My brother-in-law Lewie wanted me to pack up the boys and take them to the lake sometime this summer. I wasn’t going. If he wanted to take them to Michigan it was OK by me. He could even take my car. I didn’t have to drive 150 miles for painful memories. I had plenty of them at home.
Everyone who loved her was pained by her loss, but my pain was different. It was surprisingly physical. The cliches were true: a knife twisting in my chest, sudden lightninglike headaches, constant aching all over my body. I was sick at heart and exhausted beyond caring.
“No,” I told him. “You don’t know how I feel.”
In this atmosphere an in-law was an interloper. Welcome, to be sure, but a spare part all the same. I’d had enough of that as a kid. The only family that ever mattered to me–Grace, me, the boys–no longer existed. Now, I thought, going to the lake might be a measure of how much I belonged in her family–something I didn’t really want to know.
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I thought back a year and a half, to a bleak winter period when Grace suddenly acquired an astonishing energy after radiation to tumors in her head and neck. She’d harangued her father–who was in the last stages of cancer himself and thinking of selling the cottage–about how much the place meant to her.
After a few days Grace got better. She was able to sleep. Her voice returned. She scheduled appointments with the radiologist to take care of a tumor in her breast. She said she wanted to go home.
