From a previous post (‘Peace by Unto Thy Soul’), Joseph L. Bishop PhD, continues regarding the premature passing of his wife:
She had not entered into any second-guessing of the what-ifs of her life. She let all that go. Instead she was laser focused on the few things she wanted to do in the little time she had left: visit Harry on the way home from the hospital to help him come to terms with dying and talk to our son to help him understand what mattered most to her. After that, all she wanted to do was say good-bye to friends and family at the reunion so that she could be off to visit those other friends and family waiting for her in the spirit world. She mentioned that she was particularly anxious to see her grandmother Callister—a woman she had loved dearly all her life.
But the question remained: how was she able to ignore all the bad things that were happening to her when many of the rest of us were thrashing about in a quagmire of grief?
While going over all this in my mind, my thoughts led me back to the Trauma and Awareness Center and all those patients who, like Carolyn, were able to by-pass Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief. In an attempt to figure out what it was they had done to avoid grief, I once more reviewed those stages . . . to see if I had missed anything. I started with denial. A swift mental review led me to believe that I had no trouble with that one. I was not in denial, nor did I ever deny what was happening. That was not my problem. I quickly moved on to the second stage, anger. When I read that word, I was somewhat taken aback. It had not dawned on me before, but now I had to admit that not only had I been perturbed, but I was also somewhat been angry—not with the cancer, as much as I hate that insidious disease, but with the doctor.
When the doctor told Carolyn she was dying, he didn’t tell her the whole story. That came after she had passed away, when I telephoned him, asking for help to understand why Carolyn, who seemed to be fairly strong before starting chemotherapy, suddenly, in a matter of a few weeks took a turn for worse and died. I asked the doctor how the cancer could take over so quickly, particularly when her gynecological oncologist had said that her type of cancer was not that aggressive. His explanation was brief and to the point: “Oh, her cancer was not the cause of her death. She died because her body could not tolerate the chemotherapy. That is why she passed away as soon as she did.”
I was dumbstruck, I could hardly believe what I had just heard. After a brief pause and while still struggling to control my emotions, I asked my next strait-to-the-point question: “If you had not administered that second round of chemotherapy,” I queried, “how long would she have lived?” “I really don’t know.” he responded. But I already knew the answer . . . as did he. She would have lived longer! How much longer, no one knows. However, one health practitioner had told us that without the debilitating effects of chemotherapy, she probably would have lived a year or more before she died. To me, a year sounded like a lifetime. What we could have done in that year! ~Joseph L. Bishop, “Peace be unto Thy Soul” (Covenant Communications, American Fork,2012) p.6-8 (continued)
