Losing my mother and my best friend to cancer

I have read so many posts pertaining to people suffering from cancer. I have even read about people just like me who spent their lives caring for a loved one who had been diagnosed with cancer. I lost my mother three weeks ago. She died of cancer. She fought for so long but eventually her cancer spread from her lung to her brain and lymph node behind her stomach. She had six tumors in her brain when she died but she was determined to fight for her life. She never accepted her illness. She died fighting for life.

I continue to read about lung cancer, brain cancer, death, loss, grief and anything else relevant to my experience with my mother. I guess I hope to find something that can explain what happened and why it happened to my mother. All I have found is others who are or have experienced the same thing I did with my mother. I use to argue with the doctors and even with God because I felt my mother was too young to die. She was alive just long enough to witness my son come into this world but she died shortly after. I only wish my son could have known his grandmother.

I feel terrible for everyone who has ever experienced the impact of cancer. It is the most cruel and horrible experience one can go through. People lose their dignity and become dependent on hospitals, doctors, and the advancement of science and medicine… I will never forget what the doctors told my mother a week before she went to a hospice… they told her they wished that medicine and science was advanced enough for them to save her life. My mother’s doctors were amazing but nothing they did could make my mother’s cancer stop from killing her.

I was with my mother when she took her last breath of air. I wrapped her in warm blankets and held her as she died. I only pray that she was not aware of anything. My mother was scared of death. She was once a beautiful, independent woman but the cancer robbed her of that. No one even recognized my mother when she died. She looked so different… she never even recognized me during the last two weeks because the tumor were growing at such a rapid pace in her brain. My mother could not speak. She relied on everyone else to help her with the simplest of tasks. She couldn’t walk or even swallow at the end. I would fight with her to eat or to drink but she no longer recognized that need… sometimes I wonder if she gave up. I am terrified that she was aware of what was going on but just couldn’t speak. Cancer is so cruel. I wish I could stop this disease from robbing people of their lives and from devastating families.

I wish I could take away the pain and suffering from anyone who has ever been affected by cancer.
Susan