Our family spent days at the bedside of my beloved mother-in-law as she lay dying at Johns Hopkins hospital. She had been diagnosed with advanced bone marrow cancer four years earlier, and now her doctors told us her death was certainly imminent. She was unconscious and on hospice care, and we were told she would slip away at any moment.

Defying those predictions, she recovered and went on to live another two years.  They were two incredibly precious years, in which she took her three grandchildren to Disney World, saw her eldest son married, her youngest daughter graduate from high school, and made Christmas dinner that year in her high heels.

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