The three hardest words I ever had to say were “Dad. She’s gone.”
To fully understand the magnitude of those words one would have to travel back 11 years. I was 17 years old and my mother was 55 years old when she had a cholecystectomy that became a bowel resection and a cancer diagnosis. My mother tried her best to explain; it was cancer but not cancer—something slow-growing and not aggressive, but based on the results of lymph node biopsy specimens, it had already spread and was not curable. She had a rare cancer—carcinoid.