FBW: My Story of Survival by Meredith

Please welcome back each of our calendar bloggers as they join us for another week as the featured blogger of the week (FBW). This time they are sharing stories of survival and photos of the strong women in their lives. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

I look back now and wonder if she was dying that day at the beach, or that weekend at my cousin’s wedding. If the monster was already there, breaking her body down one cell at a time. Stalking her organs and ambushing her insides. The cancer had won before she even knew to fight.

I was 24 years old when my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I was 24 years old when she died from the disease. The whole experience organized in my mind by numbers. On the day she died, I was 24 years old, my baby was 1, my brother 22, my dad 66 and my mom 57. She was diagnosed when she was 56; the cancer was in stage 4. Before the diagnosis, she’d been sick for 3 months. After the diagnosis, she was burdened with pain and nausea for 7 months, before dying at 6:30pm on 10/1/99. I was 45 minutes from home when she slipped away.

In a period of 18 months, I brought one life into this world and helped another leave. Everyday, I packed up my toddler and drove the 35 minutes to my parents’ home where I spent the days feeding my mom food she wouldn’t eat, driving her to doctors who did nothing, and brought her water for pain killers which did little.

Weeks before she died, high on narcotics, her eyes fixed on the living room sliding doors, she said, “At Christmastime, you’ll put the tree there, and the lights will sparkle.” She didn’t survive long enough to see that Christmas tree. But I did…somehow…I survived.

Meredith Groenevelt is the voice behind BuenoBaby; a humorous, candid, raw look at a life, a marriage and a mommy-hood. Along, with publishing her blog, she also freelances as a web designer. Occasionally she spends time on Twitter, and by occasionally, I mean she’s legally changing her name to @BuenoBabyGirl.

Today she lives in Wisconsin with her husband and their three daughters. She thinks she might have a cat.