[paulcole]

My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 48. Went through treatment, got fitter than ever, started running 1/2 marathons, traveled the world, did the Coast to Coast Walk in England, and raised money and opened a library full of resources for cancer patients and their families at the hospital where she worked.

Then 10 years after she was first diagnosed, she had a seizure as she walked into her lab at a new job she just started. If she didn’t speed like a maniac, it might’ve happened as she drove on I-95 and not in one of the best hospitals in the country.

Metastatic brain cancer.

At first, it wasn’t clear how much time she’d have left (if any at all). But she woke up and radiation gave her another decent year before the last 6 months that were pretty awful. Eventually, she fell out of bed, broke her hip, slipped into a coma and died in hospice a week later on Christmas 2012.

Was it a tragedy? I don’t think about it that way.

The ending was happy. She wasn’t in pain and she took such great advantage of the last decade of her life, including that last year when she knew it was really the end.