In case you missed my previous posts, I'm 36 years old, mother to a beautiful 5-month-old baby girl, loving wife of nearly 12 years to my amazing husband and soulmate, and I've just recently been diagnosed with colon cancer that has spread everywhere. And I do mean everywhere: my brain, spine, lungs, ovaries, liver...there's nowhere it hasn't touched. The only symptoms I had were a slightly sore back and slightly narrower stool. There's nothing the doctors can do, and I have only weeks or days to live.
Somehow I've been coping semi-okay I guess...at times feeling something like a peace that passes all understanding, though also at times feeling futile anger and sometimes even hope that I'll be miraculously healed, even though I know it's not rational. I've written letters goodbye to my loved ones, made arrangements for after I'm gone, and in general feel "okay" about what will happen after my death (despite feeling immense and inexpressible sadness that I won't be there to watch my beautiful baby girl and my amazing nephew grow up and to take care of my husband and family. But that's not the plan for my life, so I have to accept it and move on.)
What I'm having a REALLY hard time with is how my parents and husband and sister will handle my actual dying part. I know that once I'm gone it will be terribly difficult for them (we're all such a close-knit family), but I won't be around to help them deal with that, and just have to trust that God and family and friends will see them through. What I will be around for (presumbly, if I'm not completely unconscious) is watching them deal with my actual death process. My wonderful mom was a nurse for 41 years and my mother-in-law is also a retired nurse, and they want to take care of me as I die at home with the help of hospice. My mom has seen MANY people die in her line of work, but I know that watching her own daughter go through the process will be immeasurably more difficult. And of course my darling husband will take it extremely hard too.
Is there anything I can do to make this whole dying process easier on them? I've read about the things that hospice provides and the care that's required at the end-of-life, and it's terrifying. Oh how I wish I could just pass away peacefully tonight in my sleep!!! Why can't euthanasia be a legal option? I'd so much rather take it than allow my loved ones to suffer needlessly, with no hope. I'm sorry this post is so negative. I don't want my last thoughts and actions on this earth to be that way. But it's unbelievable and incredibly ironic that just five months ago my mom, mother-in-law, and husband were in the delivery room with me while I was in pain waiting for my gorgeous daughter to be born. Now they will have to watch me die, and will get no bundle of joy out of the deal--only a dead daughter and a dead wife. I just wish that I could somehow spare them this.