Gratitude has a way of finding me at the end of a long day—especially when it arrives wrapped in laughter, shared stories, and the simple holiness of sitting around a dinner table.

This past November, that gratitude carried extra weight. The evening I attended Dine with Prime fell on the anniversary of my sister’s passing.

Each year on that day, I make a conscious choice to celebrate life in some way. Not to bypass grief, but to honor it by continuing to live—fully, presently, and intentionally. It is how I remember my sister and honor the life I am still here to live.

My sister, Shannon, had one of those laughs. You always knew what she was up to by the pitch of her giggle—the higher it climbed, the greater the chance she was in the middle of some mischief. Whether she was sneaking into my closet to “borrow” clothes before the school bus came—racing down the hallway, daring me to catch her—or staring me straight in the eyes and threatening to scream for Mom, Shannon’s laugh always gave her away.

She was five years younger than me, the youngest of three. Our brother sat between us. When I left home, she was only eleven. Looking back now, I realize how few years we truly had together. My memories of her come in short, stacked snippets—fragmented by a childhood that was hard in ways we didn’t yet have language to describe.

The truth is, none of the three of us experienced the same mother or the same home at the same time. Our family story shifted, fractured, and reassembled. When my mother remarried, she was gifted a beautiful baby girl—Shannon Marie Hansen.

With time, it has become easier to understand why Shannon turned to alcohol and drugs so young. There weren’t tools. There weren’t models. And none of us—my mother included—were equipped to help her see that there were other ways to process pain.

After high school, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. That move marked nearly nine years of distance between us. Letters and postcards slowly faded as we each continued surviving a past neither of us wanted to revisit.

More than twenty years ago, I moved back east, closer to where we had grown up. This time, we met again as grown women—still carrying the memories of the girls we once were and the sisters we never quite got to be together. I could see the weight in her eyes then. I didn’t fully understand it, but I recognized it.

During that year, I visited her often and spent time with my nephew. For the first time in a long while, we shared something new: toddler boys, close in age. We talked about pregnancies, parenting hopes, and that quiet promise so many of us make—that we will do things differently than we were raised.

She still had that light I remembered. That optimism. That belief that everything was about to change. It didn’t last as long as it should have.

After her son was born, Shannon struggled with postpartum depression that went unseen and untreated. Addiction tightened its grip as she tried to self-medicate her way through the pain. When she later became pregnant with her daughter, hope flickered again—but less than two months after giving birth, she spiraled deeper than ever before.

There wasn’t enough help.
There wasn’t enough time.
There wasn’t enough space to love her back to herself.

On November 13, 2017, her suffering ended.

I was standing in my kitchen, making dinner, when my mother called and said the words that rearrange a life: “She’s gone. She’s dead.”

My very first thought—before the tears came—was: She’s finally free.

Shannon was thirty-five years old. She overdosed thousands of miles away from home and from anyone who truly knew her. By then, we hadn’t spoken in years. Pain and distance had found their way back between us. This time, the ending was final.

In the eight years since her passing, I’ve released the need to answer every unanswered question. Instead, I’ve learned how to feel her—whole, healed, and present in a way that transcends form.

When I ran my first 10K across the Bay Bridge, I felt her with me the entire way—like the wind at my back, urging me forward step by step. I watched sunlight cascade through the clouds and spill across the water. I heard her giggle between the beats of my music and my pounding heart. I even saw her childhood cat, Mojo, in the shapes of the clouds.

A week later, I learned I had cancer.

Somehow—through a race I didn’t even realize was a 10K until it was over—Shannon walked me straight into the next chapter of my faith and healing.

Since then, I’ve learned to remember her on purpose: through memories, photographs, prayer, and by watching her daughter grow. Our youngest girls are two years apart, and as they’ve grown older, they look like sisters.

One of the last times they were together was a sleepover at my house, just days before my sister’s anniversary. I sat on my deck and watched through the window as they laughed inside—two goofy teenagers singing, dancing, and howling with laughter over pizza.

Shannon and I never had those moments. Not as children. Not as young mothers. And we won’t have them as older women finding our way together. But every moment we did have—and even the ones we never got—somehow made this one possible.

I know she was there with me on that deck.

When I bought my ticket for Prime Time for Women’s Dine with Prime, I had no idea it would land on that day. I almost panicked—it was also just before my oldest son was preparing to relocate across the country. But as the evening unfolded, it became exactly where I was meant to be.

We sat around the table laughing, sharing Thanksgiving traditions, earnestly defining “spatchcock turkey,” and discovering one another in real time. Some of us were strangers. Some knew one another through a single lens. A few shared years of history. But with food to share and space to be honest, we became something more.

It felt like sitting at the table with sisters.

None of the women there knew what day it was in my heart. None knew that just hours earlier I had lit a candle in my kitchen to honor the moment my sister left this earth.

And yet, being surrounded by that joy—that authenticity, that living expression of choosing life—was the most fitting tribute I could have imagined.

Prime Time for Women’s vision of cultivating spaces for connection in our prime gave me—and my sister—a meal, a memory, and a moment.

I am deeply grateful for every woman who sat at at Bernadette Wagner’s table that night. I am profoundly moved by the vision of creating dinners where we can talk, share, and learn together.

If you ever have the opportunity to attend a Dine with Prime dinner, I encourage you to say yes.

The dinner is epic.
The women are warriors.
And the memories made—truly—are forever.