This part of the story begins when my youngest grandchildren were still babies in strollers, and I was in my mid forties. And it begins with my dad.
Dad was one of those guys everyone hears about. He was never sick, except perhaps the odd headache here and there, which he'd almost never complained about. Up until he retired, he'd only missed part of one day of work due to illness. He'd fallen off a dock at work, and slipped a disk, but he went back to work the next day. And although he had backaches following that for years, he never missed more work, nor did he really complain about it.
This began when he and mom came for a short visit, and mom decided to stay a day or two. Dad went back the city himself. The next morning I received a call from him. He was at the emergency department at one of the hospitals in the city.
That, in and of itself, was extremely alarming to me. That man would rather you pull out all his teeth with no freezing before he'd visit the emergency department of any hospital. Right away mom headed back to the city. Late that day mom called us, but all she could say was dad was being transferred to another hospital for treatment.
We headed to the city only to be told that he had acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) - one of less commons forms of leukemia. Dad was in his early seventies. Reading some of the information available for this disease, we found out that there are on average less than 400 new cases each year. Dad's particular case was one of the most acute they'd seen in this hospital.
From the day of the diagnosis, until the day that dad passed away was a very short period, but those 29 days felt like years to us. Mom...she was or appeared to be very confused by everything, and simply let us lead her around by the hand. She didn't really seem to know what was happening most of the time.
We put it down to severe shock. All of us were in shock, and they (mom and dad) were less than a year away from their 50th Anniversary, so we just felt that 50 years of love, and living together day-in and day-out had caused greater stress in her, to the point where she simply couldn't cope with it, and part of her had shut down.
Spending most of those 29 days with her, dragging her back and forth to the hospital were difficult, but I had no idea then how much more difficult it would get - for all of us.