My mom – my kids’ Nana – died on Sunday. She had survived Stage IV cancer for more than a year and a half before her body finally gave out over the weekend. My youngest brother and I were with her when it happened, and I held her in my arms as her heart stopped beating.
Everybody in the family saw this coming, because she started the summer by ending her treatment, realizing that the drugs and trials weren’t making an impact on the cancer but were making her life miserable. We pulled out all the stops we could to make sure her last few weeks were great ones.
Sadly, preparing well for death doesn’t do much to lessen the pain when it finally happens. A year and a half ago, I wrote a list of four things I learned during my mom’s cancer diagnosis. Revisiting those things now, they are all still very true and remain valuable life lessons.
1: Kids make things worse…but also much better.
And how. The thing that caused me the most consternation during this whole process was the fact that I was going to have to tell my kids that Nana was going to die. The fact that she doesn’t get to see her grandchildren grow up feels like a stab in the chest.
At the same time, though, the kids made her last days much better. She spent hours watching them play around and tell stories. If anything helped reduce the pain, they did. She got to make her mark on her grandchildren, and they’ll carry the lessons she taught for decades to come.
2: Explaining the basics to young kids isn’t that hard.
After the body had been removed and while the adults were still drying their tears, the kids were playing with my mom’s chess set. Our son stopped to say, “I’m sad Nana died.” We explained that we were too and that he could talk to us about his feelings whenever he wanted. Kids get it.
3: My mom is tough as nails.
Right to the very end. This is a woman who was prescribed morphine for her pain after the cancer had metastasized into her spine. Instead, she got by for quite a while with ibuprofen every few days. Not even the doctor could believe it.
Moreover, I’m still awed by her decision to stop treatment. The ability to accept that death is coming and decide that you’d rather have a few good days than many mediocre ones is amazing to me. She faced the inevitable with grace and dignity every step of the way.
One day, while I was talking with her about what she wanted at her funeral, she broke off the conversation to say, “Make sure the kids have some fruit.” That’s another amazing strength of hers – even when she couldn’t move, she never stopped taking care of the people she loved.
4: Hope is very important.
This is a tough one to remember, because right now I sort of feel like hope kicked me in the crotch. No matter how many good thoughts we had, reality always set in. The cancer had gone undetected for too long, and every advance was countered by a new site the disease had spread to.
Despite that, hope is still very valuable. As a family, we could have spent the past year and a half depressed because Nana’s death was inevitable. In truth, everybody’s death is inevitable. Hope and optimism help keep life happier while it lasts. By staying optimistic about the future, we made my mom’s present happier.
How have your kids dealt with the loss of a loved one?
CommentImages: Sarah Brooks
