You Will Always Be Remembered

Dear Cancer,

Six years ago today, you took my best friend away from me. I learned then that you don’t fight fair. You struck our family in the middle of the night and attacked the person we least expected. 

He did everything right. He didn’t smoke, he rarely drank, he ran marathons and worked out almost daily. He was kind to children and animals and had a wonderful life ahead of him. But, in your jealousy and with viciousness you struck.

You did show some mercy. The first sign that you were insidiously eating away at him was a grand mal seizure in the middle of the night while he was safely ensconced in his bed. I suppose it could have been worse. He had just driven three hours with his beautiful girlfriend and you could have attacked while he was on the road. You waited…

We had optimism in the hospital that day and the next that it was just a benign tumor. And while we hoped, you laughed. With each update from the doctors, the news got worse until finally we had a diagnosis—a malignant brain tumor typically found in young children and rarely found in adults. Apparently, you had been lying dormant for quite some time waiting for the right moment to show your ugly self.

The moment you picked was at the height of his life. He was 35, successful and finally happy with both his personal life and his professional career. He had met the woman of his dreams, the one with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. And in this he did.

For almost three years, he fought you courageously. And he was not alone in this battle. With a battalion of doctors, friends and family, we took you head on. We went to the world’s best doctors and hospitals and left no study unturned.  We learned a whole new language and met many new friends along our journey. Through it all, he maintained his sense of humor and his incredible sense of direction, guiding us all to the places we didn’t necessarily want to be but needed to see.

We even thought we had you beat once. For almost a year, you hid yourself. This gave him time to run his last marathon and to get married. And it challenged me to live up to the promise I made to God that if he went into remission I, too, would run a marathon. It gave us all time to embrace his life. 

But as is human nature, we got complacent. We thought we had kicked you to the curb. We had not and on Mother’s Day 2005 you chose to let us know that you would not give up your quest for his life. And this time, deep in our hearts we knew you might just win.

Those last eight months were filled with many highs and some lows. He got married and finally went to Europe. He spent time in the mountains --the one place on earth he could always find peace. He laughed with his wife and cried with his sister. He suffered indignities that at any other time would have left him feeling vulnerable and embarrassed but in his desire to squeak out every moment with his new wife, he suffered them gladly.

His shouts of “I love Carrie” and the joy he showed for the simplest gestures of support brought tears to my heart. But perhaps it was his last words to me that bring me light when my own world seems dark, “You good mom,” he said as my tears fell on his bald head.

Those last weeks were brutal. Cancer, you showed no mercy. You robbed him of his speech, his hair and most of his movement. But, you never took away his dignity nor his compassion for others. To the end, he comforted us.

With soft jazz playing in the background, his wife laying by his side, and his family surrounding him with love, Ryan David Serber passed gently in the early morning hours of January 9, 2006. 

But, his legacy has lived on. His nieces and nephews dedicate their achievements to their Uncle Ryan. In subtle places, they put reminders of him: under the bill of their baseball caps there is always a dedication to “Uncle Ryan” and around their wrists a bracelet that says "R.S. we will always remember". 

Ultimately Cancer, you lost. Ryan taught people to love, live and laugh. He lived his life his way and will never be forgotten.

Sincerely,
Ryan's big sister