Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black. On this episode of our show, we'll get a behind-the-scenes look at a very special journey undertaken by a 90-year-old

woman who was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and advised to have surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

That woman, Norma Jean Bauer Schmidt, said no to conventional cancer treatments and yes,

to a life on the road instead. Going with her on

that road trip of a lifetime was her son, Tim, and his wife, Ramey Little, who've written about

the experience in the book, Driving Miss Norma. It's all about one family's journey saying yes

to living. Ramey, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

Let's back up a little bit and set the scene in terms of what was happening in your mother-in-law

Norma's life before the road trip began. Well, I'm going to back up a step before that. My husband

and I have lived on the road for quite

some time. We lived in a little 19-foot airstream travel trailer. And every summer, we would show up

at Norma and her husband Leo, my father-in-law's home in northern Michigan. And we would spend a good period of time with them

and have a nice summer and do whatever's on the honey-do list to make us feel like we could

drive away again and come back around the next time. In the summer of 2015, when we arrived there, we knew that

Leo Norma were grief-stricken. Norma's last sibling had just died a month before, and they were

very close friends. Once we arrived there, what we did not know was that Leo was not well.

And so he had a compression fracture in his back. The moment that we arrived there, we realized

something was very wrong. They didn't come to greet us in the driveway like they normally did.

And a long story short, Leo ended up dying 10 days later after we got there.

In the midst of him going through his kind of end of life process in the hospital and then

eventually in a hospice facility, Norma leaned over to me of life process in the hospital and then eventually in a hospice facility

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