Cancer Chronicles Thirty-Nine

I have not grieved for anyone in my sixty-eight years as I have grieved for my wife Janet.
My mother died of pancreatic cancer when I was fourteen. Doctors found it in March, and she was dead by the end of June. I did cry at the end of the funeral day, but I think that was because I had to be around my mother’s sisters and their families. Tennessee Williams could have written a hell of a play about them. Maybe I repressed my actual grief because young men were supposed to suck it up and not let anyone know how they felt back in the nineteen-sixties. Maybe, even though I did love her, I had only been around her fourteen years instead of the forty-four years I had with Janet.
My father died when he was eighty-three. He had a bad heart and had suffered a stroke. It’s not that he was mean to me; I just had the feeling I didn’t mean anything to him. The last time I saw him before he died we sat in the day room of his nursing home and watched Gunsmoke on television. He put his hand on my knee for a few minutes. That was the only sign of affection he ever showed to me. And the sad part was that by the time he put his hand on my knee I didn’t care anymore. I still didn’t cry.
I had two brothers who died, but there were no tears there either. The least said the better.
Janet and I were both in our early twenties when we married and so we kind of grew up together. We always said please and thank you to each other. In the later years our communication sometimes was reduced to grunts, but we still knew what we meant. No matter what happened, we knew everything would be fine because we had each other. We were never jealous; well, except for that one woman who always insisted on smoothing my jacket out for me. Janet never blamed me for it, but she did say if the woman did it one more time she was going to sock her.
I still have not cried. Maybe I will when I start sorting through all of our things, deciding what to get rid of. But there’s more to grief than tears. I am losing weight because it’s not fun to eat when Janet’s not around. The physical aches are slowly going away. The void alone is almost unbearable.
Then I consider what the last forty-four years would have been like without Janet, and it’s impossible to comprehend. The hugs and kisses. The laughs. The thrill of making plans together. It didn’t make any difference what the plans were for. We were doing it together.
Grief is the terrible price one pays for forty-four years of genuine, soul-satisfying love, and it is unquestionably worth it.

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