I should have seen it coming

It took the death of my Aunt Joan in January 2011 to spark my love affair with life. It was an irony that, had it not been to do with my own existence, I would have found amusing.

Aunt Joan was my father’s younger sister. She died at the age of seventy-four from pancreatic cancer. She spent her last days in a hospice in Connecticut surrounded by her family. Although I hadn’t seen her in years as she lived thousands of miles away, her death triggered an obsession about the end of my own life. At the age of 51, I heard the clock ticking and I needed to do something exciting and quick. It was time to take a risk, to go away, to pursue a new course. I was waiting for my moment to leave New Zealand and cursed my inability to just get up and go. I wanted to be spontaneous but I didn’t have the genetic make up for it. So I began my passionate affair with life by planning a long trip to see my family and friends in America.

I planned the trip for October, in nine months’ time. That was as spontaneous as I could get. While at first wary of my need for flight, my husband Alex indulged my preoccupation. This prompted guilt feelings over my self-indulgence and I invited him to join me for two weeks of sightseeing before my solo flight began. We would spend a week in San Francisco where my oldest daughter Abby, aged 23, lived. Then we would have a week in New York City. After that I would spend the next seven weeks driving up and down the East Coast of the United States from Maine to North Carolina, visiting friends and relatives. I looked forward to sharing memories of soccer games and Spanish classes with high school friends and recounting family trips to the Cape with my cousins. I would see my mother, my siblings and the city where I was born. I was really looking forward to it. At the time the trip didn’t feel particularly risky but then I didn’t know how sick I was.  I was going to drive a total of about 2,000 miles.

Meanwhile life went on as usual and my aunt’s death faded into the shadows of the more urgent tasks of everyday life. Alongside Alex, I threw myself into training for the 8.4km Round the Bays charity run to take place in Auckland on March 13^th. The training schedule was for six-weeks and built up from a twenty-minute run to an hour run, which we executed around our local streets. I ran alongside Alex without any noticeable problems. I have never been as fast as him, but I was not short of breath or in any pain. On race day we finished together in about 53 minutes. We didn’t think that was bad for a couple in their early fifties.

I felt great physically and there was nothing to indicate I should be concerned. A routine pap smear later in March found nothing unusual.