A mother shares her emotional journey through the devastating loss of her daughter to breast cancer — a story of love, grief, and the enduring power of memory.
Phyllis: Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and being willing to share Sarah's story with everyone who's going to be able to listen to this podcast. It's going to be so meaningful to so many people. And I just want to start from the beginning. I first heard about Sarah from our friend, Carla Galanos, in Dallas. And I believe you were in a Bible study with her. Is that correct?
Denise: That is. We were in an international Bible study and she was in Chicago and I was in New England at the time. So, we were doing something of the same thing in two different areas. We kind of came to be friends though when both of us moved to Dallas, Texas, and that's how we became friends.
Phyllis: Well, you know, I remember meeting Sarah for the first time and we had lunch together, and I remember she had the prettiest smile and was just radiant. I mean, her energy was so joyful and alive, and it always filled the entire room that she was in. I remember when you and she came to my home for a Christmas party, I think it was, and she was standing in front of the staircase, and everyone came and said, “Who is that beautiful girl over there with that radiant smile?” I said, “Well, that’s Sarah and that’s her lovely mother, Denise.” Sarah was a cancer patient in Houston, and her mother is here with her right now. It was just always such a joy to be in her presence. And she had this wonderful blog that she had created, The Happy Envelope. That was her company, she and her husband’s company. I want you to tell our audience a little bit about the blog, if you would, Denise.
Denise: Well, it started as something related to the company. She was talking more about, because it was a stationery company and she was a graphic designer, she was talking about protocol for monograms and stationery of wedding invitations and that kind of thing. But really it began to take traction when she was diagnosed with cancer and started blogging about the cancer journey. She always said that cancer was just a way to talk about hard things. And you can talk about cancer. There were lots of hard things that you just can’t talk about, but the concepts apply though. So that’s when it started to really grow and become something on its own merit apart from the company, but still affiliated. You can get it on their website along with the other recordings that she did, some of them quite significant. That’s really nice.
Phyllis: Well, I shared Sarah’s blog with my friends in Houston and Dallas and other cities, New York, and every one of us was so touched. She had an extraordinary gift for putting into words what so many of us could only feel. Her strength, her courage. She just had such an impactful, powerful way of expressing herself, much like her mother, I might add.
Denise: I hope so. I can only hope.
Phyllis: So, to begin with, why don’t you tell us about Sarah’s treatment, the very beginning of it? She started out in Knoxville. Is that right?
Denise: She did, and she went to MD Anderson initially, just because, and came home thinking that her— I mean, originally her cancer was diagnosed as breast cancer, and we just thought that she didn’t need to go back and forth to Houston and be bound up by that routine, so she would be able to have her treatment in Knoxville and that would be sufficient. So that’s where we started. Eventually then she did return to MD Anderson for treatment when the diagnosis had changed some, and I think that’s as you said, when you entered the story, was after we knew she had inflammatory breast cancer and things had changed at that point to some degree.
Phyllis: Well, I remember she went through her surgery in Tennessee, and then she sent me a photo. We had been introduced through Carla, and she sent me a photo of a rash outbreak on her breast, and I looked at that and I immediately knew that that was inflammatory breast cancer. Tell me, what was it like to receive a diagnosis that your daughter had breast cancer?
Denise: At the very beginning, I think sometimes she described things better than I can, and she was giving a talk at a church for 750 women or whatever and talking about her story and going back to the beginning. She did frame it up by talking about the fact that she had pre-Christmas plans and had put these things up on her mantle that she loved... While a friend of hers was doing the arrangement on the mantle, that poster fell forward and knocked everything to the floor, and it was just shattered in shards of glass and glitter everywhere. It was a mess. And she was standing making tea in the kitchen and she said she had the thought at that time, “Well, if this isn’t a picture of how my life is right now, I don’t know what is.”
I have to say, it's kind of collateral, but when your child hurts, you hurt. And it was being alongside, but, there you go... And their life was going to change, our life was going to change, and the mantle was a good picture of that.
Phyllis: I remember her talking about that in her blog. She had the lyrics of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
Denise: That was the poster!
Phyllis: And that was the poster that came down. Glass went everywhere. And you know what? A sense of humor in a trying time. “Well, I guess if that’s not a picture of my life right now.”
Denise: You know, too, I should predicate all of this on the basis of the fact that we are a people of serious faith and Sarah grew up with that, and their family is framed by that. So it does affect how we enter into things like this and how we process it. But I would say initially, particularly, we have a lot of people in our life who have been through breast cancer and gone through it just fine and are doing just fine. So we didn’t feel like it was a death sentence at that time. We just thought it was something we would get through. And we had a lot of people that were praying for us. And of course, Sarah had thousands praying for her. Lots of immediate answers to things that would come up, and that was very encouraging. Long term, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that we didn’t receive from God exactly what we were asking for on the front end.
Phyllis: Of course. Yeah.
Denise: Encouraging to have that many people tracking with us and praying for us.
Phyllis: The support was overwhelming for Sarah and for your family. So you were living in Atlanta, and Sarah was living in Knoxville, and now she’s in Houston. How did you cope with all that? I know you spent some time in Houston.
Denise: We did. When Sarah had her surgery, which was a big one, Ty was there for a couple of weeks, but then he had to go home for life. And then we were the next folks that came for a couple of weeks. After the surgery, she went to radiation, so she was there for several months. And at the end of that, we just brought the family in and did Christmas there in Houston. Initially, it was four years before that. She was diagnosed in 2020, I believe. We didn’t know what it was going to mean, so we just kind of put our life in a flexible mode and went and got an apartment in Knoxville so that we could be there if we were needed. It was just about the time that COVID was ramping up and so everybody was in a sort of state of fluctuation. It wasn’t a hard thing for Steve to move his office work from our house and office here, to judy setup an office and apartment there. It probably ended up being more than anything a vote of solidarity. They had a lot of support there. They have tight ties, Sarah’s husband has a large family there, they’re present, that’s their rhythm of life. And they eased into it and Sarah did everything she needed to do with better than ordinary strength. We were happy to be there. I had some, I don't know if you call coping, but it was part of the joy of being there, just some spontaneous moments. Our granddaughter, the youngest one, was three. She had spouted wisdom like, “The doctors are going to take off mommy’s boobies, and it’s okay because they’ll probably put them back on later.” And I’m not going to argue with that logic, but it was the kind of thing we got on the ground there that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Phyllis: Sure.
Denise: You know, you just do one day at a time what you can do as much as you know.
Phyllis: Oh, yes. Well, I’m going to share, we’ve been talking about Sarah’s blog, and I’m going to share a section from her blog so others can feel her faith, her heart, her depth, and what she was going through. This is titled Facing the Right Direction:
“When news is happy and when it’s not. When things feel good and when they don’t. When we wait living in an uncomfortable place of in between, we are invited to face the right direction.”
And she wrote her favorite verse, Psalm 34:5: “Those who look to Him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame.”
And then she wrote: “I was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 2020, meaning it’s been over three years since I’ve been walking this out. Some seasons have been better than others. Some days are better than others. Some news is good. Sometimes news is terrible. Three years later, I still have cancer, but then again, I’m also still alive.”
Phyllis: Sarah was rejoicing in remission, as you and I and her friends and family were, and then it came back. What was that like for you, Denise? It's a hard question, I know...
Denise: Cancer has been— I mean, it’s not my term, but it’s been called a roller coaster, and I think we experienced that in our life. Up and down and up and down. When the cancer responded in the first place to chemo and receded, the tumor receded greatly. The surgeon went in and said there was hardly anything there, and he did a little happy dance and we were up. Then, as a part of the surgery, they took a lymph node from the other side of her body and it turned out to be cancerous, which was unexpected, and we were down. Nobody knew. They said, “We’ll wait and see.” Since there wasn’t any great alarm, we were up. Then the rash came, we were down. Then we went to MD Anderson and they had the surgery and said it was gone, and we were up. I think I lost count, but you know, I have to say for me, because everybody's different, but I never really totally felt complete relief. I mean, they say that it, especially with inflammatory breast cancer, you have to go about five years before you can really breathe easy. And I just never did. We never got the five years.
Phyllis: In February, Sarah received this remarkable report that she had no terminal cancer in her body. I remember hearing her on a podcast talking about her recovery. She wrote a blog called Favored and she was ever so joyful. And then she writes,
“And I noticed that my pants were tight. My tummy was bulging. Gosh, I’ve got to lay off those carbs, I thought. By the next week, my abdomen looked like I was a few months pregnant. I was on to loose-fitting dresses and sweatpants. As the swelling grew, so did an unbearable pain along my lower back, sides, and under the front of my abdomen. I stood in our bathroom one night, and Ty," her husband, "tenderly touched my belly. It was as tight as a drum and as large as a watermelon. ‘Honey, this doesn’t seem right. This isn’t fat. Something is wrong with your liver and we need to get you to a doctor.’”
The breast cancer had moved to her liver. That was devastating for all of us when we heard that, Denise. Sarah eventually passed away, and can you share how your life has changed? What—how—what is that like?
Denise: I can’t really think of anything that hasn’t changed. I mean, it’s all changed. Most of the people in our strata of life are dealing with the aging process, and our children are getting older. You can see that the axis that you’ve turned on all these years is going to change because your children are growing up. They go to college. We’ve got five grandchildren. Four of them are in college, and one is getting ready to go. And you just start to see that life is going to change. It’s going to take on a whole different paradigm. These kids are going to get married. Families are going to shift. So there’s that going on for us, as it does for everybody pretty much naturally. But then we also have the component of having this connection to half of our children dramatically changed. And so, I can’t say we’ve got it figured out. I think it’s just a learning curve.
Phyllis: Well, I sent Dr. Ueno, who was Sarah’s oncologist, her last blog titled, “When day comes and the fire is out, I want to know I gave you my everything.” And this was his response: “Despite the heart-wrenching circumstances, she encourages us to embrace the unpredictability of life, find solace in faith, and trust in the divine plan. It is a testament to her strength of the human spirit.” And I thought those words were so comforting and so true to all of us. Do you recall what words of comfort were most helpful to you along your journey, Denise?
Denise: You know, everybody wants to offer words of comfort. They want to fix this, you know, we do. All along the way, it was not even all words. It’s the things that go along with the words. Sometimes people wrote to us, cards with tender, heartfelt sentiment, and those were special. But all in all, you know, words don’t fix it. They can help, but they don’t fix it. There were acts of encouragement, and sometimes just coming alongside. The great gift is presence—just being there. I want to be with you. There are a few people who did that after the fact particularly, who couldn’t be at Sarah’s funeral or her celebration of life, but who just came to see us because they wanted to be there.
But during the process, people came, and while we were going back and forth to Knoxville from here with two cats in the car that were not happy about being there—sometimes it was going to be a quick trip—people would come and stay here, get the mail, water my plants outside, be with the cats that snubbed them anyway. Just very kind. We had people send flowers to us, but even to Sarah when she had surgery, with little notes like, “We love your parents.” People sent meals that we didn’t need, but they just wanted to love us, and we loved them back for it. People sent money to Sarah and Ty so that it would be easier to get to Houston and their frequent trips there.
And then there were the people that were encouraging to us, to see them come around Ty and Sarah. There were six couples, I think, about that many, that committed on the front end very early on to be there doing the heavy lifting if anything needed to be done—to be helpful—because Ty and Sarah would be depleted with all they would need to handle this. And they called themselves the “Titty Committee,” and they were just wonderful. They met every so often to plan and strategize. Emily Miller was—Sarah pegged her to be her, I want to say admin help—but the person that would come alongside, take notes with the doctors, and help consolidate it. All these people tracked with us and with Ty and Sarah way longer than anybody on the front end ever thought this was going to be, and for much deeper distress, and more—it was just so much more expansive than anybody thought. Ty’s family was always there and supportive. I just can’t even list the things that people did.
But I have to say too, it doesn’t just appear like a vapor out of nothing. Ty and Sarah lived a lifestyle of being invested with people and giving to people. And so, I think out of that, to a larger degree too, it was encouraging to see—and it is encouraging to see—that your grown children are living a healthy life of productivity and being with people and investing in the right sorts of things. People felt privileged to be able to help, and that was an encouragement—uplifting to watch.
Phyllis: Yes, and they were so well respected in the community and loved in Knoxville. I had heard how deeply they were involved in the community and how highly regarded they were. Denise, thank you for sharing about the loss of your beautiful Sarah. I pray that your strength and honesty will bring light and comfort to other mothers who have faced or are facing the heartbreak of watching a daughter near the end of her journey. And Sarah left this prayer behind:
“Dear Father, I am content to leave my life in your hands, knowing that you have counted every hair on my head. I am content to give over my will to you, believing that you can find a righteousness, an integrity that I could never have obtained on my own. I am content to leave all my loved ones in your care, believing that your love for them is greater than mine. I am content to leave in your hands the cause of truth and justice and the coming of your kingdom, believing that my passion for them is just a feeble shadow of your steady purpose.”
That was her prayer that she left behind. And you all are, I can see, doing as well as can be expected. And I want to encourage everyone that’s listening to this podcast or that will listen to it to go to The Happy Envelope, where Sarah’s blogs and her writings are. They’re just a beautiful capture of her journey with cancer—what she felt, her disappointments, her fears—but in the end, her strength and her courage. She is a witness to everyone, in life and in the diseases that they will face. She was a strength of nature and of God. Thank you, Denise, again, for joining me and for giving us all this wonderful information. We love you.
Denise: Thank you for having me.
Phyllis: I miss you. God bless you.
Denise: God bless you too. Thank you.
Phyllis: You’re welcome.
Copyright © 2025 CMedEd.com
