My husband and I went to see our brother-in-law today. Royce, who is married to Brian’s sister Merle, is in the last stage of cancer.

We hadn’t seen him for a few months because we had been so caught up with work, but when we realized that it would soon be Christmas, we decided we had to make the time to see him.

When Royce, who is a social drinker, first discovered he had kidney cancer a year ago, it had already advanced into the lymph nodes, and the doctors who had been hoping to remove the cancerous kidney had had to close him up again without removing the organ.

The prognosis, obviously, was not good. All they could do was to put him through chemo and on experimental drugs in the hope that one of these treatments would reduce the cancerous spread.

The family, as a whole, reeled from the shock. For the first time, cancer – which happened only to other people, as my mother-in-law said – had happened to us.

Warm, friendly, cheerful Royce, who always had a smile and a joke ready, was dying.

We knew he would be unlikely to last a year, yet no one could give up the hope of a miracle.

In the painful, difficult months that followed, we watched this warm and loving man waste away.

At first, Royce believed that his illness was a punishment from God. He blamed himself for not being good enough – as a husband, a father, a son. He felt that cancer was God’s wake-up call, but oh how harsh a wake-up call it was.

Just before his illness, Royce’s business had failed, so now not only was he terminally ill, but he was financially in dire straits as well. He was angry with himself and railed against the injustice of it all.

He wanted to be there for his family – to see his daughter finish her A levels, see his younger son graduate and find a good job, and perhaps see his older son get married.

Knowing that he would likely leave them with his business debts as well as his whopping medical bills simply added to his guilt and rage.

But both Royce and Merle are fighters. Neither would give up or give in to the disease. Whatever hope that the doctors could hold out to them, they grabbed at.

Royce went through chemo twice, tried different experimental drugs, was in and out of hospital, suffered through bouts of bloating, vomiting and constant pain. And Merle was with him every difficult step of the way.

She prayed. We all did.

But she was the one who fed him, nursed him, washed him, listened to his medication-fuelled hallucinations and scolded him when, in his darkest hours, he blamed himself, questioned God and talked about wanting it all to end.

In the middle of all this turmoil, they also had to give up their beautiful home in order to pay off the bank, and move into a rented apartment that they could barely afford when the medical bills began to pour in.

They scrimped and saved for each month’s rent and every new round of treatment and experimental drugs.

And his three children grew up overnight. Forced to look Death in the face, they, like their parents, refused to give up hope.

The first time that we went to see Royce in hospital was the most difficult.

What do you say to a beloved family member who, in one fell swoop, has lost both his wealth and his health? How do you look someone terminally ill in the face and smile? What can you talk about after you’ve asked him how he is?

Somehow, we got through the motions.