Kelly

"My husband was tough. With the type of cancer he had, people usually last around 6 months. He battled treatment and lived three more years"

"Going through all of this, it changed my outlook on a lot of things. I’m not waking up thinking I have to go to work, or my kids have to go to school. I get to go to work today, and my kids get to go to school. I am determined to not let this fuck up my kid’s life. They can be sad, they can be confused, they can be scared. But I refuse to have my kids play the victim."

"Besides first finding out, the scariest part was letting him go. There is nothing you can compare to having someone die from something like cancer. I remember I was with him in bed and we were just talking. At this point he was in very bad shape. It was hard for him to breathe, just because of how sick he was and how much treatment he was going through. Then, I heard my niece yell from across the house so I got up and left my husband"

"When I came back, his mom was with him crying. She told me he passed away when I left. And I felt a lot of things in a short amount of time. I was angry at my niece for taking away such a monumental event, but in a split second that went away. Then I was angry at my husband for leaving me, but that went away too. I think it's fitting that he left this world with the person who brought him into it, his mom."

"I can still feel him with me sometimes. In a spiritual sense. There is just so much telling me he’s still here. I remember I was in the kitchen a couple months after his death. My 8 year old daughter was sitting on the floor drawing while I was cooking. My daughter looks up at me and says Abba, the hindi word for father, just patted me on the back. She says "I think he says he’s proud of me". And I looked at her and say “I’m sure he is”

"Another time, I was walking in my house when I heard my niece upstairs talking to herself. At that point we were all talking a little bit to Abba in our own time, which was hard for me in the beginning. As I get closer, I can barely make out what she was saying. I open the door and walk in to see her laying on the floor looking very serious."

"When I asked her what she was doing, she looked at me and said the simplest, most elegant thing I have ever heard. She said Auntie, Abba is in the stars. He is crying. But he’s only crying because we are crying for him. And I was just shocked by how profound this sentence was. Here was my baby niece, no older than 6, telling me things she had no way of understanding herself. I know that it was him talking to her, from wherever he is. I truly believe he’s there, guiding my family, waiting for me to join him"

"This is actually a book that my mom gave me when she was going through breast cancer. It lays out the history of cancer, from when it was first discovered up to what's happening now. I finally got around to reading it after my husband passed, and what struck me is how far we still have to go in terms of curing cancer. There is still so much we could be doing. I recommend anyone who's been affected by cancer to read this"

"It’s definitely hard. When I lost him, I lost so much. He was my best friend, my lover, my partner, a father. We were so young too. I never thought I’d be a widow at 45, it never even crossed my mind. To see my husband fight through three years of treatment and battle stage IV colon cancer was something I was unprepared to do"