It Changed My Life
The Last Holiday
This short piece is based on a true story about my younger sister.
She had planned a final holiday to Fiji after learning of her illness. Whilst there, she and her young family were going on a boat excursion but at the last moment, she felt too ill to join in with them.
I wrote it several years ago during a creative writing class assignment. It was selected in the top three. I also discovered how therapeutic writing could be.
“Never mind Mummy, you can come with us next time”.
Sophie forced a smile onto her face, as she waved her husband and daughters off to the boat, they were going to mingle with the shoals of brightly colored fishes. They had planned this trip. Their dream holiday.
Now she didn’t have the strength and energy to enjoy this moment.
She watched her daughter’s happy faces. The innocence that only children capture in the excitement of the moment.
She saw the fleeting worried look on her husband’s face, as he had touched her shoulder reassuringly, trying to keep the mood light as the boat jettied off.
Sophie watched them getting smaller and smaller in the distance, her daughters continuing to wave, trying to keep her as part of the moment for as long as possible.
Sophie took in the scene around her, it was as if she had stepped straight into paradise. She dipped her feet into the cool refreshing water, consumed in the magic of the moment, watching its crystal clearness washing back and forth, gentle and cleansing. She had never experienced such an intense moment whilst performing such a simple action.
Sophie paused and thought how she had taken for granted simple pleasures like this. She had walked on a beach many a time before, with the sand curling through her toes but never had it felt so exquisite like this. As she watched life continue around her, she couldn’t help but think, mother nature can be kind but cruel at the same time.
She could still hear the words of the doctor, six months earlier, resonating loudly inside her head. She had only gone because of the slight pain she had felt in her back, it had come on suddenly.
She recalled the worried look in the doctor’s eyes, unable to mask his concern; all was not as it had seemed. She had suddenly become an emergency case, rushed into hospital, and before she knew it there were cannulas being stuck in, tests and biopsies, and medical staff speaking in whispered voices around her.
Then the blow was delivered, “I’m sorry, we have found a rare form of cancer.”
I’m going to fight this, she had said.
The look on the consultant’s face told her another story, “We can offer you treatment, but the chances of recovery are slim, this is an aggressive type called Cholangiocarcinoma”.
‘Cholan, what” she had said.
Sophie had looked it up, the internet can be so wonderful yet at other times it can come crashing around you. Everything she read confirmed what she had been told, suddenly life as it was, had been taken in a swift moment.
That’s when she had planned the last holiday.
Fiji, it had been on her bucket list, she just hadn’t realized the bucket would be so close.
Sophie was returned to reality by her family returning, her daughter smiling, “Mummy, it was awesome, you can come with us next year ”, she said gleefully, only Sophie knew that there would be no next year.
After this, I felt compelled to write about my younger sister’s journey with this rare cancer. To raise awareness of it. To provide support to others going through the loss of a sibling. It is self-published on Amazon.
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