Promise Me--PART ONE.

No mater how much I thought I could prepare myself, I was wrong. The prospect of my mother actually dying had taken on a whole new perspective. The doctors told us she had three months to live. Two months and three weeks have gone by since we were in that doctor's office.

I sit at her bedside now. Her breaths are light and come less often than my own, which are frantic.
She is awake - I know she is awake, even though her eyelids state differently. She squeezes my hand tight. I know now that she is just as scared as I am. There was a point - up until yesterday, when the doctors said it could be any day now - that she would brush off the question:
'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid of dying? No.' she would reply.

I look at her frail body, tubes coming out of her arms and into a machine on the wall. She has turned a swallow, yellow colour. "Are you afraid?" I ask, knowing that I will just get the usual answer.
She doesn't answer.
I raise my head and glance at the machine, everything is as it should be. She is still with us.
'Yes,' she says, breathlessly. "but not of dying. It will come as a relief. What I am really afraid of is what I'm leaving behind; how you will cope when I'm not here. Promise me, baby, that you won't let this get in the way of your life.'

I feel tears streaming down my face, and my lip trembling. Instead of answering, I give her hand another squeeze.

'Don't cry," she says, lifting her eyelids which I've grown to know takes great effort.
'You can't let something stupid like cancer get in the way of your life. You have much left to live for.'

She looks at me. The only part of her that has remained the same throughout this whole process are her warm hazel eyes. I treasure the moments I get to look at them, these days.

'Its not the cancer. It's you! You won't be here.' what I don't add is that she's the only thing I have to live for, if she were to die, I'd be as good dead too.

She gives me a sleepy smile, and her eyes flutter closed. I know it's time to let her sleep, if I want to get the chance to see her again before...