Never Say Good-Bye

Goodbyes are always hard even if you‘re going to be seeing them again. I think the hardest goodbye was when my second cousin had lung cancer. I remember always going to her house and hanging out she always had silly putty for me to play with and I had a weird obsession with that stuff. She also had cats and I loved those cats the only bad part is they hated people, so I didn’t see them much. She was married to a man named chuck and he was abusive and not very nice to her and I didn’t know this until she passed away. The rest of my family knew this and had hate towards him, and that’s one reason they were scared to tell her goodbye. I got a little older and started understanding things a little better, for instance I knew that if you smoke you could get lung cancer. But I didn’t quite understand this scenario; she stopped smoking but continued to have this lingering cough. I remember my nana and my mother being scared and always talking about it and I just figured it’s a cough everyone gets coughs even people who smoke, that doesn’t automatically mean she has this disease. But before I knew it she went to the doctor and was told she had stage 4 lung cancer, we were all crushed. I didn’t quite understand the stages but they all knew her time was coming to an end. She had frequent doctor appointments and had to soon quit her job, and just stay at home in a hospital bed. That was the hardest thing to watch her suffer in bed; I was only 10 so I didn’t understand why she wasn’t getting better. My mom quit her job and started taking care of her daily; I can’t imagine how she felt after her passing. My second cousin was like a second mom to my mom, so she was going through something even worse. Saying goodbye to her was scarier and scarier because you never knew if you were going to receive the phone call that she had passed. It was almost like we were walking on eggshells.  It makes me sad because I wish she could have been there for different occasions, like birthdays and the big ones like my wedding and even when I begin to have children. I wish she could have met Thomas, I think they would have got along wonderfully. Well back to the story, we stayed close to her house about 15 minutes away, and one morning we received the dreadful phone call. The only way I knew that’s what it was because of all the crying, it broke my heart to see my mom cry so much in the past months but this was worse. We got together and just wept, because they had decided to cremate her, so there wasn’t going to be a regular funeral. The “funeral” was in her house which was such a hard thing, where close family gathered. We watched films, and slideshows and just spent time together. I think this was the hardest goodbye because we had to watch her go, in so much pain.