Mary Williams Melanoma Analysis

Cancer, the dreaded six letter word that will affect almost everyone at some point in their life; whether cancer is their cancer or the cancer of a loved one. What happens when the cancer the doctors said was gone comes back only a year later and this time worse than before? For Mary Williams, this just so happened to be her case. Her malignant melanoma is back and this time an unspoken terminal is present in the diagnosis. As a mother of two young girls, eight and eleven years old, Williams is given no choice but to fight. It does help that her team of doctors are from New York’s elite cancer treatment facility Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer center which is known to be working on a new drug on melanoma patients. So when she is offered to …show more content…
She shares the thoughts of anyone with children as she explains her fear of leaving her children without a mother. Williams learns that in times like this is it the small moments that matter, and that they find grace through the time they share together. “Yet we grasp for grace in our own ways. We find it in all sorts of random moments, clinging to each other for loving warmth this cold, strange month. It’s there in the nights we pop in a movie and have quesadillas on a picnic blanket for dinner, or in quiet afternoons at the library. I cannot have all their memories of march be sad ones. I want my daughters to look back someday and recall the tender ones as well” she states (page 101). It is the small moments that they cling on to are the happy one because she is terrified that her children will only have the sad memories of her when she dies. So she is trying to make the most of each day for her children but what she did not realize is that she was actually helping herself too. By making all these fun memories she was making herself forget about her cancer for just enough time to make herself feel better. Mary Williams always prided herself on being an independent person but since her diagnosis she learned how to rely on people. She writes “Just because you can take care of yourself doesn’t mean you always ought to” (page 136). For an independent person like Williams to accept the help of others is difficult but it shows her strength as a person. She admits that having the support system is something she really needs to get through her battle with cancer and that without the support it would take a large toll on her. She gives a lot of credit to her husband for stepping up to take care of the children while she has so many doctor’s appointments and says multiple times that she could have done it without