Cancer-stricken woman says her goodbyes at pre-death wake

Kaye Manring decided she didn't want to spend her last days sick from treatment.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- On a recent Sunday so spectacular one could almost dismiss death as a distant and indistinct rumor, Kaye Manring welcomed the friends and kin attending her wake with an invitation to sip and sup.
"The booze is on the back porch," she told new arrivals. "The food is in the dining room."
Scant days after Manring's 64th birthday in August, doctors discovered a malignant mass in her right jaw.
A pair of ominous spots on her lungs proved part of the metastasizing cancer.
"'It's a fast-growing cancer,"' she said the consulting physician told her.
"'I don't know how long you're going to last.'
"This is nuts," she replied.
"Give me a number. Any number. Lie to me.
"They wouldn't even do that."
Told surgery could be fatal, Manring was offered the option of piggyback radiation and chemotherapy.
She bluntly asked if it would make a difference.
"'We're hoping so,"' she was told. "You're hoping so? I don't like your odds," she said.
"Is it worth two more days or weeks or months if I spend them in the bathroom throwing up?
"You just make sure I have something for pain," she told the doctor. "Call hospice. I want to stay awake as much as I can and be with my family as much as I can."
Next step: Throw a party
Manring's "awake wake" was an outgrowth of that last sentiment.
"This is so much better," she said of her decision to be part of her own funeral wake.
"I get to see everybody and give them a hug. Nothing sad. I don't want anybody to cry."
"Kaye said she didn't want to miss the party," said Manring's cousin Rita Graves, who drove down from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to say goodbye.
"We have all come here on Kaye's command, and it's difficult. We all love her. It's hard to be at a pre-death party, but that is what she wanted."
"It's a calling together of the clan," Graves' brother Tim Dempsey said.
"We're Irish Catholic," said Manring's son Chris. "We party at the drop of a hat. We don't need a reason. We just need a place."
He shared his mother's opinion about the dubious benefits of radiation and chemo.
"If it's not going to help," he said, "it's like changing the oil after the engine's blown."
As his mother said her goodbyes, newly arriving guests piled their best culinary contributions on the groaning board.
Of the 102 invited guests, there were few no-shows.
No guarantees
In the back yard, Manring's cousin Theresia Chinn mused of her own mortality, "When I was little, I thought I'd live a long time."
The number 84 was somehow tattooed in her young and impressionable mind.
Not until she began to approach middle age did it dawn on her that she could be wrong.
"Maybe I was dyslexic when I was a kid," she said, "and I'm only supposed to live to be 48."
The guest of honor had taken care of business.
Her husband, Butch, debilitated by three strokes, will go to a nursing home.
She met with a priest for the sacrament of anointing of the sick.
"After my last confession," she said, "he forgave me of every sin I committed, even the ones I didn't remember. I felt like I could go right then and there."
But not before her funeral wake.
"Did you get plenty to eat?" she quizzed a departing guest with mock severity. "It's not my fault if you didn't."