Cancer has taken many members of my family from uncles, cousins, great grandmother, great aunts, mother & sister.
It’s tough to forget that conversation one July day with my mother sitting in her favorite chair in my home. There we sat, me with a black baseball cap on, her — my mother — with a blondish wig on her head. Asking me what I thought about it. A few years prior, my husband and I fell in love with Colorado's Pike's Peak, picking it off a map, we decided to go see the beautiful mountain scenery again.
We made plans, went and returned.
This one July day my mother had been waiting until we returned to deliver her devastating news.
It was the first few days into her cancer diagnosis. She was frightened and I sat reassuring her that she would win the battle. It was months later, I decided to talk to her about her "battle." She quickly corrected me. In the past, before she got sick and before she died October 10, 1982, I used to call it a battle, never realizing how dumb of a word that was to use. “Battle” implies there is a winner and a loser: There really is neither when it comes to any kind of Cancer. It was impossible for the cancer to really win she said. “If I die, it dies with me.” How right she was. October is Cancer Awareness Month, when everything will be wrapped in pink, ribbons will be worn and memories will be talked about.
Memories of my mother are not hard to come by. She was a constant force in my life. The woman who was born and raised in Missouri except for a short stint with two elder aunt's as a young teen before marrying my father, another local boy. She came back to Missouri to eventually marry, wait for my father to serve in WWII, then raise her family wherever my father's job took us. But, for some reason, my mind … my memories of her … always goes back to that day in July that she had to tell me she had Cancer. And I’ll always be grateful for the conversation months later, the last time my mother really openly talked about what she was going through. The last monumental memory of her, she was just a husk of her former self.
Sitting in her chair, wig on, her face tired and thin as I made chili for all of us. She was silent. I kissed her on the forehead, she looked at me and said don't worry for me. I have come to accept death. I am at peace with it. A few months later everything changed forever for our family.
Then some twenty years later our family endured the repeat agony of watching my bother in-law and then my sister taken by Cancer too. That’s why this month "October" is important to me.
I pray that there can be a cure of this ugly disease and the Wrath of Hell for any person, drug company or etc that exploit this horrific killer.
Nana
P.S.
Today would have been my parents' Wedding Anniversary.
コメント