A Mother’s Wish
A Mother’s Wish
When the call came, the world stopped breathing. A mother knows when life is about to change, not because of words spoken, but because of a silence that enters the bones. For Schenell Roussouw, that silence arrived at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, cutting through the rhythm of an ordinary workday and reshaping the universe forever.
Her daughter Schumca lived in Mozambique with her two boys and Schenell recalls their visit to South Africa in July 2024. Schuma arrived with her boys, aged 10 and 12, and Schenell was particularly delighted to see her daughter in good spirits and looking so healthy. Schennell, a registered nurse, still had two days left to work before she could join them on their holiday, and Schumca, who was in remission from a melanoma diagnosed in 2016, had agreed to go for a routine check-up on the Tuesday morning. The two of them had laughed that morning, the way mothers and daughters do when time feels generous, when the heart believes in more tomorrows. But by noon, the ground beneath them had disappeared. Cancer had returned, merciless and swift. Within weeks, the holiday that was meant to be a joyful reunion turned into a vigil of suffering, ending with Schenell standing beside two grandsons at a funeral instead of a seaside.
“The worst for me,” she says, “was not her dying. It was her suffering.”
For all her years as a nurse, for all the knowledge that had carried her through countless hospital corridors, Schenell found herself helpless before her child’s pain. No dosage, no protocol, no whispered prayer could quiet the agony. She sat beside her daughter’s bed, watching the light fade from eyes that still wanted to live. “My child was not ready to die,” she remembers. “And yet she was forced to.”
When the nephrologist spoke the final truth, that treatment was no longer possible, Schenell’s heart broke not once, but again and again. “I saw in her eyes,” she says softly, “the brutal reality of what awaited her and her children.”
Now, one year later, the mother herself walks with cancer. Schenell lives with stage 4 Carcinosarcoma, but she has learned the language of endings, not as tragedy, but as an act of grace. “I have refused chemotherapy this time around, but I have not given up on life,” she says, “only on suffering.” She follows a holistic, integrated approach, and her days are filled with small rituals: a walk at dawn, a meal prepared with care, the gentle hum of gratitude that steadies her spirit.
“My motto,” she tells us, “is good life, good death.”
There is no fear in her voice, only longing, not for more time, but for a beautiful farewell. She dreams of a law that allows her to leave this world the way she has lived in it: with service, dignity, tenderness, and peace.
“I hope DignitySA wins the court case,” she writes. “So that when my time comes, I may step away gently, before pain steals the last of who I am, and leave my loved ones with a memory of my laughter, not my suffering.”
It is not death she wishes to hasten, but love she wishes to protect. And in that wish lies something profoundly human, the courage to meet the inevitable not with despair, but with grace.
-Schenell Roussouw - 66-year-old registered nurse living with stage 4 Carcinosarcoma since 2023.
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