“It took about a year for Mom to finally die. We tried our best to keep her comfortable, but back then our options were kind of limited. Being rich didn’t seem to make a difference where cancer was concerned. Medical science simply hadn’t caught up with it enough to matter for ANYONE. So Mom just… slowly wasted away to nothingness. By the end, I think both Dad and I were just glad that it was over for her. We hated seeing her in pain and not be able to do anything about it. It was a few months before she passed, though, when she had finally become bedridden, that she brought both of us into her room and talked to us. She told us that she loved us both deeply and she could see the effects her illness was having on us. She didn’t want us to suffer any more than we wanted her to suffer. Dad was at his wit’s end and I was at a loss for words. But she kept on talking. ‘I want you two to be there for each other,’ she told us. ‘Whatever happens to me, I want to know that you will always love and support each other through everything. You’ve both been a gift to me and, eventually I will pass on. When that happens, I NEED for you two to learn how to be a gift to each other.’ I’ll never forget those words for as long as I live.”
Mother took a deep, calming breath as she collected herself. A couple of tears escaped the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away before they could trace down to her thin, delicate jaw line. Then she pressed on. “So, when she passed, we were glad for her sake, but Dad and I were just a wreck. Due to… the way we live, all we had to rely on was each other. It took us a few years to manage it, but we did our best to honor her wishes. With her gone, I was the woman of the house. I picked up where she left off. At the beginning of her illness, after we found out that it was cancer, she began teaching me how to manage a home and gave me the reins when she couldn’t do it anymore. By the time she passed, I had everything down to a science; she was a very, very good teacher. So that part of it was easy. But, as with me, Dad couldn’t bring himself to take a new woman into his life. His heart just wouldn’t let him do it- and, believe me, he tried. The results were disastrous, so he stopped. It was just him and me. I was coming into my late teens when I realized that Dad seemed restless and distracted all the time. I didn’t understand it at first, but the light bulb in my head finally turned on. By the time I was eighteen years old, I had figured out that, even though he couldn’t bring himself to date other women, he was still a man with needs. Sexual needs. And I was the only woman around.
“And he was the only man in my life. I was so busy with taking care of the house and looking after him that I didn’t really have anything even remotely like a social life, forget about a love life. HE was my life. And I was genuinely glad of it, don’t think otherwise for a second! So I got to thinking. In almost every way but one, I was living with my father as his wife. We ate our meals together, which I cooked, I did his laundry, we had conversations, we… well, to be honest, Conrad, we lived pretty much the way you and I live.
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