I sat in the cancer ward waiting room with my mother this morning. She was in for a blood draw, a means to monitor her plummeting white blood cells. We saw a friend of hers there, a woman she knew from high school. The woman sat there alone, tears streaming down her face from the unfairness of life, of the pain of loneliness, of the shortage of time. She has end stage cancer, just like Mom.

We took seats next to this woman. "Do you notice that nobody talks to anybody else here?" she sniffled. Mom nodded. "Like a funeral." This woman has such simple goals. Living until January, for instance...things that we just assume will come to pass, but this woman has to hope for them. We should all be hoping for them.

Eventually the woman was called to her appointment, and Mom and I were in relative solitude where we sat. A man and his wife, late fifties/early sixties if I had to guess, rose when a nurse called his name. "The ones you see with those big envelopes?" Mom began. I nodded, solemn. The man had looked devastated. "They're the ones who have been referred. This is the first time they're meeting with an oncologist. Did you see how scared he looked?" I saw. "The rest of us are deadened to it," she mused.

Shortly thereafter, Mom was called back for her blood draw, a process she finds very uncomfortable with her port. I went with her, and as I held her hand I remembered years of her support inside of a second, and it broke my heart that I couldn't absorb her pain, that I couldn't take it away.

We left the hospital, and I felt shame. I felt it keenly. I have been going through the worst period of my life in the last 4 to 5 days. I feel like the parts of myself that I like have died, and I am still coming to terms with why my mere existence has become cruel. The details aren't important, only the result. Only the chest pains. Only the abhorrence for sleep or food.

I expressed my shame to Mom. I said, "What kind of monster am I that I feel as if my life may as well be over and I have no idea what it's like to have my life stolen from me?" She repeated something I've said to her, small collections of words offering a piece of extended insight.

"Pain knows no scale. Hurt is hurt."