UNRESPONSIVE

Update and Revision

Thid morning I have just received the news that she is not going to become responsive again. She has now been moved to end-of-life care, and her family is facing the unbearable decisions and final hours that come with that. There is no way to make news like that fit neatly into a paragraph, and there are no words large enough to hold what the people who love her are carrying right now. Please keep my dad and his family in your prayers. my heart hurts for them . I can’t lie and say something comforting at the moment because I am almost speechless at this turn of events. I didn’t see this coming, not for a long time, not even at all.

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Hi, it’s Judith.

I am aware that our social media pages have officially been down for one week today. I had planned to return on Friday with all our announcements, but actual legal work got in the way of website work—which is a very good problem to have, even if it put me a little behind.

As I am sure some of you have noticed, the Hampton Law Firm website has been

“She is unresponsive.”

That was the text I received from my mother today.

She is at MD Anderson with my aunt, who has colon cancer. It has spread. And today, she became unresponsive.

My aunt was the first person I ever knew who had ulcerative colitis. Actually, when I was diagnosed nineteen years ago, I had never even heard of it. It was only then that my parents told me my father’s sister had suffered from it too—and that, at one point, it had made her very sick.

Ulcerative colitis is a chronic autoimmune disease. It is lifelong. It is incurable. It can go into remission, sometimes for years, but it does not simply disappear.

Years after my diagnosis, one of my cousins on my mother’s side became very sick and was diagnosed with it too. So there it was on both sides of my family, with me standing directly in the middle.

Last summer, after I had been hospitalized and was beginning to function a little better, I saw my aunt at a campaign event at Squire Creek. My own ulcerative colitis had been out of remission for months, and I asked whether she had experienced any more problems with hers.

She told me she really had not. After having her children, it had gotten better and had not bothered her much.

I remember wondering why mine had not done the same. I have had three children. Why did her disease go quiet while mine came back so ferociously after all these years?

Last summer, I envied her answer.

Tonight, I would give anything for it still to be true.

A year ago, she was the person I looked at and thought, maybe this disease really can leave you alone. Maybe it can retreat into the background of your life and stay there.

Then she began having stomach problems again.

This time, it was not a flare. It was not simply the disease coming out of remission.

It was colon cancer.

And it had already spread.

Today, she is at MD Anderson, and my mother is texting me that she is unresponsive.

My aunt and I are not close in the everyday sense of the word. We do not talk regularly. She lives in Oak Grove, and we mostly see each other at Christmas or the occasional family event. I am not going to manufacture a closeness that does not exist simply because something terrible is happening.

But closeness is not the only thing that makes someone part of the architecture of your life.

I love her. I grew up visiting her and staying with her. She is part of my family, part of my childhood and part of the history of the disease I have carried in my own body for nearly half my life.

And she is only in her sixties.

That is the thought I cannot get away from tonight.

I am nearly forty. Until today, twenty years still sounded like an enormous amount of time. It sounded far away. It sounded like an entirely different life.

Tonight, it does not.

I have lived with ulcerative colitis for nineteen years already. Since March or April of last year, it has been active again. For a while, it made me extremely sick. I am functioning better now. I am working. I am raising my children. I am rebuilding things, creating things and continuing to produce at a pace that probably makes it easy for people to assume I must be fine.

But functioning is not the same thing as being well.

Productivity is not proof that an illness is not taking something from you.

I know I am not healthy. I can feel it. I can see it, and I know other people can see it too. I can barely eat sometimes. It is one thing to know you are sick. It is another to realize you no longer look healthy enough to keep it private.

There is something deeply lonely about that, especially when you are already trying to hold an entire life together by yourself. If I am honest, there is something embarrassing about it too. Not because illness should be embarrassing, but because there is a particular vulnerability in having your body reveal something you are still working so hard to overcome.

And then a text arrives.

“She is unresponsive.”

Suddenly, twenty years is no longer an abstract stretch of time. I can see it as an actual distance between where I am and where she is.

And it is terrifyingly short.

I do not have a lesson to pull from that tonight. I am not going to turn someone else’s cancer into an inspirational reminder to appreciate every day. I do not know what happens next for my aunt, and I do not know what the next twenty years hold for me.

I only know that last summer, I stood beside her at Squire Creek and asked whether ulcerative colitis still bothered her.

She told me it really had not.

Last summer, I envied that answer.

Tonight, my mother texted me from MD Anderson.

“She is unresponsive.”

And for the first time, twenty years did not feel like a lifetime.

It barely felt like time at all.

— Judith L. Hampton

Attorney at Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC