Helpless | A Modern Hamliza Story

Chapter Twenty-Five

An End of an Era

November 24, 2022

I have written this entry probably a hundred different ways, deleting the entire thing and then rewriting it again and again. It doesn't make this any easier to say or write. I don't even know if there's a right way to say it. I don't want to say too much or too little; I want to give the perfect amount of information to make it understandable and reasonable.

I suppose by now you can tell that this is disconsolate news. I might as well just come right out and say it.

Just at the end of October, I went back into the hospital for problems with dehydration. After running tests for underlying sicknesses, given my health history, and conducting an MRI, all of the oncologists concluded that my pancreatic cancer has returned. Unfortunately, this time, it is too far along. They mentioned that last time, I was lucky that it was caught at the stage it was at compared to the symptoms I was having.

Stage four pancreatic cancer is not curable. It has spread to other organs, and it will just keep metastasizing until it takes over the rest of my entire body.

So that is what I am trying to say. I am dying. I probably don't have longer than the rest of the year. I'll get six months if I'm lucky. I'm still battling deeply with a form of disbelief.

I'm constantly on pain medications to improve my quality of life, and strong chemotherapy that just isn't strong enough to sustain me. I lay in bed most days, a cannula providing oxygen that is slowly decreasing in my body, my husband and baby next to me. I'm grateful that the hospital has allowed my growing little lion to spend time with me in these last months of my life. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't see him right now.

I feel so guilty that I will be leaving him, and leaving my husband alone. I wonder if Philip will even remember me or resent me when he grows up. I worry that growing up without a mother will affect my sweet baby boy.

I'm angry that I won't get to watch him as he grows up, and that I probably won't make it to see him on his first birthday. I won't get to take him to kindergarten and cry over him growing up too quickly, or deal with his middle school attitudes. I won't get to meet his future spouse, and I won't get to watch him marry the person that makes him the happiest in the world.

And my darling husband... my heart hurts so hard when I think about the fact that he will be left alone. I know he'll be the best father to Philip still, and our son will be in the best of hands. I know I couldn't imagine my life without Alexander in it. Since we were eighteen, we have believed we were soulmates. He's already cried with me about how he doesn't know how he'll be able to move on in life without me next to him. I can't help but also feel guilty about leaving him, and widowing him at thirty, maybe thirty-one if I make it that far.

We were supposed to have five or six kids together, and it is true that I am grateful for the one I had with him and the short amount of time I've had him in my life, but it hurts that our hopes and dreams and plans will not come to fruition. If only we were given more time, how much harder I would have worked to make each day count and to experience as much of the next sixty years of my life as I could.

What I would like to end with is just a few things.

Goodbye is one of them. I will not be adding any more entries to this blog. But I don't want to close out this last entry on a completely sad note. I want to give hope and advice. Hold your loved ones as close as you can, and spend your life as if it could be cut short at any moment. Life is a beautiful thing, and while it is such a cheesy, overused phrase, you only live once. Even though I didn't get to experience everything I wanted in my one lifetime, I don't regret a single thing in my life. Every moment of my life has compiled into a beautiful mess of wins and failures.