If you have ever loved someone so much that you quietly rearranged your whole life around them, this conversation will feel familiar.
At twenty-two, Andrea Wilson Woods got the phone call that split her life into a before and an after. Her mother no longer wanted to be a mother, and her eight-year-old sister, Adrienne, needed someone. Andrea said yes without knowing what she was saying yes to. She worked multiple jobs so she could be there for school pickups, dinners, and school events. She built a life around one person. And then, three weeks shy of finishing her first year of high school, Adrienne was diagnosed with stage four cancer. What followed was 147 days, and a grief that Andrea would spend years learning how to actually feel.
This is a story about caregiving, about the friends who show up and the ones who quietly disappear, about laughing in hospital rooms because laughter is its own kind of survival. It is about the mistake of pretending you are okay, and the slow work of finding yourself again when the person who was your center is gone.
What You'll Hear:
• What it means to become a parent to your sibling before you are ready
• Why some people vanish when things get hard, and how to ask for the help you actually need
• The humor that lived inside the hardest days
• The cost of pushing grief down, and why grieving out loud matters
• Advocating for someone you love, all the way to the end
• What it looks like to find a new North Star, more than once
Guest Bio
Andrea Wilson Woods is a keynote speaker, a writer who loves to tell stories, and a patient advocate who founded the nonprofit Blue Faery: The Adrienne Wilson Liver Cancer Association. For over ten years, Andrea worked in the education field as a teacher and professor for public and private schools as well as universities. Andrea obtained her master's degree in professional writing from the University of Southern California; her nonfiction writing has won national awards. Her best-selling and award-winning book, Better Off Bald: A Life in 147 Days, is a medical memoir about raising and losing her sister to liver cancer.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Andrea-Wilson-Woods/author/B07X51HH8W
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawilsonwoods/
https://www.facebook.com/bluefaerylivercancer/
https://www.instagram.com/bluefaeryliver/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/blue-faery
https://www.youtube.com/c/BlueFaery/
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sibling loss, becoming a parent young, caregiving and grief, losing a sister, delayed grief, finding purpose after loss, childhood parentification, hospice and dying at home, friendships that fade after loss, finding a new north star
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