Hi, I'm Shanda
It took me some time, but I built the map I wish every family had.
I've spent my life taking complicated systems and making them plain. Then I watched the people I love go through leukemia, loss, and long nights at the Hope Lodge. And one day, driving one of those long windy roads, my mother wondered out loud whether my Aunt Sissy had ever left them the passwords to everything.
She wasn't worried for herself. She was worried for her children.
That's the moment I decided. Nobody should have to figure this out with their gut switched off by grief.
Read my whole story →
When I was a girl, the thing I feared most in the world was death. I prayed that God would never make me look at it. Then one day I got left in a room at the city morgue, where my Aunt Sissy worked, by accident, surrounded by the dead. There was a little girl there, stitched up so carefully, so gently. Instead of the fear I'd braced for my whole life, what rose up in me was a prayer. For her family. That whatever came next for the people she left behind, they'd find their way through it.
I watched Aunt Sissy go through leukemia. I lost my Aunt Stephanie, and watched a family try to gather up the pieces for the only child she left behind. Now I sit with my own mother in her fight, at the Hope Lodge.
When my mother asked about the passwords, it turned out Sissy had left them. But my mother was afraid her own children would be handed a box of papers and left to guess which one mattered. So I built what I wish every family had: a way to live every ordinary day all the way to the edges, and leave the people we love a map instead of a mess.
That's the small favor I want to do for you. That's One More Favor.