26.2 miles I walked for a man I never met. Yet I felt him by my side encouraging me as the hours passed and the challenge grew harder and harder. “Keep going,” he urged. “The pain you feel is nothing compared to the pain of cancer that I suffered from.” Jack was right, of course. Battling cancer was a far greater fight than anything that bright October day brought to me. My pain was self-inflicted. I would be rewarded with a medal. I would recover with a hot pack and some Tylenol. Jack was not so blessed, for he had lost his battle the week before. I walked for Jack and for all of the people like him that I hear about through my work at the cemetery. 

I met his sister in my office when she came to purchase a niche for him. Giving up her life, she rushed into town when her brother was diagnosed. Cancer had already spread throughout his body by the time the doctors found it. Yet Jack was determined to fight. When it became obvious that this was one fight he would not win, his two sisters stayed by his side. Day and night they took care of him. He would not die in a hospital, but in his own bed in the same house they had all grown up in. It would be their final gift to their brother, to allow him to leave them in a place that held so many memories for them all. 

Their parents were already gone and Jack was to be placed near to them. It fell to his sisters to make plans while still taking care of him around the clock. There were no shifts, no time off – the two women shared this task side by side, never alone. It would be wrong to call it a sacrifice, for this is not how they viewed their situation. To them it was a calling, and they exemplified the true meaning of the word sacrifice:to make sacred. Keeping their brother comfortable while letting him go was a sacred task. They never faltered and they never complained. In the final weeks there was never more than an hour’s sleep grabbed between doses of pain medication. Jack was never alone. Neither were his sisters.