She is at Peace Now. I am Not.
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- Aug 11
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 11
A few minutes ago, I learned that my aunt Sharon had passed away.
Three months ago, doctors discovered a mass in her colon. About a month ago, they confirmed that it was cancer. She had been at MD Anderson for several weeks while doctors evaluated her and tried to determine what treatment might be possible.
Before they could finalize a treatment plan, she suffered a seizure and a stroke. She never became responsive again. The doctors could not bring her back, and our family was forced to accept that she was not going to recover.
Now she is gone.
Aunt Sharon had ulcerative colitis, just like I do. In fact, she was the first person I ever knew who had it.
I talked to her about it last year. She told me that she had been doing well. She had not been having problems and had not needed to see anyone about it. Since learning what happened, I have gone back to that conversation over and over again. I wish I had said, “Please go anyway. Please get checked, just to be safe.”
I know that grief searches backward for the moment it wishes it could rewrite. I know that I cannot say whether one conversation would have changed anything. But I still wish I had said it.
Ulcerative colitis carries an increased risk of colon cancer, and that risk generally increases based on how long and how extensively a person has had the disease. That is frightening enough when it exists only as a possibility somewhere in the back of your mind. It is something entirely different to watch it happen to the first person you ever knew who shared the disease with you.
When we learned that Aunt Sharon had colon cancer, I believed that was the worst-case scenario.
In my mind, the worst case meant that the road ahead would be hard. It meant a treatment plan, hospitals, exhaustion, fear and probably a year or two of our family trying to support her through it. Whatever arguments, distance or old resentments may have existed among us, I believed we would come together.
That is what our family did for my grandmother.
Honestly, in the version I imagined, Sharon eventually rang that bell. She finished treatment. She was declared cancer-free, and she went home.
That was what I thought the worst-case scenario looked like.
I was wrong.
The real worst-case scenario was that she would not even get the opportunity to fight. There was no treatment plan. There was no year or two of hospital visits. There was no time for all of us to adjust, come together and figure out how to help her through it.
There were three months. My mother told me today that the last time my mom got up to leave the hospital, Aunt Sharon couldn’t talk but she had tears in her eyes. Because she knew, she was not going back home again. That shatters me.
My mother and I talked today about the fact that Sharon and I had not been particularly close in recent years. But, as Mama said, family is family. It does not matter whether you see someone every day or once or twice a year. Families can be complicated. People can become distant. Feelings can get hurt, and years can pass without anyone knowing how to repair what happened.
None of that makes the grief less real.
Her daughter—my cousin—and I have also been separated by distance and hurt for several years. My heart breaks for her. She has been left to make decisions and handle responsibilities that no daughter is ever prepared to face. I have reached out and offered to help with legal paperwork, funeral arrangements or anything else I am capable of handling.
I cannot change what happened. I can only offer to carry whatever part of the weight she will allow me to carry.
My mother and I also talked about my father.
For the better part of the past year and a half, while I have been out of remission and struggling with this disease myself, he has worried about me. Now he has had to sit beside his little sister’s hospital bed and watch her die after she developed the cancer that people with this disease fear.
I cannot imagine what that has done to him.
He will not open up about it because that is simply not who he is. He is not going to sit down and explain the fear, the grief or what it means to watch this happen to his little sister while knowing that his daughter lives with the same disease.
But we will see it in his eyes. We already do.
I can see that he is hurting. I can understand at least some of what is behind it. But I cannot make him talk about it, and I cannot take any of it away from him.
There is nothing I can do about it.
Her death has also made the danger of my own disease feel different. Colon cancer is no longer simply a risk listed in an article or mentioned during a doctor’s appointment. It is no longer something that might happen to an unnamed person at some point in the future.
It happened to Aunt Sharon. And even though once I only talked about it as one of the "risks" of the disease, this will forever change the way I look at that risk. Because after this, that risk is very obviously enormous. It is heartbreaking to see it happen to someone who didn't deserve one bad thing ever in their life but had suffered so many already. Its terrifying to see it happen to the Aunt who lived with the same disease right along side me for years, she's gone. Now it's just me. 20 years. If I follow this path, I have 20 years on this earth. I hope I do not follow this path, but I'm very aware of the risks now.
The first person I ever knew who had ulcerative colitis is gone. Three months ago, we believed she was fine.
Then there was a mass, a cancer diagnosis, a seizure and a stroke. Before anyone had time to understand what was happening, we had reached the end.
There should have been more time.
There should have been time to develop a treatment plan. Time for Sharon to fight. Time for hospital visits and family support. Time for hope to have a chance to become something real.
Instead, there were three months.
I am told that Aunt Sharon is at peace now. I hope with everything in me that she is.
But tonight, I am not.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney At Law
Hampton Law Firm
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