My wife’s mother has been battling cancer off and on for 6+ years. This last Wednesday she died in her sleep. The wife and I had not truly known the seriousness of her situation and only learned just how bad it was recently. Once we learned the true extent of her illness we made the pilgrimage to Georgia where she was being treated. It was there that we learned that she had told one of the nurses that she was ‘waiting’ for Jacqui to come visit her. I am awed at the power of her spirit. She was so diminished looking, I could not share with my wife my true feelings at the time; that there didn’t seem to be anything left of her. And the truth is, all that was left was her spirit, her incredible will to live despite the sheer hell her body had been put through, to live even though the cancer and the cancer ‘treatment’ had taken just about everything it could take. Her will powered by love and the need to say goodbye to her daughter and grandchild. She passed roughly 72 hours after we left.
You feel a lot of things in a time like this. You ponder so many different thoughts, and your mind and heart travel though some dark places. Did she give up? Did she let go? I don’t think so. With every once of conviction I can muster, I don’t think so. I actually think the reverse is true: that she had kept herself going well past the time her body wanted to give in; that in the end she was like a frail paper lantern, adrift in a storm, kept lit only by the need to say goodbye to the ones she loved.