A Holiday Full of Wonder for Nora Titzer and Her Family
The countryside outside Boonville, Indiana, has a way of teaching patience. It is a place where cattle move slow, where days stretch long, and where families build their lives around land, livestock, and seasons. For Nora Titzer, thirty years old, and her husband, Joe, who are raising a young son in Southern Indiana, this winter looks different than they ever expected — but it is one they’re determined not to lose to cancer.
Nora grew up on a dairy farm in the same region where she lives now, the kind of childhood shaped by early mornings and animals that needed tending before the school bus ever reached the end of the lane. She thought she would return to her family’s farm someday, but life rerouted her. She went to Purdue University, studied animal science with an agribusiness focus, and built a career in poultry research, studying how environmental habits influence egg quality. It is a job she never envisioned but grew to love.
She met her husband in college, married him four years ago, and moved even farther south in Indiana, where they now run a small grain operation alongside their full-time jobs in agriculture. Their son, Elliott, is two and a half — an age where the world still feels enormous and entirely possible. They have a blue heeler puppy named Claude who keeps pace with all of it.
Nora and her son.
Nora stays busy by nature. She works full time, helps run the farm, volunteers as a 4-H council officer, and leans into a life that prefers full days to idle thoughts. But beneath that busyness is the identity she cherishes most: being Elliott’s mom. It is the role she prayed for, the one she hoped for long before she held him.
Cancer arrived in the middle of trying for their second child. At first, she brushed off the soreness and changes, chalking them up to hormones and the familiar guessing game of conception. But the feeling in her left breast didn’t fade. After turning thirty — literally two days later — she saw her doctor, who initially suspected something benign. When the lump persisted, a mammogram was ordered. On July 16, the radiologist told her she needed an emergency biopsy. Two days later, she received the words that rearranged everything: Stage 2 Invasive Ductal Carcinoma, HER2+, affecting her left breast and one axillary lymph node.
Her world narrowed to scans, appointments, and oncology consults. A navigation nurse called within minutes of her diagnosis, lining up MRIs, a PET scan, and port placement surgery. She and her husband visited a nearby fertility clinic, hoping to preserve embryos in case treatment limited her future chances of having another child. In the span of hours, everything familiar shifted — their routines, their plans for a second baby, their sense of what the next year might look like.
Nora speaks plainly about what this season has taken from her. Cancer disrupted her life at every level: her family’s rhythm, her body’s cues, her hopes for another child, and her sense of normal.
But even in the middle of treatment, one part of her life stayed at the center: Elliott. He is two and a half — still fully in the magic of Christmas, still wide-eyed at lights and Santa and wrapped boxes he can’t wait to tear open. This is the age Nora hoped she would never have to miss.
This year, she won’t.
The Rural Gone Urban Foundation’s Love Bomb will give Nora the chance to create a Christmas worthy of Elliott’s sense of wonder — one filled with gifts she can’t pick up on her rushed treatment days, decorations she hasn’t had the energy to assemble, small traditions that make the season feel whole again, and the quiet, ordinary moments that feel like their own kind of grace.
It will give her family a holiday insulated, even briefly, from the medical schedules and unknowns that have defined the past several months. It will give Elliott a Christmas his mother is present for — not distracted by appointments or fatigue, but rooted beside him in the moments he will remember long after this season ends.
And it will give Nora something too: the space to breathe, to witness her son’s joy, and to feel the steadiness that comes when life offers a pause.
This Love Bomb is a way of returning December to a woman who has spent the year bracing for impact. It is a season she will not lose to cancer. It is a Christmas her son will carry with him. And it is a reminder that even when life breaks open in ways no one asks for, magic still finds its way back home.
