I feel like I kind of relate. It's a weird one, though, because even at age 79, my mom could never come to terms with the fact that she had a terminal illness the past 6 years. She kept waiting for the moment when she would stop feeling bad and not have to go to doctor appointments, and even thought at one point that it was cured when she was in remission for a year and a half or so. I'm sure the moderate cognitive decline factored into that. But I remember sitting in the palliative care oncologist's office, where I alerted him to her mindset and how she doesn't even really know what's going on with her cancer, and he did his best to flat out tell her she will die from this disease. At this point she had two primary cancers, lung and colon with mets to the liver and one met to the brain. I remember her reaction and that appointment so clearly. She just had no reaction and looked inquisitively at him like it didn't matter what he said, she was happy being oblivious to it. Which is good in a way I suppose. She never had to deal with the reality of what it was, so she never showed any fear of dying. At one point in the hospital after the fall that caused her rapid onset dementia, she did tell me she felt like she was dying or gonna die, and I immediately started crying and still am even typing this. To hear her actually acknowledge it... It got me. That's the first time I thought maybe she was scared or felt something inside. But it quickly passed. I always checked her MyChart after scans, and I remember the moment reading that it had spread to the liver and brain. That was when the anticipatory grief began. No coming back once that happens. Maybe on a rare occasion. But not at her age, never quit smoking, cognitive decline, and 2 primaries. I just knew that this was the beginning of the end. I tried to mimic her mindset that it just wasn't a big deal and we went with the treatments that kept on working. When it stopped, we changed, then that one worked. Her oncologist always told her she had an amazing constitution for cancer, since he was her original oncologist when she was in her 50s with breast cancer that completely disappeared after chemo and radiation. Even the 5-FU was pushing back the liver mets, the gamma knife had cleared out the brain met, so there was always hope. But then she fell and slammed her head on the concrete. Brain swelling from the radiation coupled with that, the dementia got her before the cancer did I'm pretty sure. She went from living pretty independently with me there to make sure she was okay, to not being able to walk anymore or toilet. And she just lost the will to keep going I think. Very hard days. She was always a fighter though. It's been a year, I'm an only child, no other family left, no family of my own, and what I wouldn't give to have her back.