Dear Brenda,
you have all my sympathy for what you suffered alongside your mother during that year. My mother had just had a heart attack and a quadruple by-pass surgery from which she was recovering beautifully when she diagnosed herself with cancer (she was a pathologist, so it was her job), and very correctly identified it immediately as Stage IV lung cancer. She had obviously been ill with it for some time and, by the time she found it, it was too late to do anything useful, hence her refusal of treatment. As you say, no one who has not had to do this can know what it is like. My husband was never of any help, as I think that he is afraid of death, and his only experience of cancer was visiting his grandparents in the hospital when they had it. The difference between visiting a dying person, even frequently, and being the person doing everything for them until the day they die is the difference between two planets. Most of the people around me, who know me to be a strong character, simply think, she did that, that was absolutely fantastic, and now she is going to get on with her life, which has other problems. But those eight months took everything out of me and, as you say, very literally, something of me died with my mother. Thank you for posting; I hope that I can learn from your and others' experiences.
