I have been absent awhile, dear friends, fighting a battle alongside my brave sister, a battle we could not win. After nine weeks of caretaking at my house, she passed away at the very end of November, the victim of a particularly acute form of pancreatic cancer.
What most people don’t know is that in the seven months before her diagnosis, I was working with her to find answers to her intractable pain, as she sought help and treatment.
Pancreatic cancer is insidious. If it were a person, you might describe it as smart, sneaky, and implacably cruel. At times it hides from chemo designed to eradicate it. Other times it manages to weaponize the most toxic elements of the treatment to use against the patient. While no one can say why it seems to be on the rise, most experts can tell you its high mortality rate owes to the near complete absence of symptoms until it’s too late. Over half the cases, when discovered, have already metastasized. My sister’s was one of them.
However, she did have one obvious glaring symptom right from the beginning. She awoke last March to excruciating pain, which she described with great specificity to at least eight doctors over the next six months. Pain is subjective and difficult to quantify, I will grant you. It’s also dismissed all too often, particularly when it comes to older female patients.
When traditional scans failed to turn up anything (and my sister asked about pancreatic cancer twice), she and I were essentially launched, unaided into a months-long search for an answer. She visited various specialists and tried a variety of solutions. By the time we assembled a new team of doctors, which took weeks, it was far too late. Maybe it always was.
My sister—my breath, my blood, my bone, my history, my sometimes sparring partner and always best friend—died more quickly than anyone could have imagined, notwithstanding my awkward but full-hearted attempts to act as caregiver, advocate, and nurse.
She was amazing. She, so courageous despite the pain. She breathed through it, argued with it, powered over it until that became impossible. She drove with me to Canada this summer because she wanted to. She had a small dog-sitting business and she honored her contracts until she couldn’t walk. She reached out to doctors and nurses and made friends and comforted friends until the drugs and the cancer began to steal her mind. I thought I knew her, but she astounded me.
I am in shock, needless to say. How fast she disappeared, my sister for life. I’ve tried not to be angry. That’s hard, but it will pass. I have previous experience with this. It feels awful and awfully familiar. Already the scab is forming that allows me to get through each day. Inside will take a longer. I wrote her obituary. Take a look if you feel like it.
I am so thankful for the outpouring of sympathy and the support of good friends and neighbors. I am gratified by the reaction of at least one doctor who wants to review her case to see if early detection was even possible. I would like to see future patients spared at least a modicum of the pain that so adversely affected my sister’s life for nine months.
I will find my way back to my fiction, friends. I owe that to her and to you. Watch this space; I hope in a month to begin sharing with you excerpts from my new Sam Tate book.
Thank you.
The recent death of pop icon Prince was greeted with the usual outpouring of shock and grief, along with a fair amount of snark. The negative commentary was directed not at the dead musician, but at the people who expressed profound sadness. The naysayers criticized both the misdirection of the emotion (why aren’t you crying over the deaths of innocent refugee children?) and the shallowness of the feelings expressed. “Crying over Prince’s death?” one person wrote. “Really? You people care more about the death of a pampered rock star or an old dog than you do about a starving family in Africa.”
The thing is, on my social media and news feeds there are plenty of laments about social conditions around the world, along with a few—too few—suggestions for action that might help those who are suffering. The history of human cruelty is long and ugly. My sorrow about this is systemic; I feel it in my bones. Even on my most hopeful days, I fear manmade brutality may be a permanent condition.
Behind the pageantry, though, is a ritual as old as humankind. We mourn publicly and collectively because death is a lonely process. It terrifies us, especially when it’s unanticipated or takes someone young. We reach out for emotional support. We commiserate to connect. We shake our fist at Death from the safety of a group.
Try as we might, we can’t compel others to grieve as we would. My personal preference is to grieve hard but in private. Some people may throw themselves in the dirt at graveside. Some spend years draped in sadness. Some jump back into the business of living more quickly or more slowly than others believe is warranted.