I Will

My Aunt Pat died Monday of ovarian cancer. She died on my mother’s birthday. I had a feeling this would happen, a strange premonition that my mom’s little sister would leave us on my mom’s birthday. My mom’s response was quite composed and through her tears she said, “This way she could be with me today.” Strong words that I wouldn’t have been able to muster up.

Aunt Pat had been fighting her cancer for three years. She’d undergone chemo on three different occasions and at one time, her doctors thought she was a miracle for kicking all the cancer out of her body when it had at one time been so incredibly advanced they thought she’d never recover. She was a fighter. My aunt kept her amazing sense of humor throughout all her treatments. She made other cancer patients laugh and get through difficult times, including me.

The first time I met my aunt I was in 4th grade. She was living in Lake Tahoe at the time and my parents left me with her while they attended fish expo. I was nervous about being left with someone I didn’t know, but she quickly learned the way to my heart was through my stomach and started feeding me. She made the most amazing enchilada sauce that we dipped fried chicken in. Fried chicken and enchilada sauce sounds like a totally weird combination, but let me tell you, it was amazing. After she fed me, we watched the Wizard of Oz. She was amazed I’d never seen it, and to this day, I still haven’t seen the whole thing because we ended up talking the entire time the movie was on so I didn’t pay attention to the movie.

There’s a part of me that doesn’t feel like celebrating to the level I should be because it’s hard to celebrate me being cancer free when I just had an aunt die of it, but my aunt would not like that. In her honor, not only will I kick cancer’s ass and tell it that it has no business ever screwing with my family ever again, I will make her fried chicken and enchilada sauce recipe. She would like that.