To say that my inner strength has been tested in this past year is an understatement. I lost my husband to a sudden massive heart attack in November of 2008. Needless to say my whole world came down around me. As if that wasn’t enough, I lost my father to a 4 year long struggle with cancer in January of 2009 just two months after losing my husband. My father found out that he had colo-rectal cancer very shortly after he retired. At that time the doctor’s gave him a fair bit of hope that he would live quite a few years longer as they thought his cancer was only in stage 2. Typically stage 2 cancers have a fairly high success rate. Once they went into surgery to remove the cancer however, the surgeon could see that the cancer had spread to a lymph node, this now put his cancer in stage 3, a somewhat less positive picture for the outcome than they originally thought. After the surgery my father went through the usual rounds of radiation and chemotherapy to stop the encroachment of the disease. For the first 2 years after diagnosis things were looking positive for a possible cure. And my father was determined to fight for long term survival. In about the 3^rd year of the treatments the doctor’s found a few new tumors, this time they were in the abdomen.They removed what they could of the tumors and again subjected my father to another round of treatment. It was at this time that I watched the fight leave my father one day at a time. He knew that he could no longer keep up the fight for survival because he had no strength left to do so. It was at this time that I started the mourning process for my father because essentially he was dying; the father I knew for my whole life was essentially gone and I faced a man who was sad, in pain and really had no desire to live any longer than he had to.

A few months before he died the tumor which doctor’s essentially could not remove had grown so large that it started to impede his kidney’s and renal failure started to take hold of my father. He was admitted into a hospice the week before he died where he was made as comfortable as possible for his journey to the place where he would no longer be in pain. If you have ever watched a person live through a terminal illness it is not an easy thing to do. I felt a huge sense of relief when my father finally left this earth because I knew he was no longer in pain. It makes me sound like a horrible person to admit relief when a loved one dies but you wouldn’t wish the pain my father endured the last several months to a year of his life on your worst enemy. I do grieve for my father but I grieve for the man he was before he was ill, not the man he became after he was diagnosed the 2^nd time. I am comforted in the fact that where he is he is free of sadness, free of pain and at last at peace.