(If you want to hear Lori read this story click)here

 

 

My mother died of cancer. I suppose it was breast cancer but since there were only fourteen days between the time I first gasped to find fiery lesions sprawled across her chest and the night she stopped breathing, we don't know for sure. 

 

What threatened to paralyze me was the knowledge that she had been suffering for a long time, and I had not the slightest inkling.  Day after day I would bring her tea and ask how she was.

 

"Fine."

 

Looking back in the fogged mirror of my memory I can see her clenched teeth. I hear the catch in her voice, and the pause brimming with words she held back like Dobermans on a chain.

 

She kept her pain a secret from everyone who loved her. There was a small white insurance card in a bottom drawer that would have unlocked a hundred thousand dollars of treatment, had she ever unbuttoned her blouse. 

 

The other day a friend asked me if divorce is like cancer. Some people keep their sick marriages behind a scrim. For months or years they paint on smiles like make up to fool the people who care. 

 

I am sad that my mother is gone, and yet she was eighty years old and ready to spread her wings and fly.

 

My sorrow for marriages that die an arm's length from parents and sisters and neighbors goes much deeper. Many relationships are curable, at least if I can believe the recovery stories in a book like Can This Marriage Be Saved?. Adultery, pornography, addiction, and incarceration all infected the marriages of the people who bared their pain like lesions across the page. 

 

I have heard people whine that help for their marriage is too expensive, even if they were talking about just a class, or a weekend retreat. I have judgments about that, that I try to lock behind my gritted teeth. 

 

Because marriages need not be temporary.