I have to write about this because it is like a huge rock inside my chest. It is hard to breathe around it, and it weighs me down so that I can hardly move.

Carol has died. Wife, mother, sister, friend, leukemia sufferer. She was 33 years old. Carol was diagnosed about a month before my husband with the same kind of leukemia that Dennis has. Right from the beginning, she was very very sick. The first round of chemotherapy for leukemia is done in hospital and is called induction therapy. It makes you very ill because the goal is to wipe out as much of the cancer cells as possible without killing you. Most patients require one round of induction therapy to be in first remission. Carol had three rounds and remained in hospital the entire time. I don’t know if they ever did manage to get her into remission, defined as having 5% or less blast (cancer) cells in the blood. Following induction therapy is at least three rounds of consolidation chemotherapy, done as an outpatient. She and Dennis both did those throughout the summer.

Carol had her stem cell transplant shortly before Dennis had his. Hers was a stranger donation as none of her siblings were a match. Stranger donations almost guarantee graft vs. host disease will occur, where the donor cells fight with the recipient cells. It can make you very ill. It did make Carol very ill. Her blood counts never really came up either, so they had to do a second “top-up” transplant from the same donor. She was in and out of hospital with pain, infections, problems, never really recovering. She was in hospital more than out throughout the whole time of her illness. She had been in hospital for a month before she died, and finally succumbed to respiratory failure.

We saw Carol quite often, during Dennis’ own long hospital stays and in the clinic. She was still in the hospital after her transplant when Dennis was admitted for his. They were both still there for Hallowe’en, and one night Carol and her husband were in the patient lounge trying to find a Thomas the Tank Engine costume for their littlest boy online. They were looking at costumes and talking about prices and quality and size as if it was perfectly normal to be in a ward with absolutely no hair and an IV pole attached to your chest and talking about Hallowe’en costumes. Life went on.

When Dennis was released after his transplant, we were at the clinic twice a week for monitoring. I had a few weeks off work to look after him and take him to his appointments. Carol was on the same clinic schedule. We would chat about things while waiting to see the doctor. We talked about what her work was before she got sick, how her kids were doing, how she was feeling, how Dennis was feeling. It was November, and she already had her house decorated for Christmas. She had eight Christmas trees in her house, and had someone come and put up lights on the outside. She was determined to make everything beautiful for her family.

She had some good days, but mostly not so good days. One time she said to me that she just wanted things to go back to being normal. She told me that she would sometimes say to her husband, “Remember when things were normal?” She didn’t require perfection, just regular everyday life, watching her kids grow up at home, working, fixing up her house. Just an ordinary life, without hospitals and needles and constant pain.

I found out that she had passed when I saw her picture in the obituaries in the paper. At first I wasn’t sure, because I had never seen her with hair, and in this picture she had straight dark brown hair. When I realized it was her, it was like an electric shock went through me. I said, “Oh shit. Carol died.” The tears started immediately. Dennis already knew, his daughter who knew her from Carol’s kids’ daycare had heard earlier and told him. He didn’t want to tell me, because he knows how upset I get when any of the leukemia patients we know die. He said, “I’m not Carol.”, as in “It won’t happen to me.” But that wasn’t the point. Carol IS Carol, and now she’s gone.

Her boys are just little, seven and two. I know how the seven year old feels, I was about the same age when I lost my mother. He will not remember much about her as he grows, the sound of her voice, the smell of her skin, how she looked after him and loved him. In fact, he will mostly remember the hospital and the fact that Mommy was always sick, and then she was gone. The little one will not remember her at all.

I also know how her husband feels because I have lost a spouse. He will be in shock for a very long time, and he will never ever recover fully from the pain and the hurt of the last year and a half, watching her suffer, trying to keep things together for the children, and then finally losing her. He cannot even fully grieve because he has two little boys that he has to make a normal life for, who now need him more than ever.

I do not know how Carol felt. I do not know if she was aware that she would die, and if she did, at what point that realization came to her. I cannot imagine the agony of knowing you were leaving your babies behind. I cannot imagine the suffering she went through with her illness. Maybe she was ready to go when it finally happened. I only hope that she is at peace, if such a thing exists in death.

Mixed in with my extreme sadness are twinges of other emotions. I feel guilt, because even though Dennis has the same illness, he is on the way to being well. Everything has gone so smoothly for him. On the leukemia scale, if Carol was a 10, Dennis is a 1. Not to say that he has not experienced things that no one should have to withstand, but I believe with all my heart that he will be one of the lucky ones and will beat this. I also feel some relief, that it was anyone else but Dennis that died. In my little insular world, things are still okay, he is still there breathing and recovering. I am almost ashamed that I still feel panic and desperation over the future when it could have been so much worse.

Life goes on, they say. But sometimes, life just doesn’t go on. It ends. It has ended for Carol, and it has irrevocably changed for her husband and her children. Life will not go on for them the same way, it has changed them forever.