‘I’m crying but I’m happy,’ says terminal cancer patient who views her final days as like a bittersweet film ending – filled with pain but also beautiful moments
- Newlywed Hongkonger Keren Goldman, 49, has known for months she will soon die – and laments the lack of options in the city for those at the end of their lives
- ‘I don’t want to die’, she says. ‘But I also don’t want to be here on machines for days on end when I have no control of my life’
For the past several months, death has been top of mind for Keren Goldman.
Since 2018, the Israeli-born Hong Kong resident has battled liposarcoma, a rare type of cancer that develops in fatty tissue. Doctors told her in November 2022 that her disease was terminal.
“They said, ‘That’s it. There’s nothing we can do for you any more,’” she recalls.
That conversation had come just a week and a half after she and her husband wed – a time that was supposed to be blissful and full of hope.
I was hoping for 10 [years], I was hoping for five. I was not thinking six, seven months
Goldman, who owns an online plant shop called Keren’s Garden in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with liposarcoma in August 2018 after a CT scan revealed that a hard lump in her stomach was a tumour.
She had an operation a month later to remove it, and returned to her daily life.
