How to Say Goodbye: Losing the Battle with Cancer

I was 24 years old and at the top of my game. My husband was the director of security for a company that really valued its employees. We had a great daughter that just turned 5 and was going to private school. I had a job in a corporate office and making more money than I thought I ever could. Things were great. My husband, Tony, and I, were so in love and everyone around us could tell. It took 6 years to get married, but we did it!!!

We were proud home owners and felt that we were more blessed than anyone we knew. But he was getting sick. It was getting worse very fast! He had a hernia that had to be repaired and he also needed a biopsy on some tissue in his abdomen. On my 25th birthday, my husband was in the hospital after surgery, I had a cast on my foot, and I thought that the walls of the world were closing in on me. Tony came home from the hospital with a clean bill of health, but was still getting worse every day.

He had to stop working in November, 2 months after his surgery. I knew that he had cancer, but his doctor said he didn't, and that the blood tests that were being done were proof of that. I will never forget that fateful day 4 months later when they told us that he had stage 4 lung cancer and would die within a year. WOW. So, there I was, 25 years old, being told that my husband was going to die.

What do you do? Well, I reached out to everyone that I knew for support, knowing that we needed it. We did not tell our daughter that Daddy was dying, just that he was very sick. I made the most of every moment. I took a leave of absence from work. We went to see George Carlin and ate junk food.

We took tons of pictures. Tony was in denial. But I knew what was happening. I could see him wasting away. I held him close every night, squeezed him as I fell asleep, scared that this was the last time I would sleep in his arms. His pain was getting worse. The cancer had metastasized, it was in his brain too. He started to say things that never made any sense and had frequent headaches.

My role as caretaker was not an easy one. I was used to taking care of our daughter, but Tony, a K9 police officer years before, and always self sufficient, well, it was hard for both of us. He felt like his dignity was robbed when I had to help him. But I was going to be overbearing and doting, because I loved him and I wanted him to see how important he was to me. I needed to do things like call his friends and have them come over for a card game, no cigars.

I wanted to bring him to see his family. But he was so upset at how he looked with no hair that he wanted to see only the people that HE chose to see. As hard as it is to be sick, it is also hard to be a caretaker. When a person knows that they are dying, they need their dignity. But the caretaker needs to be needed and needs to have the knowledge that they did EVERYTHING that they could. Stepping back was never an option for me, but it should have been.

The day before our daughter's kindergarten graduation, Tony got sicker. I had been at home with him for 12 weeks by then, carefully administering medication, watching for any signs of distress. He was no longer sleeping in the bed with me, it was just too painful to lie down, he said. He wanted so badly to see his baby graduate. Oh, she was such a Daddy's girl. He never allowed me to tell her that Daddy would not get better. He didn't want to see her sad.

My mother, who had been there every step of the way, brought Tony to the hospital while I went to graduation. After I got to the hospital, the doctors told me that he would be coming home in a few days. So, I left that night with the security that he would be joining me in a few days. Later that night, Tony called me in tears, they wanted him to sign a paper that if he went into cardiac or respiratory distress, they would not revive him. So, I left my daughter with my brother and went to talk to Tony and the nurses. When we finally agreed that no papers had to be signed that night, I went home.

It was 1 AM. By 8AM I was back at the hospital and the doctor came in to see me. He broke the news to me that Tony would never come home. He was going to die in the hospital, within the next few days. It was time for me to take over and sign the papers. What a blow it was to me. I decided that I was not going to leave the hospital until I was a widow. That is a horrible thing to resolve to when you are 25 years old. I held Tony, I watched him fall asleep, I watched him rally.

The next week was Fathers day weekend, and when I realized that he would not be home for Fathers day, I read his cards to him, barely making it through the love poem in my card to my husband. We had been married less than a year, I was so excited to have a card to my husband.

My husband died in my arms that Sunday at 5 PM. I told him it was ok to go. That he could rest. We would be ok. I love you, I must have said I love you 30 times. I said goodbye, and he took his last breath. It was peaceful. It was quiet. The silence was deafening, and I was sitting on the side of the hospital bed, holding him, crying softly.

What was I going to do? I was 25 and had to be alone. Tony was my life. Even though the doctors had prepared me for this, I was still not ready. I was numb and still had not realized the magnitude of what had just happened to me and my daughter.

I had to be strong, I had to be there for my daughter. I clung on to everything that made me feel like I was still married to the man I loved so much. I slept in his clothes, I sprayed his cologne everywhere, I looked at pictures and watched videos. God, I was so stupid, to think that I was prepared. But the death of a loved one is never something that you can be prepared for. Ever.

So, how do you get through the death of a loved one? How do you get over it? How do you feel better?
You don't.

You will move on, you will have a life. But you will never get over it. You will live through it, you will have an incredible story that will bring tears to people's eyes, and you will be stronger then you were before you started the journey into caring for a loved one with cancer.

Three years later, I think of Tony often, and my daughter speaks of him almost every day. She sleeps with the teddy bear that he was holding when he died. And we live.