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.
Molly has turned fourteen, which means she’s either 88, 84, or 76 years old, depending on which chart you follow. I prefer the one at her vet’s office, which measures her size, weight, current health and puts her at 72 years. I prefer that calculation. I like to think that she, like me, has a bit more time left on the clock. Although such things are unpredictable at our age.
If you’d asked me twenty years ago whether I’d care for (much less worry about) a senior dog, I would have said, “Doubtful.” Then again, if you’d asked me where I expected to be, I’d have said in Florida or Canada with my loving husband. Then he died and I had some quick adjusting to do, which ended up not being quick at all. Four years of hyper-activity only helped me so much. After I slowed down, the walls began to close in. I still lived where I lived, one of two occupants in a house I couldn’t seem to leave. Thus, a dog. A puppy, actually, whom I purchased when she was nine weeks and I was four years into my grief and still deeply afraid of making lasting connections.
She was a mellow puppy, which made things easier. She was also a life-saver, an identity-changer (I’m a dog owner!), a bit of a headache, and an absolute guarantee that the low moods and the dark thoughts to which I am prone could not pin me to my house, let alone my bed. My canine companion’s immediate and ongoing needs have always compelled me to, as a friend once said, “Get over your bad self.”
even shorter intervals. Her health can turn on a dime. That’s hard for me to accept, but I must. Living with a rapidly aging creature is a teaching moment. I frequently find myself lacking in either patience or gratitude. The care and maintenance of a senior dog requires the one and urges the other. That’s a lesson I’m working hard to absorb, a lesson that will be Molly’s lasting gift to me.
For such a diminutive month, February features a number of holidays and festivals of varied significance. Did you know February is National Cherry month? Chinese New Year occurs in February this year, although Fat Tuesday does not. We always begin with Groundhog Day, which seems more meaningful in those parts of the country besieged by extreme weather. Never mind it’s unreasonable to expect a rodent to perform as a meteorologist. Honestly, it doesn’t make sense that we’d greet the sun with an “oh no, six more weeks of winter!” just because some little creature is afraid of his shadow. Talk about seeing the glass as half empty!
Valentine’s Day seems to have replaced a rather pagan fertility celebration that involved the sacrifice of both a goat and a dog. Now it’s a multi-billion-dollar business that involves reams of paper and toys with the affections of millions. Nevertheless, I’m sure we all agree that exchanging cards is better than blood-letting an animal we’d prefer to see bouncing around on YouTube in pajamas or nuzzling a baby or a cat. In fact, most of us in 2019 would go all 
And nothing beats reading. After wading through three books I disliked so much I won’t mention them, I read three books in a row I really enjoyed, including an extraordinary science fiction novel and Nebula award winner in 2016 (The Fifth Season by N.K. Nemesin), a lyrical 2018 best seller (Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Ownes) and an important non-fiction read that manages to be uplifting despite its painful subject matter (Parkland by David Cullen). Even better, I read these absorbing books in front of the fireplace with the dog curled in my lap.