The Secret She Unlocked Hours After a Life-Altering Diagnosis.

When life begins to slip away, something remarkable happens — the mind starts gathering pieces of the past like seashells on a beach.

At least, that’s what she has discovered.

Memories arrive in bright, sharp bursts, refusing to fade: the muddy backyard where she and her childhood friend shaped a “birthday cake” from dirt and decorated it with candles and a tiny American flag… only to watch in wide-eyed horror as the flag burst into flames.

Or her college boyfriend, who insisted on wearing boat shoes in a snowstorm, slipping directly into a puddle of slush while she laughed harder than she should have, knowing deep down the relationship had run its course.

Maybe the mind replays these moments because hers — along with all of them — are running out.

On May 25, 2024, at 7:05 in the morning, her daughter came into the world.

She and her husband, George, barely had time to marvel at the tiny miracle before everything shifted.

Hours later, a strange blood count turned into a terrifying possibility.

A normal white-blood-cell count hovers around 4,000 to 11,000.

Hers was 131,000.

Doctors first thought it might be pregnancy-related.

Then they didn’t.

“It’s not leukemia,” she told her husband.

“What are they talking about?”

But it was.

Acute myeloid leukemia — with a rare mutation called Inversion 3 — one typically found in the elderly.

She had just turned 34.

One moment she was introducing her toddler son to his newborn sister; the next, she was being wheeled to another floor, her children drifting away behind her like a fading dream.

She had always planned to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also their promise.

During treatment, she learned that one of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, was originally derived from a Caribbean sea sponge.

The irony struck her: she had wanted to write about the ocean’s hidden power, and now her life depended on it.

But she will not finish that book.

She will not know whether the world saved its oceans or let them turn into boiling wastelands.

She may not see her children grow into the people she imagines so clearly.

But she hopes they will remember her — not the illness, not the hospital rooms, but that she loved the world enough to write about it.

That she believed in its beauty, even when she was running out of time.

And she hopes the world remembers something too:

That life is made of small, glowing flashes — backyard mud cakes, slushy puddles, a newborn’s tiny fingers — and those moments are worth fighting for, worth holding onto, worth cherishing while we still can.