Stupid, Stupid Breast Cancer - An Apology to Jill

Yesterday afternoon, at about 4:30 p.m., my sister-in-law Jill Bernstein passed away after what everyone will call a long "battle" with breast cancer.  She was diagnosed at about the same time as I was in 2010, but her disease had progressed much further than mine when it was first found.  She had the best doctors, the most advanced treatment in the world, and my brother would have gone to the ends of the earth to find that one medication that would be the "miracle."

And, for a while, some of those toxic cocktails worked.  She did not have any surgeries, but every chemo out there that could be tried, was tried.  She had good days, and she had awful days.  And things looked very hopeful for a while, although no doctor (including my own) will ever say of breast cancer that it is gone, and it was never in any way "gone" for Jill.

She was amazing - my niece and nephew are pretty wonderful kids (and I will say that because they are still kids and that is awful too) and my brother is a better person for having had these 24 years with her.  She could pick up the phone as she was waiting to go from blood testing to chemo treatment, sitting in a hospital hallway, and call me just to pass the time.  Although I never knew her as a child - we both grew up on Cape Cod but she was almost 8 years younger than I am - for some reason we could talk for a long time, or not talk for a long time, but we could talk.

I am so, so sorry that we did not talk enough, that I did not have the courage to pick up the phone in these last few months, to call just to say....I don't know what I would say.  She was already not well enough to make the trip here for Andrew's wedding, and at our nephew's Bar Mitzvah in April she looked to be in pain, but I did not know it was because the cancer had spread to new, bad places.   I thought she was sore and stiff from treatments.

I am not sure how many times I have to learn this lesson.  One of my dear friends, also named Jill, passed away near the end of last August from a cancer that was diagnosed less than a year earlier.  And again, I had no idea how close to the end it was when Ari called (she was his best friend's mother) to tell me the news that she was gone.  I cried then, and I cry now.

Only I cannot go back and say anything to Jill to let her know that I loved her indomitable spirit, that I loved how patient she was with my sometime impossible "baby" brother, that I loved how she handled her son's innumerable food allergies when he was young.  (I think he couldn't have egg, wheat, peanuts, strawberries, tomatoes, chocolate....and goodness knows what else.)  But she did it all and his big sister, my niece is a beautiful person and a beautiful dancer and a caring child and I don't know what to say to her or her brother.

We are not geographically close, and we have never really been "physically" close; it's just the way our family tends to behave.  But it is at times like this that I cry for a sister-in-law, for a friend who was nothing but kind and loving to me, and one more person whom I did not have the strength to see beyond my own fears to comfort.

http://brezniakrodman.com/obituary/bernstein-jill-meredith-weiner/