Bunnie Carol (Haggett) Lambert
Memorial Website
Tragedy 1978
Bunnie's fifth and final child, my little brother Jody Michael Lambert, was born September 18th, 1975. He was the only blonde boy of us siblings, the three others all having brown hair. Jody was intelligent, patient and brave. Some time in Jody's second year, mum noticed that things were just not right with Jody. She had brought him to the doctor's multiple times, but they reassured her "It's just the flu, mum" and sent them home. After he fainted without precedent, she really became worried. A routine dental exam soon showed what the medical doctors had failed to diagnose: Cancer.
The dental xrays showed cancer through his jaw bone and up through his left eye. It had likely already metastasized and arrived in those locations. Mum made endless trips to bring Jody for cancer treatments over the next 18 months, including Cobalt radiation and chemotherapy. When he was two, the cancer treatment caused all of his hair to fall out, as is usual side effect.
The eye that had been infiltrated by the cancer was painfully obvious to all of us. Mum was especially hypersensitive about it. I remember after Christmas '77, Jody had received a picture book as a present, and one of the pages had a silver mirror pasted on it, and I was attempting to show my little brother how he can look in the mirror and see himself. Mum glared at me and whispered condemnations. I hadn't realized she had been trying to keep him from seeing himself in any mirror, so as not to realize the full depth of his condition.
After exhausting all attempts at treatment, the doctors informed Mum that there was nothing more they could do, and in the summer of 1978, they ended treatment and sent Jody home to die. Mum warned us siblings that summer, in '78, during a grave talk, that Jody was going to die, and there was nothing that could be done. Up until then she had maintained her composure around the rest of her kids, but during those last few months, I remember her in deep depression, but trying to keep up appearances for Jody's sake.
I understood what she had told us, and that he was supposed to be dying, but it was unclear exactly when, and for the 8 year old that I was at the time, I mostly pushed it out of my mind; with no situation to compare it to, not having yet experienced the death of someone I knew. But the gravity of it would soon be known to us all, and on a cold day in the afternoon of November 2nd, 1978, my siblings and I arrived home from school but the back door was locked - for the first time ever. We knocked and my father soon opened it, and I remember my oldest brother remarking that it was "like a jail" which struck me as odd at the time, because we'd been locked out, not in... but my father interrupted our entry and informed us in words that still reverberate through the decades since - "Jody just died".
We came into my parents bedroom, where Mum was holding Jody, crying in deep despair and without words or instruction we each took turns hugging and kissing him good-bye.
