A love story about a unique family tradition

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“I thought about seeing other men, but realized that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. First, yes, there was you to consider, but not in the way that you might think. Your… OUR father loved us both very, very much and the short time that you got to spend with him was special. I didn’t want your memories of him to somehow be supplanted by new memories of some other man. And the memories I had with him were just as precious. I found that I had no interest in brining another man into my life. The one who made me and who’d also made you… he was man enough. And then there was you, in a whole other sense. As you grew older, you became the man in my life, son. Take another look at those pictures if you like, the ones where he and Mom are younger. You’ll see yourself in those pictures. You are like him in so, so many ways that, at times, it’s almost like he never left at all. You never knew him in the way that I did, son, but you know him in the way that you are, in the way that you live. He shines out through your eyes and actions on a daily basis. So… in a way, he never really left us. So why would I even need or want another man, when I had him… and then you?”

I let that sink in for a moment and then finally found my voice. “How… how did it begin?” I asked.

Mother closed her eyes in concentration. She didn’t speak for several seconds and then it all rattled out of her. “When I was just getting into my teens, Mother started getting sick. It wasn’t like your normal illness, either. She began feeling weak and drained, like just a few hours of being awake for everyone else was like being awake for days on end for her. She couldn’t lift as much, move as fast or think as clearly. Everything about her was… slowing down, I guess. Father and I didn’t know what to make of it until she started having fainting spells. She’d be standing up, talking to us about one thing or another, and suddenly she’d just collapse in a heap. Father took her to the hospital in town for a few days of testing. I was here, all alone for those few days, not knowing what was happening. When they returned, they finally had an answer for what was wrong. It was cancer.

“You have to understand, back then, it was the 60’s. In those days, cancer was a dirty word. No one spoke it, like just saying the word would somehow inflict you with it, like the very mention of cancer would strike a loved one down. People died from it left and right. Doctors knew what it was, but they had no clue how to treat it, let alone fight it. It was like that new virus they’re talking about in Africa, the one that caused that scare in Reston, Virginia last year. Ebola. The going theory was that being diagnosed with cancer was a death sentence. Out of thousands, only a handful survived, and no one knew how or why. Frankly, it scared the hell out of everyone. When Mom and Dad came back with the news, it was like all of the life and laughter and happiness in our home had been replaced by everything cancer-related in a matter of days. Pain. Doubt. Fear. Those took up residence here while all the good things seemed to have gone on vacation.

“It took about a year for Mom to finally die. We tried our best to keep her comfortable, but back then our options were kind of limited. Being rich didn’t seem to make a difference where cancer was concerned. Medical science simply hadn’t caught up with it enough to matter for ANYONE. So Mom just… slowly wasted away to nothingness. By the end, I think both Dad and I were just glad that it was over for her. We hated seeing her in pain and not be able to do anything about it. It was a few months before she passed, though, when she had finally become bedridden, that she brought both of us into her room and talked to us. She told us that she loved us both deeply and she could see the effects her illness was having on us. She didn’t want us to suffer any more than we wanted her to suffer. Dad was at his wit’s end and I was at a loss for words. But she kept on talking. ‘I want you two to be there for each other,’ she told us. ‘Whatever happens to me, I want to know that you will always love and support each other through everything. You’ve both been a gift to me and, eventually I will pass on. When that happens, I NEED for you two to learn how to be a gift to each other.’ I’ll never forget those words for as long as I live.”

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