Kim Carolan

I am a young person who lost my dad due to cancer. I have a BS in Business, but have stopped everything professionally (at least for the time being) to write about him and to take care of his widow (my mom). I actually wrote a book that just came out called Walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death (Copyright 2009, AEG Publishing), about his illness, death and our journey afterwards in grief. I love to write, play music and be in the outdoors.

My dad's story is probably an all-too-common tale: My mom told him to go to the doctor to get checked out for what she thought was cancer, he put it off. In the end, she was right--it was cancer. He had the cancer (melanoma) surgically removed, and life returned back to normal. Fast-forward four-and-a-half years, and the cancer returned, this time migrating to his lymph nodes. Then later it moved to his brain, and last, to his spinal cord. Then he went into hospice care and died. I was 20-years-old, my brother was 17 and my mom was 49.

He was a stoic man in his life: He didn't care what people said or thought of him. And even in his illness and death, he was strong, thinking that doing everything the doctors said would preserve his life, not merely prolong his life. In the end, he cared more about God than he had in the past, reading his Bible everyday he was on disability. He apologized to my mom about being a jerk during their marriage once one night when he was sure he would die--sadly, they never got to talk about those issues or work through them. They were busy "hurrying up" and "waiting": Hurrying to doctor's appointments; waiting for test results or for chemotherapy and radiation to work.

He never realized the chaos he was going to leave us in after his death: Not enough money for his widow, not enough parenting and guidance for his son and not knowing how his daughter's life would play out.

And that was the least of all of our worries afterward.