My husband hid his term!nal diagnosis from me throughout my pregnancy — days after we b*ried him, his mom gave me the letter he’d made her promise to keep secret: “for my little girls, in case I don’t make it.”
Two times during my pregnancy I woke at three in the morning and found my husband seated on the bathroom floor with the tap running.
He said he hadn’t wanted the noise to wake me.
I believed him.
Why in the world wouldn’t I?
We’d been trying for six years.
Somewhere in year four we stopped saying when we have a baby and started saying if.
When I handed him the test, he dropped to his knees on that same bathroom floor, put his arms around my hips and cried into my shirt.
“We actually did it.”
Four weeks later he sat in a doctor’s office alone and was told how much time he had left.
He didn’t tell me.
Not that night.
Not the next month.
Not once.
I saw things.
Of course I noticed.
He was growing thinner and I blamed it on the hours he was working.
I’d wake up and his side of the bed would be cold, and he’d come back in and say his stomach was off again.
Eight months.
He carried it on his own for eight months while I chose a crib.
He met our daughter.
He held her.
He was here for four months of her life.
And then he wasn’t.
Four days after the f*neral his mother arrived at the house.
She settled next to me on the sofa without taking her coat off, took a heavy envelope out of her handbag and placed it in my hands.
“He made me promise,” she said.
I got about two pages in and had to stop and start again from the top, because none of it was going in.
Then, near the end:
“Now, knowing you, you’re sitting there crying and thinking: you absolute idiot, you hid all of this from me, you d!ed, and all you left us was a letter?
Come on.
You know me better than that.
I didn’t spend the time I had left doing nothing.
There’s something I need you to see.
Something for both of my little girls.
Mom knows.
Ask her.”
I put the page down on my knee.
She was already crying.
She hadn’t looked at me once since she’d handed it over — “What is he talking about?”
What did he leave for his little girls—and how will his mother explain it?
“NEXT” for Part 2.
