This has just been one long-ass summer and I am very tired of it.
My daughter called me an hour ago. Her father died an hour after I left. He was my first husband. A teen marriage that was over before our daughter’s second birthday. He found happiness in a second marriage and two sons. I found happiness in a second marriage with two sons. My daughter was baffled that neither marriage produced a sister for her.
Jon’s second wife is a nurse and I am a nurse so when they had a meeting in town today I agreed to go out and sit with him. My grandson, Keith was my partner if we needed to turn Jon or do any cares for him.
When they returned, I stayed for a time and visited with the boys and his wife. Friendships had sprung up over the years and so it was comfortable to sit and talk about the pain of cancer stealing our loved ones. I was very acutely aware of this fact as we had just lost our son in May to cancer.
The call came from my daughter just as I was sitting down to catch up on some local news in two papers. I put the papers down and went to tell my husband. There was a large amount of anger in the room as we discussed the tricks that cancer can play on a family. My daughter has already been through so much in the past few years and to lose not only her brother but a father in the space of thirty-nine days was inconceivable.
For myself, it is a bittersweet loss. There was always a warm place in my heart for him in later years. The years that were filled with grandchildren and more birthdays. I always had a good relationship with his family and this just seems so ironic that he would be the first of five siblings to die. He was the youngest at sixty-five, the oldest is eighty-seven.
Cancer took our son in thirty-nine days from diagnosis. My daughter’s brother.
Cancer took her dad in thirty-eight days from diagnosis.
How do you explain to a woman in her forties that cancer never plays fair?
meekamayesmarket 