I spent the next two days on a covert mission collecting supplies: helium balloons hidden in the nurses station, secret phone calls for delivery Hawaiian pizza (my mother's favorite), batting my eyes at the cafeteria chef to convince him to make a birthday cake.  My grandmother is the only person I know who could come out of surgery, unable to leave her bed and successfully pull off a surprise party in a hospital room--of which not necessarily condoned by hospital policy. But that's the way she was--she put everyone before herself.  She used to tell me it was stress that caused her cancer and made me vow not to let myself stress too much. 

My grandmother survived cancer for over twenty years. Fourteen years after her first attack the cancer returned and spread to her breast. But she was a fighter, the toughest lady I know, and managed to again survive cancer. Her and I would laugh about her treatments, the chemotherapy that made her loopy, the yellow stains in her eyes from whatever fluid they used to scan her, the stoma bag for her bladder cancer. We would giggle at the doctors office and I would whisper into her ear, "Grandma, your a yellowed eyed, birdbrained, bag lady," and then we would laugh even harder and she would hoot, "haha, it's true!" 

I was a few months into grad school when she called me. It was early evening and I was sitting on my bed reading. The phone rang and she said, "Nibbs, it's grandma. I have something to tell you and I wanted you to hear it straight from me before I tell anyone else..." It was probably the longest pause ever between the two of us, before she spoke again I could feel the tears running down my face. "The cancer has spread to my blood, my lungs and my liver." 

I spoke to my grandmother almost every day until the day I graduated from school. The day after graduation I was on a flight to stay as long as I could with her. For three weeks I sat by her side. I cooked her favorite meal, English split pea soup and corn cakes, a recipe I had learned from cooking next to her years earlier. It was the last she ever ate.

 The day before she passed, she grabbed my hand and placed her engagement ring into my palm. "It's yours now" she said. Having been told my whole life that it would be mine when she was gone I did everything I could to give it back. "Please grandma, no, no, I don't want this. Please, I don't want it." But in the end we both knew it was time. We spent the day crying together, and then laughing, talking and then crying some more. 

I boarded a flight home the next morning and that evening one her 55th anniversary, while my grandfather held her in his arms, she fell asleep and never woke up. She was seventy-four years young and I never stop missing her. 
- Ms. Christian