What Price?

You sit there
Motionless
Like a carved statue
Made of living flesh
Devoid of anything
Beyond your own thoughts
Of impending doom.

Caring not
What others might need
Whether it be
Your love
Or a caressing touch
After being hurt.

Your withering body
A pale reflection
Of a once strong woman
Who moved mountains
With her presence
And moral willpower.

As the cancer
Greedily devours your body
Spewing it’s toxic waste
Across your deteriorating
Bodyscape.

Tumours erupts
All over your body
Like volcanoes
Waiting to explode
Venting their poisonous content
Like lava
Throughout your veins.

Death becomes
A sweet release
To daily grind of pain
And pitiful stares
Which she catches
When other think
She has not.

What cost
Is worth paying the price
For a few extra days
Of seeing grandchildren
Saying their final “good-byes”
If you are suffering
In uncontrollable pain?

Only delaying
The undeniable
And natural outcome
Of death.

Author's Note

During the first half of 1996, I watched my Oma slowly dye from cancer, as the tumours spread across her body, before she finally died, in late June 1996. The doctors refuse to admit to the family, she was dying from cancer, until afterwards.