I have struggled with whether I want to share this blog post with you, but I have concluded that I need to offer a tribute to my late wife’s astonishing intuitive power.

With that, I’ll start at the end and work my way through it. I believe my darling Kathy Anne felt in her gut that she was sick a good bit before we received the cancer diagnosis on Dec. 26, 2022.

Kathy Anne did not reveal what she might have known. She was not wired to do that. It was her stoic nature that compelled her to keep it quiet.

I lost my bride to glioblastoma cancer of the brain on Feb. 3. She fought a brief — but very fierce — battle against the disease before it claimed her.

Now for a brief flashback.

We returned in October 2022 from a lengthy trip in our travel trailer. We hauled our trailer to the West Coast, visited family and friends. Then we returned home. On our way back to North Texas, Kathy Anne broached a subject I wasn’t expecting from her: She wanted to sell the RV. It was time, she said.

Kathy Anne laid out plenty of reasons for selling the vehicle: We had traveled far and wide in our three RVs; we were weary of battling the little problems that kept cropping up with them; we could sell the RV and then decide how we wanted to spend the rest of our life.

I signed on. Sure thing, I told her. I am ready to do something else.

So … we sold it. We pocketed the money and then, barely a month later, she began exhibiting some curious symptoms. She began losing her balance. She was stumbling — a lot.

Kathy Anne also had undergone a significant loss of weight over the course of several months. Our friends would comment on it and she would blow it off, saying she had spent a lot of time power walking through the neighborhood; that’s how the weight came off.

It sounds plausible to me even now. But … then came the decision to go to the hospital in McKinney the day after this past Christmas. The doc told her of the mass they found in her brain. Her reaction? Typical stoicism. “Let’s just get it out of there,” she said.

I look back on all this now and wonder: Did she know something she couldn’t share this past fall? 

I have told members of my family that Kathy Anne was the most intuitive individual I have ever known. As I recall the sequence I have just described, I am convincing myself that her marvelous intuition was at work. Quite obviously, I cannot prove any of this.

Thus, I have just explained why I have struggled to tell this story.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com