Meema

I've traveled a lot in the last three years. First I took my then 17 year old son to Paris 2 weeks after my husband died. It was a welcome distraction, a place I'd always wanted to go, and it would have taken a great amount of coaxing to ever get my husband to go, though I know he would have loved it once he got there. I dropped a small bit of his ashes in the Seine. I can't stand to be home at Christmas anymore, and my son and I have a new tradition of traveling during the holidays. Christmas 2012 we went to Venice, the next year back to Paris, and in 2014 I met him in Istanbul where he was finishing up his semester abroad. That was an amazing trip. Some of my favorite trips have been the 3 times I've driven from coast to coast with a girlfriend bringing my son's car either to him at college in California or getting it back home to Massachusetts for the summer. This is an incredible country with so much beauty to see. And lots of corn. In April my boyfriend and I are planning a week in Colorado with his two sons, 18 and 14, which is very new and different. Yikes. Should be interesting.

Pancreatic cancer, the neuroendocrin type. He was stage 4 when diagnosed, there was a football sized tumor in there that was starting to invade his stomach and there were numerous tumors in his liver. We had just over 2 years from diagnosis to his death--2 years to obsess and research and try almost every conventional and alternative treatment possible, none of which did any good. The surgery might have given him an extra year, but he suffered miserably for most of that year. He was probably sick for the whole 7 years we were married and we just didn't know it.