Cancer Like a Silence Grows

Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t know my sister is dying? It seems that even those who don’t know her must have felt the paradigm shift that happened when her body cried, “uncle” just last week after having fought and lost a three way battle for the past year and a half. The cancer so cruel and unrelenting ever pressing pain here and there, being beaten back on one front, but rounding the flank on another. And the chemotherapy fighting back, but with so much disregard for the massive collateral damage it leaves in its path. Her poor body trying desperately to hang on while the battle rages – like an inmate in a prison camp who can only hope to survive until the war is over – hoping agains all odds to still be standing when the last enemy falls. But the wrong side is winning and she can’t hold out any longer for an ally that is losing ground on every front.
And I must stand by and watch the cancer troupes come pouring in by the droves. Piling on the pain while confiscating those things that would make her last days on this earth bearable. All I can do is watch as the buildings crumble and the tanks roll in.
The fact that she can’t digest food hasn’t caused her taste for tea to wane, so we lift our cups to share and old ritual and then we pump it out through a tube.
Precious and few are the moments of lucid conversation before the next dose of pain control is absorbed through her cheek and she drifts away to a place of oblivion where she has temporary respite and I am locked outside alone, wishing I could enter her dreams so I could just be near her once again.
Loved ones brought together in tighter bond by the ropes of shared grief and loss. Tears mingle with anger and laughter and things that dull the senses for a moment. We connect in the, “I know,” and “It hurts,” and “why her?” We hold hands and cry on shoulders. We worry about each other in turns. We make room for each other by the prison bed.
In spite of the pain and tubes and the incomprehensible seeping away of life, she pats hands, comforts grieving children, offers sympathy and prayers to strangers who prattle on about their woes as if she didn’t have enough worries of her own at the moment (I want to scream at them, “Get your own sister!”). She extends her hand and whispers gratitude to those strangers who come to tend her.
And I want to be just like her. It’s the thing that doesn’t change.