Postby jmn » Fri Apr 05, 2019 1:52 pm
So sorry to hear of your loss.
When I read your post, I thought right away of one of my friends who died of cancer at age 27, leaving behind her husband and one-year-old son. In the aftermath of her passing, we all struggled to cope with our grief and come to grips with her death. We all sought to understand it, to make sense of it, when the truth of the matter is that we’ll never make sense of it.
Here’s an excerpt from a blog entry that I read recently, though it was written nearly five years ago by an oncologist who lost his father to lung cancer:
When my dad died, I so intensely wanted to understand it. I repeatedly attempted and failed to construct a narrative that made sense, this loss of a central role model when perhaps he would be most needed as time pulled me into adulthood. I wanted to make it a Hemingway story, stripped of anything superfluous and brutal but romantic in the way the characters were battered by their circumstances but were still sufficiently self-contained to walk themselves home at the end of the book.
I continue to fail at this, and forgive the speculation but it can’t be easier when a child is at the center. There’s no context in which it makes sense, there’s no greater plan whose outcome makes it forgivable (and generally I’m a believer in greater plans) …
When the death of a loved one to cancer shatters our world, all we can do is what you’re doing: you gather your resolve, pick up the pieces of your life, and do your best to move on and keep what matters in sight—and that means taking good care of yourself and your kids.
My heart goes out to you. Blessings on you and your children.
DX: CC, 7-9-18 @ age 61, male
Severe anemia (4.5 g/dl), 5-11-18; colonoscopy, 6-29-18
Lap-assisted right hemicolectomy, 7-16-18
G2, cecal adenocarcinoma, 4.2 x 3.7 x 0.7 cm
Stage IIB, pT4aN0 (first pathology DX: pT3N0)
0/24 lymph nodes, LVI present, PNI present, surgical margins clear, MSS
CEA: 3.0 (pre-op, 7-10-18); 0.7 (post-op, 8-8-18)
TX: Xeloda (capecitabine), 10-16-18 to 4-21-19
5 years of clear scans and colonoscopies
Released from MSK surveillance, 7-20-23 - NED