Cancer Stinks

Today I’m mad and sad. My neighbor just lost her brother to esophageal cancer. Another neighbor just had surgery (again) to try and remove his cancer. And a dear friend, Tonya Jamois (former ICAN President) just got diagnosed with breast cancer. She started a blog called Pink and Plaid Warrior about her journey.
I was at the park when I overheard a little boy, maybe nine or ten years old, say, "I like to burn the hair off Barbies and pretend they have cancer." I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that one. Does his mom (or another relative) have cancer and this is his way of dealing with it? Or is he a real-life, straight off the big screen movie Toy Story, toy torturing Sid? I don't know, but it freaked me out.
Why can't we find the cure for this disease? It can't come soon enough...

My Dad's Passing: 2002

Flashback to May 20, 2002, a Monday: I am at home, anxiously waiting for a phone call from my husband, who is at the hospital with the rest of his family, while his mother is having surgery to remove uterine cancer. I have a nursing baby and little preschool kids and didn’t want to be at the hospital for hours with them. The phone rings, instead of Jay, it is my step-mom’s brother, whose sad duty is was to tell me my Dad had a heart attack and passed away. I try to stay calm. Just as I’m thinking I’m going to have to get in the car and go to the hospital, because my husband’s cell phone has to be turned off in the area they are waiting in, he calls me. He has bad news. He says they took his mom back, only to find the cancer had spread everywhere. They closed her up and gave her six months to live. (She lived only three, but that is another story). I tell him my bad news. There is nothing like getting slammed with a 2 x 4; unless it is getting hit twice with a 2 x 4.

I think that was one of the hardest weeks of my life. I mourned the loss of two parents that week. Eight years later, I still feel the loss. Healing is a funny process. Grief is like an onion, layer upon layer, sometimes being peeled away at unexpected times. Its grief rings are many, yet each is smaller than the last. If we see the onion from the inside out, those are our healing layers, getting bigger each layer.

My Dad was a good guy. Just look at him with Jayson and John. This was at the Hite family reunion in Idaho in 1999. As much as I love him, God loves him more. Miss you, Dad. Love you.