On sickness and death

My nanny has just been diagnosed with suspected stage 4 lung cancer. Her lung is filled with water weighing about 5kgs that it's affecting her internal organs and the rest of her central nervous system. She was a healthy woman before this, barely even having opportunities to munch on outside food.

She's been watching over me from the time I was still wrapped in white sheets, to the moment I was buttoning my own clothes and moved on to secondary school. Yesterday, the roles were switched.... I had helped her with a bowl of porridge feeling pretty helpless I couldn't do as much as she did for me before this.

She was still the fiesty woman even after being hospitalised. Ashley sat down by her side on the bed while she still had her legs comfortably folded whilst sitting upright speaking of stories past and present. Through conversation, it was obvious she wasn't aware of the graveness of her watery lungs. That just made it harder to stand upright and smile when she was grinning all over. And of all things. Cancer.

If every person had the right to take power of their own life; decide on when the first greying follicle should peep out, if babies should be kept in the womb longer than 9 months or make plans for when or how we should we should pass on from being alive.

No one wants grey hair, and everyone adores babies (unless of course you have the baby in uncalled for circumstances) but everyone would like the chance to live longer and die in an unsufferable way. Technology and advancement has gifted us with the power of denying our looks of aging and producing wonderful bundles of joy, yet there are some things which even up till now, we don't quite have control of.

To plan your own death, is a terrible burden on yourself. And yet, to have something else or someone else or fate to decide for you, you'd want to question that as well too.

Out of the whole hospital visit she then speaks a quiet line. She tells me. "All I have hope for all my life is to have a good life as I get older, It doesn't matter if I suffer in my youth as long as there is a easier life as I begin to grey. I hope everyone who are not born under 1,000,000 shining stars sees the same too."

Right now, I'm thinking of good things to come. We'll go visit her again on Mother's day :)