10 Months before dying
Photo by Hayes and Fisk, the Art of Photography
I wonder what it would be like to know that you were going go die in ten months. To be told that your children would be motherless, your friends would have an empty seat in the office next to them, your family a hole in their hearts when you left. In ten months.
Would I take a vacation? Would I scoop up my children and throw out my laptop? Would I call everyone I knew and tell them how I really feel about them?
I wonder what Coco felt like in those last months. Did she have any idea that this was it? Did she prepare her kids for her absence, her lawyer with her will, her physician with her medical instructions?
Did she ever tell anyone what she would have wanted at her memorial service? As we sat there, last Saturday, I wondered all of these things. It started out formal, and religious, and well, church-like. Memorial programs rattled. An organ played. Pews stood stoic. At a little campus church at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina, we sat, preparing to memorialize a bright light who had just been snuffed out much too soon.
Tensing up, I wondered if the entire service would be like this. Courtney–or Coco as we called her–would have sat patiently through a service like this but would have been impatient for the good part to start. The part when people started talking, and laughing, and being real.
Luckily, that happened. After the obligatory prayers were said and hymns were sung, we talked about Coco. And in-between I wondered all of those questions: did she leave notes in a box for her boys? did she leave her affairs in order? did she know?
Ten months prior, Coco had been told she had cancer. Being a fighter, she took on chemo and did a marvelous job with it. Always upbeat, she asked her boss if she could continue on at her job as a college counselor on a part-time basis, a job that kept her going. They bent over backwards to keep her. The doctors said she was fighting well. She was due to start another round of chemo on Thursday.
Wednesday night, in the middle of the night, she stopped fighting it all and stopped breathing. Her eldest son Brent found her in her bed the next morning.
We thought she had months–at least years? Just ten months. From start to finish. She never met her grandchildren, who I’m sure will be born someday and could have had one of the coolest grandmas of all time. That thought, in particular, tugs at me.
Her sons, Brent and Benjamin, young and handsome, strong and responsible, stood up and shared some amazing memories at the memorial as their wives and many of us listened. The laughs–there were plenty of them. As the pastor had shared, Coco was “part southern belle, part go-go dancer.” The description could not have been more accurate. Kleenex was passed as tears fell, sniffles ensued, heads bowed. How did they compose themselves, I thought? How were they able to stand up and speak when I, not even a blood relative, could barely breathe?
Coco had always been a source of light for me. Six years ago, when a ruptured disc had meant back surgery and I need nursing, she was the auntie who took a week off work and drove up from North Carolina to feed my family and help with our eighteen-month-old son, whom I was unable to lift. During those days, we laughed, drank wine, cried, watched Shrek. She danced with our son, she grocery shopped and cleaned our house, she gave everything of herself. That was just Coco. I remember not wanting her to leave our house.
If she knew she had ten months to live, I rationalized, she’d have lived it just as she did. She took vacations. She spent time with her kids. She counseled students. She lived the life she was meant to live. “You can’t afford not to go out and enjoy life,” she had counseled her son Brent.
Wednesday, March 17th. A day that Coco would likely have spent drinking green beer. A day that we’ll put her to rest in Richmond. I’ll remember the fourteen years that I had her in my life as a gift. And try not to think about these last ten months.
Kate is the CEO of Richmondmom.com and has other thoughts to share in her Random Rants, should you wish to explore. Thanks for remembering Coco with her. Kate’s pretty confident that God has an incredible southern belle/go-go dancer to entertain him now.
