Tess Williams of Elk Grove wept when she saw her sister holding a sign in the crowd of protesters standing outside Santa Cruz's City Hall last week.

"It just is so unlike her," Williams said. Her sister, a soccer mom, PTA secretary "and always the more quiet and elegant of us two," isn't the sign-waving type.

Or, wasn't.

"I hid behind this tall, bearded fellow...hoping she wouldn't see me crying," Williams said. "I wanted to be there for her. The last thing I wanted to do was wimp out."

Yet the best-laid plans often fail us; life refuses to be as neat as that.

So it's been for Williams' sister, who lives with her husband and two children in the Bay Area. She also uses medicinal marijuana to manage the pain as she dies of cancer. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Six months ago, Williams took her sister to their favorite San Francisco restaurant for lunch to celebrate what seemed to be the latter woman's successful battle with cancer. Two weeks later, the extended family was crushed to learn the cancer was back -- and had spread.

"All she wants now is to live the last of her life with dignity and to spend it with friends and family, especially her kids," Williams said. "If that means using marijuana to manage the pain, so be it."

Her desire for dignity is what brought Williams and her sister out to Tuesday's rally, which was called to protest federal drug agents' stepped-up crackdown on medicinal-marijuana clubs and patients certified to use the otherwise illegal drug under a doctor's care for documented medical purposes.

Voters made medical marijuana legal in California in 1996, but its use remains illegal under federal law, sparking ugly rifts between officials in California and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Which is why Williams' sister doesn't want to be named in this column. Life in her household is crazy enough.

"You know, if it was just me, I'd stand up for this, but I'm just too, too tired," the 36 year-old woman said. "This whole thing has been confusing and awful enough for my children without me getting arrested, too."

Tuesday's rally made the national news, but with that stereotypical "only in California" twist outsiders have a tough time resisting.

As in: Ha-ha. There's those California potheads again, pretending to be sick so they can toke up. What's wrong with 'em? A stubbed toe?

But Tuesday's rally wasn't about drug use. It was about quality of life and end-of-life issues. That, and the dying.

Williams wishes all the naysayers and disbelievers had shown up. "Their hearts and minds would have been changed." They would have seen that no one there was faking a terminal illness or debilitating condition just to score a little marijuana for weekend parties.

"We're talking sick, sick people," she said. "People who are pale and emaciated."

At one point during the rally, Williams stood next to a man who looked like a skeleton wearing a Hawaiian shirt. When she commented about something a speaker said, he turned to her, looked in her eyes and smiled.

"Something about him reminded me of my sister," she said. "And then I realized it was the eyes. His eyes looked so, so tired. There's just so little light there....How uncompassionate are people that they would accuse these terminally ill people of being fakers; that government agents would raid their homes and handcuff them?"

Because they can't cry about everything, she and her sister sometimes laugh about the irony of the situation. Two years ago, the dying woman was the PTA official who organized the local Red Ribbon Week anti-drug campaign in her children's school.

"I guess you never know where life might take you," Williams said.