During what I thought were the best years of my life, my husband began to feel ill. He worked extremely hard, and we both knew that his job was stressful at times, so we both attributed it to that.
But as his illness began to become more serious, he finally agreed to go see a doctor, and that is when we found out that he had cancer. The news crushed us both.
What followed were months of treatments, hospital visits, and plenty of medication. Sadly, the cancer spread to his other organs and doctor’s gave him days to live. I couldn’t believe it was really happening, and I leant the hard way that life gest cruel when you least expect it.
However, eventually my husband died, and I needed a lot of time to accept the situation. My relatives and friends came to visit me initially, but later everyone went back to their normal activities, and my stepson and I were left to look after each other.
I married my husband when his son was still very young, and although I never tried to take the place of his mother, I somehow did become the substitute for her in his life. The truth is that he and I have always been very close. He was closer to me than he was to his father, and I was happy to have him around, although I knew that he was just starting his life and that he would eventually move out and start his own family. But at the time, he was there, and that was all that mattered.
My husband didn’t leave me much, just the house where we lived. All the money we had been saving were spent on medical bills. What’s most, it wasn’t even enough. I was left with debt.
My stepson was nineteen at the time, and honestly, I started feeling like he needed to start contributing.
So, one day, I told him we needed to talk.
“I need you to contribute,” I said. “Five hundred dollars a month. Just to help with expenses.”
I was somehow sure that he would agree, because honestly, I didn’t think that $500 was much, but he didn’t respond the way I thought he would.
He was angry and said that I was taking advantage of him. There was so much anger in his eyes that I even got a little scared. Was he the same man who had gone through thick and thin with me during his father’s fight with cancer? Honestly, back then, that was a question that was so hard to answer.
What hurt me the most, however, was when he called me “childless.” Okay, I knew that I didn’t have any children of my own, but I did consider HIM to be my child.
How could he forget everything that the two of us had been through together overnight? At the end of the day, I was the one who had taken him to and from school for all those years, and I was the one who had never missed any of his school recitals and games.
Because of some reason I couldn’t even explain to myself, I didn’t say anything back. But at that point of weakness, I simply nodded in agreement with him and went straight to bed.
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