• Living with Dying by Dawn Majors
• The 57th Missouri Photo Workshop | MPW.57

Thirty-five-year-old Trudy Hutchison says she jokes about death often. She said she does it to help her family deal with their situation in a more lighthearted manner.

After an eight year remission from breast cancer, Trudy is still joking about death, to help her two children Hannah, 14, and Hayden, 10, and her husband of 15 years Larry, come to terms with life, as she battles cancer a second time. This time it's liver and bone cancer.

"If I'm not crying about it they don't get too emotional," she said.

When Hayden was two years old, Trudy's doctors gave her only four months to live. "I would just lay on the coach and just smell him, and kiss him, I knew he wouldn't remember his mom but, he would remember this crazy women that just kissed him all the time. "

Despite her diagnosis, Trudy decided she wasn't ready to die, and for the sake of her family she would live those four months plus one more day just to prove the doctors wrong.

Now she's out to prove them wrong again. "There's just something about love that heals the body that scientists can't explain," she said.

Hutchison feels that her family is strong, and she is confident that if she dies, they will go on. "I don't dwell on the end," she said, "I just think for the day. Today I get to be a mom one more day, and at the end of the day, I'm just going to try again tomorrow."