james t kirk

I am very sorry my friend.

My eyes are burning right now.

I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer in April of 99, and my father to lung cancer in April of 2004. Even though I was closer to my mother, my father's passing was ten times harder to endure. I think about my parents every day. I know all too well the space you are in right now.

As cold as this might sound, until you have lost a parent or both, you can't really relate. I know myself before my mother died if I had of read a post like yours, or had been told similar news by a friend, I would have responded with sympathy, but it wouldn't really have affected me. Now I am feeling sick to my stomach because I know all too well everything you are describing. It's humbling, and it's a hard way to die.

Like your mother, my mother was also a teacher. Grade 3 and 4. She worked most of her life teaching kids to read and write. I think that's a noble thing to be remembered for. My mother was only retired for perhaps five years when cancer struck. Like your mother is right now, my mother was 6 years ago. I can still remember it like it was yesterday. I can picture the room she was in, the noise that the IV pump made, the state she was in. How she lingered for days once she was readmitted to the hospital for the last time. How on the first day, there were conversations, after the third day sentences perhaps, and finally, just murmering.

At first when she was diagnosed, you think that they have made a mistake, then you think that you can beat this thing, then you get scared that they might be right, then you hope for a miracle, then you pray for death so that she might know peace at least. When you think that the last breath has to be it, you are amazed that it is followed with even another breath. The will to survive is strong. You wonder which of your relatives already on the other side will come to collect her. You wonder why they haven't come yet. Can't they see that this is just needless suffering. Please come. But she keeps breathing, defying the logic of death.

You spend nights in the hospital with her, your sister spends the days. Neither of you want your mother to die alone. This goes on for a week. Finally when death arrives, you are sleeping in your car on the side of a highway because you are exhausted and can't continue. Your sister who has taken over for the day was actually out of the room while the nurses tended to her. You think to yourself that she probably waited for that exact moment when neither of us were there.

So my friend, I have seen what you are now seeing. You are not alone and I am thinking about you at this moment in a far away place, living your moment of pain and reliving my own. My thoughts go out to you.

If I can offer one thing, that would be to think of this not as good bye, but just as see you in a while.