I went to my grandmother's house for Labor Day weekend. This wasn't your average trip, cluttered with all of my immediate family. This was just me and Mom - partially because it wasn't necessary for them to be there and partially because it was cheaper to go without them. This trip was to say goodbye to someone I cared about very much.

I'd known about the concept of death long before that, but I've never had it be anyone this close to me before. I think that is a blessing, or I would have had to deal with those emotions before I was even halfway ready to handle them. I'm not saying I was prepared for it even now, but I can accept it with the maturity I wouldn't have had at an earlier age.

I found out my friend Delphine Patrick had cancer on the way home after the reunion. I was shocked. I had felt the hard lump in her stomach area once before, but I never really equated it with the deadly disease it is. It was fourth-stage cancer, which had originated in her lungs, but had spread to other areas of the body. Over the next few months I heard occasionaly about her condition. how she was getting worse and worse. The thought hit me that she was going to die, and that there was nothing I could do about it.

When I first met Delphine, she was working for my grandmother; doing the dishes, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, pretty much anything except cooking. I didn't like her right away; she was a bit intimidating and she's a bit rough around the edges. Once I got past that, though, I found a vibrant, fun, surprisingly strong woman. She always had a mischievous sparkle in her eye, always findng humor in something. She was honest, and up-front with you. She told me about her rough, exciting life, and her job as a bartender in Colorado before coming to live with us. We had the same sense of humor, and she was always saying the nicest things to me. I will always remember her as a sister, a kindred spirit, and one of the angels looking out for me when she passes.

I don't know what I was expecting when I went to the care center. Nothing could have prepared me for it. She'd lost a lot of her curly salt-and pepper black hair. She'd lost a good fifty pounds, which my mother told me was due to the fact that her body was beginning to eat away at her muscles. But what I wasn't expecting was the change in the eyes. The sparkle was gone from them, to be replaced with a hollow emptiness that was most unnerving. She was in a lot of pain, and had tubes stuck all over her to get her oxygen and other basic needs. She said it was hard to breathe on her own. They gave her a whole lot of morphene so the pain receptors would sit down and shut up. She would sit there and cough up what loked like massive amounts of snot, but I think it wasn't. I could tell that she wanted to die, and there was a bit of her old fervor when she wondered aloud "What is taking so damn long?" She's on the DNR list - Do not recussitate. And in that moment, if it had been in my power, I would have granted her wish.