Ten years. That number is ingrained in my mind as I stare blankly at gray walls. A well-known cancer doctor lectures about this very thing. She claims there is a 10-year span from a rogue cancer cell to tumor formation in the body. My mother did say that her timing was always a little off.

It all seemed to start, or end rather in a dimly lit, empty hospital corridor. My uncontrollable sobs into the chest of my soon-to-be husband filled the space. “Everything is shutting down.” Including me. Losing my father was profound in the way that you start to frame your life with a before and after. Before dad. After dad. Condolences were received, paperwork was filed, and life marched forward because it had to. Only my mother, a middle-aged widow was left behind.

There is always collateral damage when one dies, isn’t there? Decades of love and the intricacies of marriage, children, and shared history ended so abruptly setting her out into an unfamiliar sea of loneliness. My father walked into the hospital on a Thursday and was gone by Tuesday. The universe, in its perfect order, can deliver such cruel blows.

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Nine years later, we sit silently in an oncologist’s office days after Christmas where we learn of the treatment plan for my mother’s newly diagnosed stage IV cancer. A gentle and sweet man, her doctor explains it all so simply. “It’s very treatable,” he says optimistically.

It’s treatable if the treatment works. No one really likes to say that though. Statistics painted a rather grim picture, which I swiftly turned her away from. Smoothing the edges of a harsh diagnosis became a specialty of mine. If we continued to recklessly hope and envision radical healing being so rightfully hers, we could manifest a great outcome. Take that, universe!

It didn’t take much time to figure out I wasn’t superhuman, and her treatment wasn’t working. My mother is dying almost 10 years after losing the love of her life. Frankly, this revelation enrages me. Did stress and loneliness create cancer cells all those years ago? I demand answers from God. Why her? Why now? My children are small and need a grandma. Daughters need their mothers. The bitterness. I rack my brain for people more deserving of this horrible prognosis. Those who squander time and waste their precious gift.

Darkness has always been a friend of mine. Grief. The deep pit in my chest that aches with emptiness, the spot I am carving out in anticipation of her forever absence. The piece I chip away in solidarity. A permanence. She was mine, and I was hers and this is the proof. I will never be the same.

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As I wade through the muddy waters of a strained and complicated marriage, and the constant pull of two small children in need of my unconditional love, I wonder who I lean into when she goes. Who will love me unconditionally and care about me more than they do themselves? I suppose we relinquish this self-absorbed part of ourselves when there is no one left to fill the role. It’s gone, never to be found again. Life will go on as it does and balance will be restored in time. Logic tells me so.

Until then, I mourn what’s to come and the moment I say goodbye to one of my greatest loves. I fear what will be left in her wake. I desperately hope and dream of better days. And there will be better days. I know because my mother taught me that.