Cancer Chronicles

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In the back of Janet’s closet I found The Thing I hoped had been lost forever. It’s still here.
On our honeymoon forty-five years ago in the Smoky Mountains, we had a pastel (that’s colored chalk, I think) portrait done of ourselves. The artist was a college student working for the summer and was quite chatty. He had us pose separately. I knew something was wrong when he turned to Janet and asked, “Does he ever smile?”
Yes I did smile and I thought that was what I was doing, smiling, not grinning. Smiling is turning your lips up at the corners. Grinning is showing off your teeth. Off to the side of the artist’s space was a portrait of a young woman grinning. The artist had carefully outlined every tooth. Poor woman ended up looking like Minnie Pearl.
It didn’t make too much difference how I looked in the drawing. Janet looked nice, and it was going to be a Christmas gift to her parents. We showed it to some friends and one of them said we looked like Ichabod Crane and a very tired Liz Taylor. I couldn’t help looking like Ichabod Crane. The artist gave me only half a neck. I did like the idea I was married to Liz Taylor even if she did look very tired.
After Christmas my mother-in-law hanged the drawing in a spare bedroom and gratefully I didn’t have to look at it too often. Like any young man I foolishly did not think to the future. After my mother-in-law died, of course, The Thing came back to us. Janet knew I didn’t like it so she hid it in a closet where it remained hidden until recently.
I would trash it but I’d hate to get rid of the reminder that I married a woman who looked like Liz Taylor. This is among the quandaries we face when going through a loved one’s things after cancer has taken them away. I suppose I will turn to my favorite option—put it back where I found it and let my children decide what to do with it when the time comes.
I still can’t get over that someone thought I looked like Ichabod Crane. Why on earth would Liz Taylor—even when she was very tired—want to marry Ichabod Crane? Although I’m glad she did.

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