela’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and loads of other publications, and we're honored she agreed to have this intimate chat with us. We discuss the (unnecessary) shame and guilt that arise when friends don't know how--or if, or when--to support someone through a difficult time like an illness. We talk about loneliness as a public health crisis, how books can be our best friends, raising daughters, and more. Jakiela also shares some of the beautiful ways her friends supported her (or, in some cases, didn't...) throughout her bout with cancer, through the surgeries and during her recuperation. 

Just as her stories always wrap us in a big warm hug of compassion and empathy for just how hard life can be, so too does this conversation, which offers us a permission slip to simply do the best we can with what we've got when it comes to supporting each other. Rather than hang our heads in sorrow and shame for not being there when someone hits a health setback, Lori humbly assures us that feeling guilty isn't the point. "Don't worry," she says. "Everyone is going through something." 

Here's to showing up for our friends as best we can, whenever we can, with all the love we have in our hearts to give. 

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