This is the continuation of a thread or threads I began on Linkedin a few months ago. Please do a search on Linkedin and you will find several different accounts, hidden threads, comments from students and colleagues, my musings and what has been happeing to me over the last few years--the joys I have had raising my daughter by myself for the last 35 years while climbing from Community College to the Ivy League, and most specifically my battle with Metastatic Breast Cancer and my impending demise in the next few months. The Linkedin pages got a bit messy, so I decided to move my thread here, where I will be learning as I write, and hoping to turn this into an interactive site the way the Linkedin pages were doing, before the assistance of my Stalker who kept fuddling things up. But I do hope that you get a chance to catch up on what I had written there. Please feel free to contact me privately through the information on my Contact Page or join in the discussion on the Guest Contribution Page. I am particularly interested in the ways in which my teaching, either through my writing, classroom teaching, the way I lived my life and parented so many children, or any way in which my presence on this earth touched you, your life, or still impacts you. 

I entitled this web blog, "The End of an Era" as my life encompassed so many things and different stages. But there are too many to go into here. Many of my friends have suggested that I write a book. There seems to be a big demarcation, however, between my early fast and loose rock and roll days of the Jim Carroll Band, the Stones, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, etc, to my single mom and striving academic days, and, of course, lastly, how I pull them all together in my journey into the next realm recalling the joys and struggles, the ways in which my daughter and I made up our own lives under our terms, and the new challenges of being medevacked, poked, cut, struggled, and live through the imminent end of my life, ultimately to let go, enter a hospice program, stop all treatment and experience the last few months of my life. 

I thank all of those who have taken this journey with me. I hope you continue. I promise I won't take you with me the entire way.

Laurie