Pip: Some questions answer themselves just by being asked — and Gratitude Squared asks one this week that stops you mid-scroll.
Mara: The post takes on love in its most complicated form: what it looks like when it costs something, and what gratitude means when life is genuinely hard.
Pip: Let’s start with the story at the center of all of it.
How May I Capture “Love” In One Post?
Pip: The post opens with a question it never quite resolves — and that’s the point. How do you write about love when the story involves cancer, a goodbye, and a six-pound Yorkie named Mickey?
Mara: The setup matters here. Sherry has been hit by aggressive breast cancer a second time, and in the middle of navigating a double mastectomy and treatment decisions, she also has to decide what happens to Mickey, her dog of thirteen years. The post puts it plainly: “After cancer seemingly has taken everything that is meaningful to one’s life, should it also take one’s best friend?”
Pip: That question lands hard because it isn’t rhetorical. Sherry actually had to answer it — and her answer was to find Mickey a new home rather than let him go without one.
Mara: The logistics are specific and worth sitting with. Sherry and friends located a Yorkie rescue group, found an adoptive family, and arranged a volunteer caravan to carry Mickey north to new parents and Yorkie siblings. The new family, reached by phone, promised to try to love Mickey as much as Sherry does.
Pip: Promised to try. That’s the kind of detail that makes a story real rather than tidy.
Mara: The post is careful not to let the rescue story soften what’s actually happening. It names the cancer directly as the “evil” that doesn’t just damage a body but, as the post says, “literally tears out the heart of the cancer recipient that certainly has done nothing to deserve such a fate.”
Pip: And then it pivots — not away from the grief, but through it — into gratitude. Three times the post repeats the phrase “you are so blessed if you do not,” stacking the ordinary things most of us never think to count.
Mara: There’s a detail at the end that reframes the whole story. Sherry got Mickey thirteen years ago, during her first cancer diagnosis, because caring for him gave her direction and hope. The post’s words: “Mickey fulfilled his job and must now move on.”
Pip: Thirteen years of a dog doing exactly what he was supposed to do. That’s not a small thing to name.
Mara: The post closes by asking readers to send love to both of them as they say goodbye — and to notice, today, whatever blessings their own life holds.
Pip: Gratitude as a practice is easy to talk about in the abstract. Sherry’s story is what it looks like when it’s not abstract at all.
Mara: That tension — between the difficulty of a situation and the choice to stay thankful anyway — is exactly the territory worth returning to.
