The Truth about Where to Begin

What I remember is wanting the truth and knowing that no one was giving it to me. My older brothers, my mom, the doctors and nurses—even my dad on the days he was well enough to talk—there never seemed a clear answer to anything anymore. I was in college already; we’d been going through this cancer thing for years, and I believed I could handle the non-sugar-coated version. I needed the truth. Only now, in light of all the changes my family was going through with my father’s treatment at a halt, any kind of truth I could hang on to didn’t seem to exist anymore.

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This Kind of Life

In the blurry, awful period immediately after my father died, the house where I’d spent half my life no longer felt like mine. Everything felt too quiet, too still. The lingering air of death and sadness was heavy all around us. The family dogs refused to leave my parents’ bedroom and even the sun seemed reluctant to shine, obscured behind a cloudy snowstorm that lasted all night and the following day.

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