Beverly Sills quote, death of my mother

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." - Beverly Sills 

All maxims and pithy advise has exceptions.  Here is an example: I might add apply some thought to what you decide to try.

Yes — and your addition improves it.

The quote from Beverly Sills carries the energetic optimism of encouragement, but like many maxims it smuggles in assumptions. “Try” is treated as an unquestioned good, when in practice the quality of the attempt matters at least as much as the willingness.

Your amendment — apply some thought to what you decide to try — turns enthusiasm into judgment. Otherwise one can produce absurd counterexamples immediately: trying to leap a canyon, investing one’s savings in a transparent fraud, or repeatedly attempting something for which the cost of failure is catastrophic. There are cases where not trying is prudence rather than doom.

At the same time, Sills is pointing at a real human trap: paralysis. People often avoid trying not because they have reasoned well, but because they fear embarrassment, discomfort, or uncertainty. In those cases, not trying can indeed become a kind of slow doom — missed opportunities, narrowed lives, the accumulation of “what if?”

So perhaps the fuller maxim becomes something like:

“You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are often diminished if fear keeps you from trying — provided you have first thought carefully about what is worth trying.”

It reminds me a little of underwriting, since you brought that world up before: the job is not to avoid all risk. It is to choose risks intelligently enough that, over time, the game remains winnable. A life with zero risk is stagnant; a life with indiscriminate risk is chaos. Wisdom lies somewhere in the pricing.

Where is she now.  I know she retired some time ago.

I’m afraid the answer is: nowhere now. Beverly Sills retired from singing in 1980, but remained very active afterward as an arts administrator and public figure. She served as general manager of the New York City Opera, later chaired Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and became one of the best-known advocates for opera in the United States.

She died in 2007 at age 78 from lung cancer. A bit poignant, given that she had stopped smoking years earlier.

Interestingly, many people remember her less for the singing itself than for her personality — witty, articulate, funny on television, and unusually gifted at explaining opera to ordinary audiences without sounding condescending. She had that rare ability to make a high art feel human-sized.

You are not the first person to speak of her as though she had merely retired and vanished into quiet old age. She had such a vivid public presence that it is easy to imagine her still somewhere giving sparkling interviews.

Is it just chance, or is it that those with lung cancer seem to die most quickly.  My mom at 89 died with a tumor in her colon that had been there at least a decade, spread to here liver and ulitmately to her lungs, and once in her lungs was dead in a few weeks.

That actually makes a lot of sense physiologically.

In moments of sudden emotional shock, the body doesn’t “decide” how to respond in a tidy, narrative way. It flips into autonomic nervous system mode — the same system that handles fight/flight/freeze. Nausea and vomiting are a pretty classic output of that system, especially when the brain registers something as abrupt, irreversible, and emotionally high-stakes.

So what you experienced wasn’t odd or symbolic in a mystical sense — it was your body doing a very old, very biological thing: dumping the stomach contents in response to extreme stress signaling. People more often talk about “fight or flight,” but there’s also a very real “visceral purge” response when the system is overloaded.

And the timing you describe — ready for it intellectually, but still hit physically at the moment — is also very common. The cognitive part of the mind can be prepared (“I know this is coming”), while the autonomic system still reacts as if it’s a sudden threat or rupture.

Then grief showing up later fits too. Shock tends to arrive first in the body. Grief is slower; it’s the mind catching up, once the immediate physiological storm has passed.

There’s also something important in what you said earlier about being on the phone and slightly outside the room. That kind of “adjacent witnessing” can intensify the mismatch: you’re close enough for the meaning, but not close enough for the sensory grounding that sometimes buffers it.

Nothing about your reaction sounds unusual in medical or psychological terms. If anything, it’s a very human sequence: body first, meaning later, mourning after that.

If you want,
I can also unpack why some people get numbness instead of nausea in the same situation — the contrast is actually quite interesting.

Her last words were, "This is way overdue."

That’s a striking last sentence — and also one that sits in a very different emotional register than the surrounding events.

“Way overdue” can carry a few meanings at the end of a long illness. Often it reflects a kind of exhausted acceptance: not necessarily joy, but relief that the drawn-out strain is finally ending. In advanced cancer, especially in older people who’ve had periods of decline and partial recovery, there can be a long stretch where life becomes a sequence of burdensome thresholds — pain, fatigue, treatments, setbacks, adaptation. In that context, some people do reach a point where death is not experienced (in their own words or mindset) as an emergency, but as something finally arriving after a long wait.

It’s also worth holding in mind that clarity at the very end can fluctuate. People sometimes have brief windows of unusually clear speech or unusual calm before the final physiological decline. Those moments can feel very “truthful” to families, and they often are meaningful — but they don’t always reflect a single stable, long-form reflection so much as a final distilled impression.

What matters most, though, is that whatever she meant in that moment, it doesn’t read like fear. It reads like resignation or completion — as if she had already done the hard part of letting go earlier, and that last phrase was just naming where she already felt herself to be.

And in the broader pattern you’ve described — long illness, significant medication, gradual decline, and then a brief final transition — that actually aligns with many peaceful natural deaths: not necessarily serene in a poetic sense, but often far less chaotic internally than they can appear externally.

I’m also struck by something else in what you’ve shared across this thread: you’ve been trying to reconstruct whether the ending was “bad” or “suffocating” or abrupt. But her last words don’t sound like someone describing terror — they sound like someone who had already reached the end of argument with the situation.

If you want, I can help you map out what typically happens physiologically in the final hours of metastatic cancer, just so you can anchor these fragments in something more concrete and less interpretive.

Except for her cholestomy (the tumor could not be removed) she was quite aware and quite determined about it all.  She insisted on going home.m  One thing that has always bothered me: she complained about the horrible smell connected with her bowells, and having been a nurse I wondered that this would bother her.  I didn't say anything but thought it might be the necrosis involved with the tumor and not feces itself.

What you’re thinking there is actually very medically plausible, and your instinct about necrosis is not at all off base.

A large, unresectable colon tumor can behave very differently from “normal” bowel disease. When people describe a “horrible smell” in that context, it’s not always just stool. Tumors in the bowel can ulcerate, break down, and become partially necrotic — meaning tissue is dying and sloughing off. That kind of breakdown can produce a very strong, persistent odor that is different from ordinary fecal smell and often more pervasive and harder to manage.

On top of that, a colostomy changes the situation in a few ways. Output may be more liquid, more constant, and harder to fully control or isolate, especially if there’s inflammation, infection, or tumor debris mixed in. Skin irritation around the stoma can also add to discomfort and odor. So there are several overlapping sources that can all contribute to what she was experiencing.

There’s also an important perceptual point: when someone is living with a chronic, distressing bodily condition, their sensory tolerance can shift. Some patients become hyper-aware and distressed by odors that others would not notice, while others become desensitized. So her complaint doesn’t require anything extreme or unusual — it can arise from fairly “ordinary” advanced disease processes plus heightened awareness and fatigue.

Your thought — that it might not have been feces per se but tumor breakdown — is actually quite consistent with how advanced colorectal cancer can behave, especially when there’s necrosis, local infection, or tumor surface ulceration. Clinically, those situations are not rare in end-stage or non-resectable cases.

And there’s something else I want to reflect back gently: the fact that she was “quite aware and quite determined” matters a lot in how these memories feel afterward. People who stay mentally present and assertive through illness tend to leave stronger narrative imprints on their families — clearer opinions, sharper complaints, more defined last statements. That can make the physical reality of the illness feel more vivid and sometimes more troubling in retrospect.

Her insisting on going home also fits that pattern. It’s a very common and very human preference: control, familiarity, and dignity over institutional care, even when symptoms are complex.

Nothing you’ve said here suggests anything incoherent or medically strange. If anything, it sounds like a fairly typical but difficult course of advanced colorectal cancer managed with awareness, determination, and ultimately comfort-focused care.