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royalty checks from gas wells that his grandfather had retained the mineral rights to. She also told Jim that he was the second person whom she knew to have pancreatic cancer, and the other person was her father-in-law, whose name was also James—as it turned out, this was another connection that was not just coincidence.
    Jim did not directly ask Allison how long he had to live. He did tell me that Allison said he would be able to make what he called ‘my birthday trip to Hawaii’, but it would be very, very hard on him. Jim said they had a nice hug as he left that made him feel pretty good.
    In September we went to MD Anderson, the cancer treatment and research centre at the University of Texas. By the end of October, though, Jim’s cancer had got much worse, and in the first few days of November his oncologist decided to change the chemotherapy and put Jim on treatment that was a lot stronger. This new treatment made Jim extremely sick.
    A month before he had won the Victoria Country Club First Round Club Championship in golf. Now, all he could do was sleep. Until this point, he had not lost his hair, either. He had been proud that he’d had cancer for more than a year, undergone chemotherapy and kept his hair. But then he started losing his hair, and pretty much his self-esteem, and he was so weak he stayed in bed most of the time, often with a fever. He started losing weight, too, as he just had no appetite.
    Just as Allison had said, Jim was most sick in November. We went back to MD Anderson for another dose of chemotherapy. One week later Jim’s most recent tests came back and his cancer was escalating. So the treatment was changed again and now involved four different kinds of chemotherapy, one by mouth and the other three by IV. Jim was so sick. At one point, he even said that if this was living then he had to talk to the oncologist because this was not living. He didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to talk on the phone. He didn’t want visitors. He didn’t want to leave the house at all.
    December 8 was Jim’s birthday, and I didn’t want the day to go by unrecognised, for I knew this would be his last birthday on this earth. I wanted to have some kind of celebration. He was feeling a little bit better, so at the last minute we had some friends over. A few days before our trip to Hawaii, Jim seemed to be feeling upbeat. We drove to Houston on Saturday and he only had a bowl of soup that night; Sunday morning he had some cereal and milk. But that night when we boarded our flight he felt nauseous. Two hours into the flight my husband started throwing up. He told me he thought I was going to have to take him to the hospital when we landed in Honolulu. From the plane I called a surgeon we knew and he advised me to take Jim straight to an emergency department. However, even though he was still vomiting, before we landed Jim said, ‘Let’s just go on to Maui and get the kids to the condo and see how I do.’
    We were there for one day. Jim was trying to feel good. The next day he felt terrible, and shortly after midnight we went to the emergency department in the Maui hospital. It had great doctors who offered some forms of treatment, but Jim said he just wanted to go home because he knew he would really get the best care for himself there. That morning, around 5 a.m., I made the flight arrangements to leave Maui to get back to Houston. We left Maui around five o’clock in the afternoon on December 22 then arrived in Houston at six o’clock the next morning and drove home.
    A month later, on 22 January 2011, my heroic husband passed away.
    Thank goodness the Sunday before Jim died I had gone to the nursing home where Jim’s mother lives and brought her to our house to see him. She has dementia but she’s ‘with it’ if you talk to her one on one; if you have three people in the room talking at the same time, she gets confused.
    Even though