Even though cancer is pervasive throughout my own family, I still don't know how to cope with its diagnosis. You'd think I would know by now after my mother, my sister, my great-nephew, several cousins and a close friend.

You just take one day at a time I guess, but you still end up feeling so unable to figure out what to say, how to think, how to feel. What you have to try to do, although I don't know that I ever achieved it, is not to let it rob you of today - the hours and minutes of our lives. Maybe that is what our Zippy has already discovered.