My mother in law died yesterday at the age of 80, another of the wartime generation lost.
A very strange day here today at Montcocher, and I will not be blogging for long.
The reason is that my husband’s mother died last night. She was the last of our parents to go. We both lost our fathers to sudden heart attacks many years ago, and my mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2007.
I haven’t written about Lise on this blog, because she didn’t know that she was terminally ill, and you never know if things might get back to people. But she was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer at Easter. She’s lived just seven weeks.
This type of lung cancer is very malignant, but because it’s malignant, it responds well to chemotherapy. But Lise was quickly too ill to have chemo, and her first session was postponed. When she had it, it made her feel terrible, and she was taken into hospital soon afterwards.
Cancer is a strange beast – some people are given weeks and get months. Some people that the doctors are quite optimistic about get almost no time at all. And this is what happened to Lise – the doctors kept saying she was in good general health and had good prospects, but she didn’t respond to treatment and the medics came to feel that she must already have secondaries that they hadn’t spotted.
On Sunday, the doctors said they thought she might die next weekend, so we had planned to leave France tonight to see her tomorrow, sorting out ferry times and clothes to take. Then my husband’s brother called yesterday to say they now no longer expected her to live out the day. She didn’t regain consciousness and passed away at 9.15pm UK time.
My husband has blogged about her briefly and the rest of the day will be given over to scanning the family photos so everyone can have a copy. Other than that, we are very tired, so will be having a quiet day.