Sad Sadder Saddest

My heart breaks and aches today.

Yesterday we went to visit a family friend in the hospital. It seems these last couple of years she's been there more often and with longer stays. She's almost 71 and has been with us thru our victories and sadness, basically been in our lives for so long we can't remember a time she wasn't there.

But yesterday... seeing her frail and bruised... it finally hit me.

We might lose her...

Cancer has infested itself in her. She has Leukemia, Bone Marrow Cancer, Renal Failure and is a diabetic. On Wednesday she had a heart attack and because of all of the above her blood cells are... in medical lingo, all out of whack, her kidney's are shutting down.

I couldn't sleep last night again. I was thinking about how people that are at one time strangers in your life can become so important to your mental survival. This lady, whom my mother met somewhere as mundane as her workplace, decided to adopt us as her family. They formed a friendship due to their similarities. Both being mothers and having raised, or in my mother's case still raising, their children without help from their spouses. Both hardworking women who put their kids welfare before their own.

We formed a bond that is hard to explain but our hearts can understand.

Her daughter is now my sister and I hurt for her. The pain she feels when her mother tells her she asked God to take her in his arms, is the same knife I feel piercing me. She doesn't want to suffer any longer. She doesn't want her daughter to suffer any longer. Yet we cling to her. We are too selfish to let her go. It's too soon and we're not done learning what she has to teach.

Her body is betraying her but her mind is still as sharp as ever. This is what saddness me the most, the fact that she knows how ill she is. Can we say it's a blessing to have dementia? How cruel does that sound?

What can medical treatment offer her at this moment? Nothing.

The doctor with firm kindness told her that all they could do is give her morphine for the pain.

She still needs blood transfusions but as for her chemo, well only if she shows improvement.

This dear friend who has captured our hearts and has become more than a stranger who you're friendly to, how do I classify her?

I knew her before I met Andy and I've known him for almost 13 years. She was there for my wedding, for my brothers' wedding, my sister's wedding for the birth of my niece for my parent's divorce. She was there when we moved to this or that apartment. When we bought our houses. How can we classify her?

Every day and night I pray for her and her daughter I pray so she can come and have one last evening in our garden and have coffee under the stars as this was her wish last year but made impossible due to her health.

After all the years of hard work and disillusionment, she deserves one more night of tranquility and happiness with no pain.