When I was a little girl my family drove into Eau Claire to go to work and school together everyday. And like clockwork, the radio would flip to Paul Harvey’s radio show. Right after Paul Harvey would break for a moment to tell you about some marvelous vacuum cleaner, stereo or light bulb, he’d say, “… and here it is – the rest of the story.”

I always loved getting the rest of the story as a kid – I still do as a “grown up.”

So here it is folks – the rest of the story.

It took less than 24 hours before the e-mails, phone calls and letters began arriving at The Spectator office and at my home after I wrote a column about a month ago on my step-dad’s struggle with cancer.

To recap, around Memorial Day weekend, my step-dad, Al, started having double vision. By fall, we learned that he had a cancerous brain tumor. My family learned all of the ins and outs of chemotherapy through October and November. By January we realized we were losing the fight, and began using hospice services.

And that was about where the story ended.

My family spent most of February in Sacred Heart Hospital and Dove Healthcare Nursing and Rehabilitation, as the cancer continued to ravage my step-dad’s already feeble body.

Suddenly, IVs, wheelchairs and oxygen tanks were the accessories de jour.

After Al agreed to go to the nursing home, my mom noticed that his feet and ankles began to swell; she remembered my grandmother having the same response right before she died. We braced ourselves.

Four days later, on Feb. 16, Al died.

And just as Al’s cancer threw my little family into a secret world that you don’t see much of, so did his death.

Funerals are an emotional rollercoaster like nothing else.

My mother was a basket case – and rightfully so. I spent the night Al died making phone calls to family, friends and our pastors because she couldn’t. Later, after my boyfriend arrived, we spent the remainder of the evening taking care of my mom. You don’t know fun until your mom, who gets tipsy off of two glasses of wine, has three.

The decisions following a death are endless and none of the choices are all that good.

The next day, my family met with the funeral director.

For those of you who haven’t gone through it, here’s a crash course in funeral planning:

You get thrown a binder full of announcement templates and options for the text inside. I’ve never been much for mushy, flowery, sympathy junk, so this one really just about made me puke. It made my mom bawl. When you’re given 23 options of pamphlets that all look tacky and have ugly flowers or deer on them, it’s hard. We went for the lesser of the evils and opted for a country road scene.

At some point you look at “containers,” which in our case was an urn. When they brought in the little marble box they showed us how it works, and where the hole was. All I could think about was whether or not they used a funnel to pour in the ashes or if they just winged it.

You talk about lunches and sermons, about flowers and music. It’s a lot like a wedding, only much smaller and nowhere near as much fun.

When the funeral and the visitation came, I put on my tough face and just did it. I coped by adopting something of a speech.

“How you doin?” everyone would ask.

“We’re hanging in there,” I’d reply with a smile.

If I have to say I’m hanging in there one more time this year, I think I’ll scream.

All in all, I think my Aunt Mary summed up the whole ordeal in the coffee room of the funeral home on the night of the visitation, after she realized there was no cream for her coffee.

“Well this sucks already!” she said with a smirk.

The experience did have two positive outcomes. The funeral, while sad, was a true expression of Al. It was to the point, it was personal and, above all, it was real.

More than that, the outpouring of support through the week from my friends, from the university and actually from strangers has been staggering.

In times like these I’ve learned the power of friendship, of caring and of compassion. I can only hope that by sharing my family’s story someone else might have an idea of what to expect if it happens to them or someone they love.

MacLaughlin is a senior print journalism major and staff writer for The Spectator.