Old Love, New Love

I recently published an article on Still Here Magazine. It's a piece of memoir about my son and his wife, who passed away from breast cancer at the age of 34.

Here is the first part of the memoir. Download the Issue ONE to continue reading my story. See page 16 of the PDF document (which is page 10 of the magazine).

Old Love, New Love

When my cell phone rings and I see it is my son, Colin, I tense in my office chair and swivel to face the window. I want to see the tops of the trees with their bright spring greens, imagine the looping trail to my house through the woods behind. Home, comfort.  I picture April next to Colin, listening.  April, his twenty-seven-year-old bride of one year with a new lump in her breast and results from her tests. 

“Maybe nothing to worry about,” I had suggested the week before, hopeful, wanting to be confident.  Hopeful, but not helpful. It’s an aggressive form of breast cancer. 

A tall, slim young woman with long, dark brown hair and dark eyes, April is striking with perfectly shaped eyebrows, nearly black, long and arched, tiny freckles across her nose. She wears ballet slipper-type flats on her long, narrow feet all winter long, sans socks. She is smart and capable, a very young executive director of a perinatal network where she started in the lowest position and rose to the highest very quickly. 

She has a double mastectomy immediately, chemotherapy and radiation. Sick with worry, I call them from 4500 miles away, helpless and worse, useless. My calls are more work for them. It feels very far away and at the same time, lodged in my throat.