Accompanied by my mother and brother, I enter into a room in a small, barely furnished apartment. The room has sea green walls and there are twin beds covered with bright white sheets and blankets. In one of the beds is a little girls around 10 years old. She seems to be my mother's daughter, yet not the sister of my brother and I. She is very, very sick. Cancer has spread itself through her blood and her heart is slowly beginning to to become stiff, losing its ability to beat. The machine next to the bed shows that 97% of her heart has stopped (it looks like a bar you would see on a computer when you are downloading something) and it is only a matter of minutes before it stops all together.

My father enters the room with another young girl (perhaps 14 or 15). He approaches the bed and holds the little girl's hand. She smiles at him and says "It makes me really happy that you came." My mother explains how strong it was for her to be able to smile. "With 97% of her hear stopped, she has pain up all the way up to her ears," she says. We all know why we are there. To be with her when she dies. But instead she says, "Don't worry. It's going to be a while. I want Sarah to eat first. Go have dinner and then come back to see me." Sarah is the girl who came in with my father. She has fine red hair and is frighteningly thin. She is the sister of the little girl, but again, not related to my brother or I. Sarah begins to cry. "As if I needed another reason not to eat," she laments. "If I eat, she will die."

But the rest of us think she is overreacting and respect the wishes of the little girl. We move from the room into a small, completely white kitchen where we try to have a eat dinner, nibbling at a platter of unappetizing food in silence.

Soon we go back to the room, only to find the bed where the little girl was empty, sheets changed and bed re-made. All of the machines are gone. A nurse comes back through the door to tell us that the little girl died while we had been in the kitchen. "Sometimes they just don't want to die in front of anyone." She says. Her body seems to have just disappeared and we know we will never see it again.