Chapter One
A Family Who Couldn't Find the Words
by Louise Heckendorf
A Family Who Couldn't Find the Words
by Louise Heckendorf
My daughter's cancer had been discovered two and a half years before, but there had been surgery and chemotherapy, and, for the last half year, she had looked beautifully healthy and talked optimistically of the future. Taking our cue from her, we did not talk about the possibility of death.
We were painfully unprepared for the shock of her abrupt, three-week final illness. For the first ten days, she and her doctor fought it together, just as they had from the beginning. Then on the eleventh day he discontinued all medications, with the exception of morphine.
He asked us not to tell her that she was near death. "It will devastate her," he said, "and she will stop fighting." We were too numb to ask why he believed it was necessary for her to continue fighting. But we went along with it, not just because he was her doctor, but mainly because we couldn't say to her the words "death . . . dying" without breaking down. And this is important to emphasize:
We have since come to understand that the doctor knew it was we who were the ones who would have been devastated by the telling.
Most of us have seen family members standing outside hospital rooms crying, then returning stoically to the patient, pretending that nothing was wrong. We were such a family.
Since she was sleeping most of the time, we hoped that she would die peacefully while she slept. However, when the stage of her illness arrived that marked the beginning of her last hours, she was awakened by a choking cough. Her eyes opened widely, and then closing them again, she began humming.
She hummed until she was overcome by pain, then unconsciousness.
Although we, her family, were present every moment during the last weeks of her ordeal, she was, in truth, alone. She made her own comfort in the end, with her own music.
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