R.I.P. Maria King Peters, 6/26/68-2/5/09.

My sister died on February 5, 2009.

She was two years younger than me. We got along generally well through childhood, grew apart a little during adolescence, but got pretty close during young adulthood, particularly when we were both freshly out of school and finding our places in the world. Eventually we each got settled in our respective communities---me in Chicago; her in Champaign-Urbana---and got married, and then she had a couple children, which kept her busy. But we kept in touch.

About four years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, she was pregnant with her second child and her first was only about a year old, so it was a bit of a blow. But Maria had always been the embodiment of robust good health, and I knew or had heard of many people who had fought breast cancer with some success, so I wasn't too worried. She had surgery and started chemotherapy; all would be well.

Some months later, an unfortunate pattern of events began. At the conclusion of her treatment she had a scan that was supposed to confirm that it had worked. But no, it turned out, the cancer was still there. So began a new different treatment regimen. That happened several times: just when everybody thought she was on top of things, it would turn out that no, it was still there. New treatment after new treatment, and while she didn't seem to be getting much worse (from what I could see, anyway), the cancer was still there, like a time bomb in her chest.

It finally went off. Unclear exactly when this happened, but the first strong indication came towards the end of 2008 when she started having bad back pains. Initially we thought it came from sleeping on a bad couch (and that may have been part of it). The weekend after New Years our family got together at my parents' house in Springfield for a couple days, and she had to spend most of the time in bed or in a recliner.

Shortly thereafter she had a scan done that revealed that the cancer had moved into her lymph system and was now in the bones of her hips and back and possibly her liver. I called that next weekend (the second weekend in January) to get the most accurate account of what was going on, and we had a really nice conversation. We hadn't really had much of a chance to talk in Springfield, and I was glad to make that up. (Not too much later, I was REALLY glad!) She told me about the test results and prognosis, but she seemed positive, and we talked about things we would do in the upcoming year---she had planned a trip to Chicago with her daughter in May, and we talked about the whole family coming to visit over the Fourth of July.

Less than a week later, however, she took a sudden bad turn and was hospitalized. My father called me when it happened and my wife and I went down to Urbana to visit her. She had reached a point where she couldn't move her body without agonizing pain, and she was not thinking clearly. This may have been partly due to an electrolyte imbalance or drugs, but it turned out that the cancer had also moved into her brain and she had a tumor there that was interfering with her thinking. When my dad called he had said, "If you want to see your sister again you'd better get down here," but actually by the time we arrived she was relatively stable. She was sort of out of it but she knew the people who came to see her, and we were able to talk a little bit.

The doctors' goal at that point was to come up with a medication program that would keep her relatively comfortable, and they were giving her radiation treatments for her brain and hips. After the first couple days it looked like that would work. I spent several more days down there over the following week, and she seemed to be getting better; it looked like she would at least be able to eventually go home, and nobody was talking about her only having a short time to live, although neither was there any more talk about recovery, either. The paradigm had shifted: it was no longer a question of when or how she was going to beat the cancer. She was not going to beat the cancer.

Over the next week-and-a-half or so, I kept in touch with my parents, who for that entire time slept at the hospital in reclining chairs, so that someone would be there with her if she woke up in the middle of the night and needed something. Things seemed to be going okay, and plans proceeded for moving her home.

Then on the night of February 4th, again more or less out of the blue, my dad called again stating that if I wanted to see her again, I should get down there. I took the next train and got there the next morning. She looked a lot worse, and I'm not sure whether she was ever conscious or knew I was there. Towards the middle of the afternoon, the nurses saw something that to them indicated that she was going to go soon, and called everybody into the room. We gathered around her---me and our parents, her husband and his parents, and her best friend---and I ended up holding one of her hands. I don't know exactly when she died---her breathing was erratic; I would think it had stopped but then I would hear her take another breath. But I do know that, towards the end, I felt a brief, slight pressure from her hand. I dont' want to read too much into it, but it did seem like a good-bye. At least, IF she was aware, she would have known we were there with her. I hope that was a comfort to her.

I felt very sorry for her, for what she went through those last weeks of her life. I think she was in a lot of pain, and she was having trouble thinking clearly and KNEW she was having trouble thinking. But at least, the time she was in the hospital gave everyone else involved time to get used to the idea of her imminent death, and when it finally came, there was a sense of relief that she was free from the pain she had been feeling. I was glad that she was finally at peace. That was my recurrent thought: "Be at peace, be at peace."

A very interesting phenomenon occurred just after she died: over about half an hour, her appearance slowly changed. I think it must have been due to fluid draining from her extremities, but all the stress and strain left her face, and the puffy blotchiness it had previously exhibited. She looked calm, and better than she had looked in years. That, more than anything else, really drove home to me what she had been going through up to that point. Since then I have often wondered to what extent her condition was always worse than she let on, and she just didn't tell anybody. It would have been in character for her not to burden other people with that.

The next few days told me more things I hadn't known about my sister, or more properly, reminded me of things I had forgotten. There was a memorial service/wake for her a couple days later, and I was amazed to see the number of people who came out to pay their respects. People from her job, from former jobs, from the neighborhood, from school, from women's groups she was in...the line just didn't stop. I don't know how many people there were but there were 200 cards printed up and they ran out. I thought about how my sister had touched all these people's lives and earned their respect, friendship, love. I was a little jealous because in recent years we rarely saw her at her best, and as in any family there were decades of baggage attached to all our interaction. I was reminded that, fundamentally, she was a very positive person, full of love and happiness, even amid all her troubles. During her last stay in the hospital, that was a big part of her conversations: telling people that she loved them.

It had been many years since anybody close to me had died, and I was unaccustomed to grieving. Sadness as an emotion doesn't get a lot of attention, because it's doesn't really engender drama, but it is a very powerful emotion. It's different than anger, or despair. Sometimes people who suffer losses of loved ones are portrayed as railing against God or injustice, and I can see how that might happen---I can see how it might apply in my sister's case, with her, who never did any harm to anyone, having been plucked from life with so much still to do and so much still to give, leaving her two little children. But that wasn't how I felt. I was just terribly, terribly sad.

As I mentioned, in recent years, although we had a good relationship, we only saw each other occasionally, and talked on the phone every once in a while. So Maria wasn't part of my day-to-day life the way she was for my parents, who went over there just about every week for a couple days to help take care of the kids. But now that she's gone, I find myself missing her at unexpected times---I'll think of something that maybe we would have done together, or see something that I think she would have liked, and then suddenly realize, oh, she's not around anymore. For several years we hadn't really been able to interact much as adults when we got together, given the attention demands of two toddlers, and we had sort of assumed that a few years down the road, when the kids were older, we'd be able to do more together. Now that won't happen.

I'm sorry she's gone, but glad she's at peace, finally.