There were tears when Barbara Bardak’s three young children first started watching the video she’d made for them about her life and what she wanted for theirs. It wasn’t long, though, before they were nudging and kidding each other in affection for the mother they’d lost to breast cancer five months earlier at age 43.
“It was such a beautiful moment,” said Nora Bardak, Barbara’s mother-in-law and caregiver for the children — 10, 11 and 14 — in Rocky Point, N.Y. “What a gift this was, and it couldn’t have been easy for her — she had to think, ‘maybe I’m dying,’” even though she looked healthy on the tape made six weeks before she died in July.