In Feb. 1978 Ruth, Afton Hansen Jess and I went to Hawaii. Spuds weren’t a good price but Jess knew how badly I wanted to go. We toured five islands in ten days. The weather was perfect and I thought I would like to spend the winter months on the Island of Maui. Jess laughed and said, “You can’t be away from home for two weeks without getting homesick.
One night the hotel notified us that we were to call home. We were terrified. Our first thought was our sons and grandchildren. We knew something was wrong. It was Stanley, Jess’s brother, calling. He told us that Rachel, (Jess’s mother) was in the hospital with cancer. I will never forget that night. Jess and I sat on the edge of the bed and cried and talked. Rachel hadn’t been feeling well but we never thought it could be cancer.
The doctor said that Rachel only had a few months to live. She lived over a year but it was endurance rather than living. I think if the choice had been mine I wouldn’t have had the surgery Rachel, had. I hope I would have the gumption to say “no to treatment”, if I had cancer. I wrote that in 1978. When I got cancer in 2005, I had chemotherapy and radiation. It was hard for Jess to see his mother suffer. Rachel was deadly ill with chemotherapy. Toward the last she was on morphine and had terrible hallucination. The hardest thing on earth is so see a person you love suffer. The family gathered around her bed and prayed that she could be released. She died that night, March 1979.
