This blog post will be difficult. It’s really the start of my journey and how it forever altered my Core Four. I found myself thrown into a new world that had elements of a fairytale. That may sound odd. It felt odd. Not all fairytales have happy endings. Not all fairytales are full of light. I was standing at the edge of a forest, unsure of the characters I would meet. But I could imagine some of them…
After we left the Oncologist’s office Dennis and I went to pick up Victoria and Matthew. We would tell them first. My sisters, Denise and Lisa, had arrived from Wisconsin. Still, we needed to tell our children first. This is how we have lived since that day. The Core Four are told first.
How does one prepare to tell their children that mom has cancer? A cancer that didn’t have a complete name? That we have 3 days as a family and then mom would be admitted to the hospital and may never come home? There was no map for this. There was no book to read, not that we would have had time to read one. Time. Time…
We drove the kids to a park and we all sat in the car. We were honest. We were hopeful. We had faith. The hardest part for me was seeing their loss of innocence. They had to grow up so much in those few minutes. This wasn’t happening to another family. This was happening to us. The kids each asked questions. I expected the questions like “will you lose your hair” or “when will you get better” but I wasn’t prepared for the first question from my 7 year old son, “will you die?”
There are moments that haunt me. This is one of them.
The Time that is Given 