Spreading joy – the magic pill to overcoming life’s tragedies
After losing her closest family to cancer and dementia, Elisa Lee suddenly found a new zest for life by performing tricks and clowning on stage
There are few things more heart-wrenching than losing family. One of those things is to have to watch them suffer first.
Elisa Lee Wai-ching, 62, experienced it multiple times in the span of a few years.
Both her brothers died from stomach cancer; the older one first, then the younger one, whom she’d worked hard for all her life to put through engineering school. And all the while she was dealing with terminally ill brothers, her mother’s dementia was getting worse.
That was about two decades ago now, but Lee still can’t forget the moment her baby brother lay on the sofa, with barely enough energy to lift his arm, looking gaunt and jaundiced, helping wipe their elderly mother’s face and arms one last time. Lee chokes up. “She didn’t even know who he was.”
After her younger brother died, she cared for her mother as her health declined, until she also passed away.