Just a bad dream
13th of April. My father tells me and my brother to come to the living room, he has something to tell us.
“Mum couldn’t make it through the night.”
Those words hit us hard. I thought I had just imagined it, or most likely I hoped so. Suddenly the world felt like something I was not living, but rather watching from outside, like a powerless witness.
Cancer is a unpredictable. There is no way of knowing how it is going to develop. It’s not like any degenerative illness, but the healing process is degenerative itself. It strips you and your family of all your energy, and you just have to power through, without even knowing whether you want to fight anymore. This fight can last months, years, decades. No one knows, not even the doctors, when and if it will come back.
As a 14-year-old who had just started to understand how life works, that was a tough introduction to the world.
Before that moment, I already knew that something was going to change.
My mum had beeen sick for almost three years. She had ups and downs, but we were still able to enjoy our time together.
I remember the last time we went on a holiday together. My family rented a house with a pool in a beach town near Rome, so that she would have no problem going to the hospital whenever she needed to. We were happy there. My mother was often in the shade by the pool - she couldn’t lay in the sun due to her chemo.
She was beautiful even though her hair was gone. We were always joking about how that look actually suited her.
Unfortunately, her positivity wasn’t enough to beat cancer, and in the months after summer it developed quickly. She was hospitalized.
She had already been in the hospital for a couple of months when my dad brought me to see her in the night. I knew it was the last time I would see her.
She was laying in bed, in pain. She was not awake, yet I could hear her suffering. I started crying and the nurse gave me some juice. She died that same night.
That episode would come to haunt me in the night during the following years. It’s never easy to realise that your parents are not invincible, let alone to see them in such a vulnerable state.
In the days after seeing her, I would wake up in the morning expecting to see her making breakfast, hoping that it was all just a bad dream. It was not, and my life had to go on without her.