Luminous at the end: My sister's last 40 days

From the Wednesday in mid-July when my sister called with word of her illness to the bright Sunday afternoon in late August when she died, death was a revelation: it put everything else in a different light. In a culture where we control so much or believe that we do, death is not ours to control. And in the end, there was something more: a luminosity.

It was 40 days from the day my sister Regan called to tell me that an MRI had revealed metastatic cancer in her liver, lymph glands, lungs and brain to the Sunday she died. Six years earlier she had been treated for breast cancer. It metastasized suddenly.

Were these 40 days a Lent lodged in summer? I tried that idea out as I sat alone a few days after her death, trying to make sense of the experience of the past five and a half weeks.