Stupid Cancer, Part 14

The last time I wrote, I began by wishing that I could soon stop writing about this topic. It seems my wish was granted, but not exactly in the way I'd hoped. You see, my sister passed away exactly one month ago.

I've considered writing many times in the past month but I couldn't. The pain and the sadness was too fresh and overwhelming. I needed to sit with it a while. I am reminded of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem, The Invitation...

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

That is what I have spent most of the past month doing: sitting with my pain, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. At least as much as I could. There were times when I had to function and I would put my grief aside, but it would always come back. It still does. Every now and then something will remind me of my sister. It's often something small or relatively insignificant, like piano sheet music or Hershey's Kisses. It's not looking at photos or talking about her, likely because I am aware of the emotions that will elicit and I can prepare myself for them. When these unexpected reminders occur, I am usually taken back to the moment that I found out that she died and I am overcome with sadness and loss and tears. I know that someday those moments will also subside and that I will be left mostly with just memories.

My sister died quickly. Her health had been steadily and rapidly declining all summer. There were the brain tumours and then we found out about a spinal tumour (which was causing her paralysis) and then there were apparently some lung tumours that I hadn't even really been told about. The cancer was spreading quickly and vehemently. However, she was not yet at a point where they had stopped her treatment or were talking about hospice care. She and my brother-in-law had made some funeral plans but I don't think they'd done much more than that in terms of preparing for her death. She was in declining health but no one expected her to die when she did. I suppose that is a blessing. We didn't have to deal with a long, drawn out, steady decline. There were no hospital visits, no difficult decisions to be made. In the grand scheme of things, she went the best way. For her. She avoided the suffering, but none of us were prepared.

It was Labour day. She was sitting in the living room with her family and suddenly said to her husband that she felt faint. He went to help her lie down and she stopped breathing. He did CPR and the paramedics did what they could but they weren't able to resuscitate her.

On my end, it went like this: I got a phone call shortly after 4 pm from my mother. She said that my BIL had just called, that my sister had stopped breathing and they were on the way to the hospital. My parents were going to meet them there. I wasn't sure how dire the situation was and my sister had had breathing issues before. I was worried, but I was somehow under the impression that she'd stopped breathing temporarily. About an hour later, my BIL called me to say that my sister had died. It was the worst phone call I've ever received and it put me straight into shock. Obviously, everyone in the room could tell it was a bad conversation. I hung up the phone and blurted, "She died." That was really not the best way to tell my 11-year-old daughter that her aunt had passed away, but there is no thinking in times like that. You brain is a swirling bright light, you're trying to stay conscious, you're trying to comprehend what just happened, you're trying to find words and get them out. It was all I could do.

Luckily, my best friend happened to be visiting that day. She, her husband and their two kids stopped in for dinner and a short visit on their way through town. They arrived about 10 minutes before the first phone call. I was so glad to have had her here throughout it all, and, of all my friends who live around here, she's known me the longest. We've been friends since we were 14; since we all lived at home with our siblings and parents. I was glad to have had someone here who knew my sister.

The next couple of hours were chaotic. I was still trying to make dinner (we all had to eat and I had already started) but there were phone calls and texts and questions and comforting my kids and simply trying to grasp the utter magnitude of what had happened.

I'm still trying to grasp what has happened. I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that my sister isn't there anymore, that I'm an only child, that my BIL is a single parent, that my nieces (aged 13 & 17) don't have a mom, that my parents have lost their eldest, most beloved child. It's hard to understand.

These first few weeks following her death were mostly spent dealing with the shock, but I'm sure as time goes on, I'll begin to notice her absence even more and begin to miss her even more. For example, next weekend is Thanksgiving. As is customary, we're all getting together for dinner. While it's important for us to be together as a family, it's also going suck tremendously that my sister won't be there. And Christmas will be the same thing. And so on.

So, even though this is my last Stupid Cancer post, it's really not, because every post and everything I do from now on will bear the mark of Stupid Cancer. Because Stupid Cancer has taken my sister.