40 February 2022 The Birthday Journal Esther Ama Morkor stared blankly at the doctor, her whole body trembling and her tongue dryer than it had been that morning. This was the result she had expected, yet hearing confirmation from the doctor’s own lips suddenly made it real. It was like something she could touch. Lord, have mercy! The Legacy of Esther and Her Brave Battle Against Cancer In just a matter of seconds, her whole life rolled out before her like a film reel. She saw her handsome father, Charles Newman, her saintly mother, Hannah Baker Acquah, and her loving siblings. She saw her childhood as the feisty, sassy, precocious Ama Morkor, who did not allow anyone to walk over her. On a normal day, she would have smiled at the thought that she was considered the most troublesome of all her mother’s children. She saw her own children, (Margaret, Philomena, Dominic and Betty), each of them exactly as they had beenborn.Sherememberedholding them in her arms. Her children, who saw her as their confidante and critic, as their “go to” person. How would they cope without her? She could see the day shewas born again and how her faith in Christ had helped her through the challenging phases of her life. She recalled how she had immersed herself in the work of God and had risen in the hierarchy of the Methodist Church. This was not how it should have ended. She was supposed to grow old, to see her children get married and carry her grandchildren on her back. However, that was not meant to be. There she was, a middle-aged woman dying of cancer. The doctor’s lips moved, but she didn’t hear him. She didn’t want to hear anymore. All she wanted to do was go home, curl up and sleep. Then as her senses returned, she heard him say resolutely, “there is hope, there is hope. We will use the most aggressive treatment. Trust me.” Listening as the doctor tried to pump hope back into her, she couldn’t help but see the hopelessness of it all. The die was rolled. Her own body was failing her. Feeling numb, her mind raced back to a few days ago when she first detected the hard mass in her breast; her heart, pumping likemad. She had felt it again, willing it to go away, praying that it was just one of the tissues in her breast, but when she touched it again, it was there, a mass more solid than her breast tissues. At the Cocoa Clinic, the lump was removed and sent to the lab for a biopsy. So, there she sat in front of the doctor being told that the lump was cancerous and that her breast had to be removed. “In those days, the word cancer was synonymous with death. I initially accepted the fact that I was going to die and began to come to terms with it. I thought if that’s the way God wanted to take me, fair enough. The actual dying wasn’t a problem per se, it was the emotional and physical separation from my children that was my main problem. None of them had finished schooling at the time, and that was the saddest part for me. I kept the diagnosis and treatment from them in order not to burden them. I believed that breaking the emotional bond between myself and my children would make the dying process easy for me, so I started to distance myself from them.” One day, while at a prayer meeting, a prophecy came clearly to her, “This is not unto death, but for My own glorification.” “The word of God had come and I had to hold on to it, but holding on was not easy.” ESTHER AMA MORKOR DEGRAF T - A I DOO Unstoppable Eighty & “The word of God had come and I had to hold on to it, but holding on was not easy.”
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