Surviving the Death of a Terminally Ill Parent
by Nausheen Eusuf I recently had the wrenching experience of seeing a friend lose her mother to cancer. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it had already metastasized. Treatment would be palliative, not curative, the oncologist explained. One-and-a-half to two years was the prognosis. This summer, she died at the one-and-a-half year mark. What was horrifying wasn’t the death itself—which was a welcome release—but the suffering that preceded it. The unrelenting pain, the flesh coming loose from the bone,…