I Had Hoped I Was Immune, but I'm Not

Since my childhood, I have been told by adults, “Oh, you’ll see plenty if you live long enough.” And they didn’t necessarily mean good things. Illness is one of those not good things. “Every family is touched by cancer or other lingering illnesses,” they told me. “It’s a given.”

My mother is the next-to-youngest of eleven children. She’s 85 now and only she and her baby brother, two years younger, are still kicking—and kicking they are! Not kicking quite as high, certainly, but still getting around and enjoying life. My uncle, a raconteur extraordinaire, is still harvesting his avocados and hauling bushels of them to two farmers’ markets each week, where he finds that regaling customers with his endless repertoire of stories is much more fun than bringing home a stack of cash.

Of the eleven children, the youngest to die was 76, and it was totally unexpected—fine one day, gone the next, having passed peacefully in her sleep. The others mourned that she left them at such a young age (I admit that, at the time, 76 didn’t seem so young, but that was then). Several of the siblings lived into their 90s, and the rest into their 80s, and when they went it was pneumonia or other ravages of old age that took them, and it was quick. I’ve never endured the anguish of seeing a loved one slipping away slowly, inch by inch. In that regard, I’ve lived a bit of a charmed life—until now.

One month ago my sweet sister-in-law, my husband’s sister, was hit with a cancer diagnosis that stopped her (and the rest of us, albeit differently) in her tracks. The cancer is aggressive and her life expectancy is likely only a matter of months. Like every family in this situation, however, we have great hope that she will defy the prognosticators and grace us with her presence far longer.

The fact that she is the first of our generation to face such a tenuous future is a reminder to the rest of us of our certain mortality. It has caused us to examine our own futures, as well as the present. None of us is guaranteed limitless days and, although it is cliché, an event such as this really does push us to make the most of each one of them.

This lovely and gracious woman is an RN, a nurse anesthetist who, after several years, left the OR and returned to the bedside where she could interact more fully with her patients. She is a born caretaker, a little mother hen who showers her family and friends with attention and acts of thoughtfulness and kindness.

A reversal of roles is currently taking place. Now, the nurse is the patient, and instead of her looking out after the rest of us, we will become her caretakers and supporters and it will be a privilege to do so. Whatever we do, it will never be enough to match in kind the gentle gestures she has lavished upon us through the years, but, with heavy hearts, we will do our best.