I don’t know how to lose her.

My mom has been battling cancer for over 15 years.

My mom has been battling cancer for over 15 years.

She beat breast cancer with chemo and two years later started a long fight against slow-growing PTCL-NOS that was forced to continue through a non-conventional approach only because she was given no other choice. They just didn’t know how to fight it.

Things took a turn two weeks ago.

The non-conventional is no longer working and the PTCL-NOS is now aggressive and spreading. She is in the ICU. Her lungs have already had to be drained three times and she has needed 8 transfusions in 13 days. She is now facing the possibility of being too weak for the new chemo treatment she was supposed to start Monday.

They are blaming her rapid decline on the damage the original chemo did to her back when they knew so little about her rare form of the disease and on the fact that she went so long trying to treat it on her own because the medical community had nothing to give her.

She is only in her early 60s and has done everything to fight this but after beating the odds so many times, she is now losing that fight.

She doesn’t deserve this.

She has suffered more than enough in her life, more than most people could even fathom. It is cruel to have her life ended in this way after so many years of brushing herself off, picking herself up, and moving forward with hope.

Against the odds stacked against women like her she always kept going.

She deserves hope. She has earned it. And yet the world hands her only more pain.

This woman, my incredible mother, just 24 hours after receiving this devastating news, woke up today with her lungs still filled with fluid, her heart still struggling to function, her blood drained of life, and her mind facing a reality where she may only have days or weeks to live.

And what did she do?

She recorded herself singing happy birthday with my Dad for my youngest son and sent it to me — so he can watch it after school because she feels horrible that she can’t be here for his birthday this year.

Because that is who she is.

I love her more than I can express, and my heart breaks with the knowledge that this may be the last video I have of her, that my boys will ever see of her, that she may ever make, and that despite this, the world keeps spinning in defiant, cruel indifference.

I don’t know how to face this.

I don’t know how to lose her.

My soul aching rage and despair at the approach of her end is overwhelming but right now I must act as if all is fine.

I need to put on a smile and go pick up my kids from school and hold myself together so I can share her message as if it isn’t the last video I may ever have of my mother — and then somehow tomorrow I must feign that hosting a birthday party for a hoard of first graders tomorrow is exactly what I want to be doing. Somehow exist in a way that can proclaim every second of me not being with her isn’t like a knife being sliced into my gut.

Because that is what we do when life hands us horror, isn’t it? We pretend all is fine. We move forward. We keep going.

Not because we have to, but because fuck no are we going to take the world’s cruelty lying down.

What I face is shallow in comparison to what so many people, so many men, women, and children are suffering everyday around the world.

And yet we all pretend every day that it isn’t. That these wars, these atrocities this reversible, preventable agony is not stealing the souls of so many and crushing our hope. We fight and we keep living. Against the odds. Against the indifference.

If my mother taught me anything, she taught me this: when facing a world that doesn’t flinch at your existence, you grit your teeth, smile in defiance, step forward with gratitude for what you have been given, and make the best of it all while searching for ways to make the world better for those around you.

So I will brush myself off, pick myself up, and move forward with hope that one day I will find a way to live without being overcome by the pain of stepping into a future without her. And that one day we can create a world where our loved ones aren’t taken from us at the hands of ignorance — in all its many forms.