caution: this one is (more) personal

The October issue of Vanity Fair (the one with the hot picture of Paris Hilton on the cover) has a memoir by writer Marjorie Williams who battled liver cancer for more than three years. She died at 47, with two young children, 12 and 9.

Williams recounts the symptoms that brought her to the doctor, the diagnosis, the range of concern, callous, fear and gloom from doctors and nurses, the unyielding support of her husband - who she said took care of the living part while she focused on preparing to die, and her own fight with and acceptance of this disease.

As someone who lost her own mother to cancer when I was 11 and she only about 40, Williams' words offered a glimpse into some of the thoughts I imagine my mother having when she was sick. And some of the questions Williams asks have come from my own lips at times. The story also made me think of one of my best friends who recently lost her mother to cancer, and the all-too-many young people I have met who have suffered similar fates.

Williams writes of her "lesser fears" of what will happen after she dies:

"That no one will ever really brush [my daughter]'s fine, long hair all the way through.... That no one will ever put up the curtains in my dining room, the way I've been meaning to for the last three years."

And the deeper ones, which rang so true for me:

"Who will talk to my darling girl when she gets her period? Will my son sustain that sweet enthusiasm he seems to beam most often at me? There are days I can't look at them - literally not a single time - without wondering what it will do to them to grow up without a mother. What if they can't remember what I was like? What if they remember, and grieve, all the time? What if they don't?"

And a passage that really brought my mother's face to my mind:

"But from almost the first instant, my terror and grief were tinged with an odd relief. I was so lucky, I thought, that this was happening to me as late as 43, not in my 30s or my 20s. If I died soon there would be some things I'd regret not having done, and I would feel fathomless anguish at leaving my children so young. But I had a powerful sense that, for my own part, I had had every chance to flourish. I had a loving marriage. I'd known the sweet, rock-breaking, irreplaceable labor of parenthood, and would leave two marvelous being in my place. I had known rapture, adventure, and rest."

Anyway, the story is poignant and well-written and heart-wrenching, and would likely be so for anyone who has suffered loss. I think today of my mother, who, from what I know, did get to live a full life as a mother, wife, poet, best friend, "bull in a china shop." And though not a day goes by without me wishing she were still alive, I take comfort in knowing that I have become what she taught me to be, and that she is indeed all around me.