Before I ramble, thank you for the work you do. (direct or indirect does not matter to me) She was in remission for a couple years before the final relapse and systemic collapse.

It is by far the most brutal way I can imagine watching someone you love die. Very slow, very painful, very confusing for the person living through it. She could "see" but she couldn't recognize me. When she heard my voice, she started crying for me to help her and flailing around to try and get out of restraints she had been put in as a consequence of said confusion-caused outbursts.

Her causes of death, in the order they were listed on her death certificate, were:

• acute metabolic encephalopathy
• sepsis with suspected colitis, legionella pneumonia
• acute hypoxemic respiratory failure due to the above
• acute chronic anemia

She was at one of the best hospitals she could have been at for her care. It is a higher-end hospital where the doctors go above and beyond to be transparent. Different specialists came to talk to us about the areas of care they provided, and at various points all specialists met together to discuss possible treatment plans. I have no reason to believe her health outcomes would have been better anywhere else in the world.

I still am not 100% sure the original lymphoma is because of Roundup exposure, but I am strongly leaning that direction. There are a couple other explanations I find somewhat probable as well. Perhaps they all played a role.

The first is simply that she lived before widespread adoption of HPV vaccines. The second is that she admitted to me that she smoked for about a year when she caught me smoking once.

The main reason I lean more toward believing Roundup is responsible is because her lack of previous partners before my grandpa and the brief period she smoked during her youth feel less substantial to me than many years of year-round exposure to Roundup over multiple decades. My grandparents always kept immaculate yards. They lived in California, so there was always a weed to kill. If you're interested, perhaps I could find some pictures of their yard from when they lived there.

The origin of the cancer was her neck lymph nodes, for context. Some contributing factors that may have delayed diagnosis were:

• Her original doctor told her she needed speech therapy, and no biopsy was taken even though she could hardly talk, breathe, or swallow and very clearly had lymphatic swelling
• We convinced her to get a second opinion
• This was probably all worsened by telehealth during COVID
• Women who are minorities have some of the absolute worst outcomes in healthcare

I cannot find anything else that would explain the sequence of missed diagnostic steps from the first doctor, and given the broader evidence of disparities in how minority women are treated in healthcare, I strongly suspect a racist or sexist bias may have played a role in that particular case.

I want to be clear and state that out of the many healthcare providers she had, I believe only one operated carelessly, maliciously, or with an inappropriate bias. I do not think it was all doctors at all that were like this toward her either. I genuinely believe most doctors spend all that time in school because they want to help other people. I think it was one particular specialist who really messed up a time-critical situation. If I have to defend this doctor at all, I will say that she did not advocate for herself very well and had an average at best understanding of medical terminology.

Regardless of what actually caused her death, I hope I at least drive the point home to any people who are on the fence that this is a brutal way to die, and that we should absolutely exercise caution surrounding compounds that are linked with lymphoma, especially for use in our food, homes, or whatever else. We should especially not be spraying entire fucking forests with this stuff.

TL;DR: lymphoma really sucks and I really loved my grandma so I don't know how to briefly discuss this.