It is horribly heartbreaking to watch your family pass away, and equally heartbreaking to hear doctors say they can no longer help.

My dad passed away this year from AML at 60.  I find that people who are dying are usually braver than the people around them.

I only hope that time can ease your sorrow as I hope it can mine.

You may find that you are braver than you think, and you will be able to make it through your daughter's wedding.

take care.

P.S.... I too find that this discussion board helps me understand the illness.

Hi, I'm brand new to this site.  I wish I'd known about it sooner.  My mom passed away from Lymphoma April 28, 2007 at the age of 60.  I was 24 and pregnant with my first son when she died.  It's comforting to know that there are others out there that understand what I have gone through.  It's been almost 3 years and I still find myself crying at night missing her.  We were very, very close and I lost her quite suddenly.  It's hard for others to understand that I still ache so much now, even 3 years later.  Anyhow, thank you so much for your post.  I wish I'd known about this site when everything was going on.  I have so many regrets and feel like if we'd just done something different we could have saved her.

Thank you so much!  I will email you.  My heart aches for you as I remember clearly how I felt 4 months after my mom's passing.  While the pain never goes away, it does begin to dull.  In my case we didn't really have any warning she was going to pass until the week before.  It was a horrible, horrible experience and my mother was terrified of dying.  She wasn't ready and we'd never been given a straight answer on her stage of cancer or prognosis or anything until the day before she was transfered to critical care and then the ICU.  I regret so much about the whole ordeal.  And I regret not having a picture like you have of just my mom and me at my wedding.  I got married July of 2006, when she had the cancer, but before she was diagnosed.  She just kept getting sick and was assuming it was the flu or something.  She was sick my whole wedding...Anyhow, the pain comes and goes now that it's been 3 years.  Sometimes I just sit and pretend she's here hugging me and I feel her smooth soft skin and body.  I feel how it used to feel to hug her.  Just one of the many, many things I miss.  She was cremated and on Mother's Day, 2007 we spread her ashes in the ocean in Malibu, CA.  I had been planning on getting her a DVD of my ultrasound for Mother's Day...instead I spread her ashes.  We also poured a bloody mary from her favorite restaurant (also on the beach) into the ocean and tossed rose petals in the waves.  It was beautiful, but I wish I had some place to go where I could talk to her and could at least pretend she could hear me.

Anyway, I guess I'm kind of hijacking this thread...sorry!

Yeah, we basically had a week to prepare ourselves that there was a possibility that she could die.  There were so many doctors that we were being rotated through that no one had ever given us a straight answer as to how bad it was.  One day they were asking to discharge her (it was a Friday) and we told them they were on crack.  She couldn't walk (she had a massive tumor pressing up against her spine that was inoperable.  The pressure from it had actually fractured her spine in two different places). She was suffering congestive heart failure brought on by one of the drugs from her first dose of chemo and she'd just had stints put in her kidneys because neither of them were draining properly.  She was in really bad shape and was in such bad health they wouldn't do anymore chemo on her (they reformulated it for her to not include the drug that had brought on the congestive heart failure).  And they wanted to discharge her.  We refused to take her

home and made them keep her.  By Saturday we were suddenly being told that we needed to talk to her about her wishes in case her heart failed.  We weren't prepared for this at all.  No one had ever told us that it wasn't fixable.  By Sunday she was in critical care.  Monday she was in the ICU.  A few days later she was brain dead and on life support.  So really we had less than a week to prepare for what was going to happen.  My mom had completely thought she was treatable and was super optimistic about it all, despite all of the issues and pain she was in.  It wasn't until the doctor very roughly told her she HAD to give us an answer as to what we wanted to do if/when her heart stopped that she started freaking out.  She was terrified of dying.  It was really really awful.  I hope I never have to set foot in the that hospital again.  Ironically it happens to be where I was born by accident.  I was supposed to be a homebirth but ended up

having complications and was rushed to this hospital.  I had my own homebirth 5 months ago and again, this was the closest hospital should something go wrong.  Thankfully nothing did and it went perfectly.

Anyhow...my mom's situation was quite an ordeal and was pretty traumatizing on me and all my siblings (there are 5 of us and we were all very very close to her). 

Your mom sounds like an amazing woman and quite a trooper.  I'm so glad she was able to be at your wedding.  I absolutely love the picture you have of the two of you together. 

I dream about my mom all the time.  Sometimes they are so real and sometimes they are about the fact that she is gone, sometimes she's still sick in them and other times she's not.  I love dreaming about her because it's like I get to be with her for a little while. 

My mom was so excited about me being pregnant.  I'm so glad I at least got to tell her that I was pregnant.  It was a big surprise and she bawled her eyes out.  She passed away literally a few days before my 20 week ultrasound when I was going to find out the sex.  She was so sure it was going to be a girl (she only had one girl grandchild and all the rest were boys).  It was a boy.  :)  I wish she could have been there for both my births.  It was really hard for me to go through labor with my first son without her there.  I wish she could meet my boys and see how amazing they are. 

One of the hardest things for me for the first 6 months or year after my mom passed was not being able to call her.  We saw each other pretty often before she got sick, but we talked several times a week at least.  I constantly would find myself grabbing my phone to call my mom about some random thing, only to realize that I couldn't.

Arg, I feel like I've been blabbing about myself for forever and here you are having just gone through this all yourself.  Loads of hugs.  I wish no one ever had to experience what we did.  It's awful.