Are you a cancer survivor with a complicated family history? If so, I’d like to hear from you, on behalf of my cousin in Germany. Your testimony might help lift her spirits.Edith (who was named after me) was going to visit next summer; to this end, she’d enrolled in a refresher course of conversational English. We visit each other every few years. Our children traveled back and forth during college. Days before Christmas Edith confided, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and is scheduled for surgery in early January. Long-distance travel was out of the question. She’d be in chemo, come summer.Please take time to email your thoughts and experiences, English or German, to e104cook@gmail.com. See WTE column (early Jan 2014) for further details.

Below are pics from Germany. The one of Edith and yours truly stems from my visit in August 2008. From 1991 is the one of Edith and her mother Anna, who passed in 2010 at almost 90 years of age