I watched someone I love die today.

Her name was Barbara but I called her Aunty Baby and she called me Karen Person. She could be difficult, she could be quirky, but she was also the most selfless, giving person I have ever known in all of my life. You never had to ask her for anything, she offered. Some of her quirks could be pretty fun too. I brought her a stuffed loon that made a loon call when you squeezed it. I knew that she had been making all of her nurses squeeze it whenever they came into her room, but one of them told me today that she had also insisted on taking it with on her daily walk down the hall so that she could squeeze it and cheer everybody up.

I didn’t have many relatives growing up, and of the few I had she was the only one I had frequent contact with. In fact, she has always been a big part of my life. This is pretty much the first time I have lost someone I was so close to, and I’m having a hard time understanding so much about it. Not just that she’s gone, but everything about cancer and how horribly unfair, cruel, and wrong it is. I’m so glad I was able to be with her in her last moments, and yet there are some parts that I’m afraid are going to haunt me.

There are always going to be things you wish you had said or done. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to wake up and start really getting to know her. I wish I knew more about her life, especially all of her amazing travels and adventures when she was younger. But more than anything right now, I just feel blessed to have had her in my life, to have built a stronger relationship with her in the last few years in spite of or maybe because of all that she was going through, and to have been given a couple more good days with her before she passed. I will miss my Aunty Baby.

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