Sometimes I Get Angry

   Lately when I watch TV, I have noticed that there are a lot of commercials on for cancer treatment places. I sit there, and sometimes I get angry. Why? My mother-in-law passed away just over a year ago, from breast cancer that spread to her lower back and hips. I saw her suffer. I watched as she fought it.

   I get angry on her behalf, wishing her doctors, or anyone, had suggested she go to one of these places. While they talk about their success rate, all I know is that Betty died. I wish I could go back in time and try to get her to go to one of those places. Having known her, I know that she would have refused. But I just wish she had been given the option. Maybe we could have talked her into it.


   On a TV news channel, they interviewed a cancer doctor, and asked him what fact about cancer he thinks people don't know. He responded by saying something trite about finding it early. I totally disagree with him. What people need to know is that breast cancer comes back. Years later, usually in the bones of your lower back or hips. Betty was cancer free for a lot of years,  still being checked twice a year. Her "numbers" would go down, then up, then down again. Then her cancer came back. It took her so quickly. It was only a couple of months.


   I wonder how different things might have turned out. Maybe she could have lived longer. She declined so quickly, even the Hospice workers we had in were surprised. We moved in to her house to take care of her, and it was only 16 days later that she was gone. And here we had planned on staying the Winter there with her, and sending her to her friend's house in the Spring.

   I guess I miss her. As big of a pain in the ass that she was, I miss her. I think about her a lot. Sometimes it makes me cry when I think of the night she passed. After that experience, I made my mom promise that she would die in her sleep. I mean to hold her to that. I don't think I could go through that again.


   I know that the anger is part of the grieving process. I keep reminding myself that she's not in pain any more, that she's back to bossing her husband around, and hopefully he was glad to have "the warden" with him again. I do wonder if he minded that we had his ashes moved. Where he was, she couldn't be interred with him. I do wonder if he did that on purpose. But it was her last wish that she and Tom be buried together, so that's what we did.