SECRETS
It was only a matter of time before I'd have to tell him. The nausea visiting me at regular intervals was not the giddy harbinger of some bootie brigade. It was the result of a noxious combination of chemicals ironically baptized a cocktail, the most recent research into cancer therapy. Surgery was not an option, and would not have been my choice, anyway. Remember Korea?
When he noticed that I no longer brushed my hair a hundred strokes every night, I'd just tell him he'd missed the performance. If I heard him near our door, I'd start counting "…98…99…" My hair was breaking off and I blamed it on a new Clairol shade or a failed Toni home perm.
I had always hoped he would go before me. Nothing personal, you understand: but I believe women are better equipped to deal with the complex emotions of life. Men seem to have an inborn dynamic of denial of everything they can't fix. And Death is a doozy.
But I need to tell him soon. I know how it gnawed at him, that he did not learn of his mother's illness until it was too late to say good-bye.
If I lick this thing, then I won't have to tell him at all. Or if all the tests in the world are wrong. Or if I get hit with a bus first. But Houlihans are realists, who have always looked Life dead in the face, so to speak. I've had too much training, too much experience, to put faith in exaggerated survival stats. Or the magical attributes of apricot pits.
Poor Hawk. It would drive him nuts, the inaction, the helplessness, the impotence that this mere collection of cells would hold over him.
And I've had the best and brightest directing my tests and treatment. While Charles' specialty was thoracic surgery, he had incredible contacts in the rarefied world of the Harvard medical community. And he kindly arranged schedules so my daytrips into Boston didn't seem so unusual. (That's all I'd need now: Hawk getting suspicious and jumping to some silly conclusion, like Charles Emerson Winchester III and I were having an affair.)
But at my last appointment, even dear Charles was encouraging me gruffly to confide in my husband.
I'm going to have to tell him soon, because the burden is growing too heavy for me to lift much longer: the burden of guilt for shielding him; the burden of fear for the pain, the separation and afterlife to come; the burden of this lonely, unlovely knowledge.
He always thought I was so tough. Like one of those pointy, pounding meat mallets, Korea began to tenderize me, and he did the rest.
I'm going to have to tell him soon, because I need him to hold me when I cry, and I want to hold him while he cries. I want to hold him forever, and forever is not as long as it used to be.
finis