If I’ve told you this story before, please indulge me in sharing it one more time.

Who says that you can’t have cancer and a sense of humor… I think that a sense humor is one of the most powerful characteristics a person with cancer can have. It is finding the wildly inappropriate slant on very challenging real life topics that can be the difference between emotionally dog paddling and sinking. This was most certainly with my Mom.

After a horrendous round of biochemo treatment, Mom wanted to go straight from her hospital bed to the Santa Monica promenade (our routine of ‘IV drip to shopping blitz’ still makes me laugh out loud).

Once the release forms were signed and Mom got dressed we took a yellow cab straight down to retail heaven. Bleary eyed and medicated, Mom would scope the stores for silly treats. One day she came across something that she really fancied - life sized daisies! Not content on just buying one, Mom purchased 30 huge daisies in purple, pink and blue. Knowing full well that I was going to be the one lugging these plastic pieces of perfection all the way back to Canada, I was none too pleased.

Back home in Vancouver we unwrapped and put together the daisies. Mom started bringing them into her bedroom and placed them all around the bed. Curiously I asked Mom why she wanted them there. She replied that when she lay in bed it was like she was pushing up daisies. Horrified by her macabre sense of humor, I grabbed them all and charged out of the room.

Mom and I soon agreed that she would “plant” the daisies in her living room on a green grass looking carpet, making the area and indoor garden.

Looking back at that day, I can now appreciate the need for both the flowers and the dark humor that Mom expressed - it was in fact a way for her to touch, understand and deal with her reality - one which at that time was very uncertain.