I was not raised to be fragile.
I was raised in a town outside Macon by a mother who thought idle hands invited trouble and a father who loved us in the practical way some men do, through repaired hinges and sharpened pencils and making sure the car had gas before anybody else noticed it was low. By the time I was nineteen, I knew how to make biscuits, check a fever without a thermometer, fold fitted sheets, balance a checking account, and calm down a frightened person by the sound of my voice alone.
That last skill made me a very good nurse and, much later, a very convenient mother.
I retired at sixty-two, not because I was tired, but because Samuel got diagnosed and I wanted every minute that remained to belong to us.
Pancreatic cancer does not bargain. It does not care what you had planned for retirement or who still needs you or whether you just refinanced the kitchen. It arrives like a locked door slamming somewhere deep in the house of your life, and then it starts closing the rest of them one by one.
