John could clearly recall the day they got the results: sitting in a dimly lit doctor’s office, complete with plastic skeleton and prehistoric computer, listening to a monotonous voice and staring at an x-ray of a set of lungs that neither of them really understood. They might just as well have been the lungs of the doctor. Should John have walked into the room under any other circumstance, he would have thought: nice poster. But it wasn’t a poster and they weren’t just any lungs. They were Mary’s and they had cancer in them. John saw how the truth struck is wife as hard as the harshness of the word itself.
‘Ma’am, do you realize how sick you are?’
Mary nodded, but John recognized the lie in her body language. She hadn’t been feeling well for months. It all started with a throat ache, something she had discarded as a cold. But the pain grew more intense, and before long, Mary was coughing all day long. She had terrible leg aches and wasn’t able to eat, walk or sleep. The only thing she was able to do, was sit, and even that was agony.
A smoker, unable to quit, a smoker with an unidentified disease, that slowly consumed the entire body. Only two people in love, refusing to face reality, would have been able to ignore those kinds of signals. And if John and Mary were anything, it was in love, after thirty years of marriage perhaps more than ever.
Unfortunately, there was someone else who failed to think of cancer; Mary’s doctor, the man who killed her. At least, that was how John saw it. Deep inside, he knew that it would have been a lost battle anyway, but it was much easier to blame the doctor. After all, you can’t punch cancer in the face.
‘Ma’am, do you realize how sick you are?’ It was as if you ask a widow whether she realizes how lonely she is. It made world they had carefully built together, fall apart. But what it didn’t do, was make Mary realize how sick she was.
What the doctor should have asked was: ‘Ma’am, do you understand that you will die really soon and that, over the next three weeks, you might want to focus on saying goodbye to your loved ones?’ Maybe then, John thought, they wouldn’t have lived three full weeks in denial. Maybe then they would have had a chance to say goodbye properly.
STAI LEGGENDO
Dinner with God
Storie d'amoreJohn would give up everything to see Mary, the love of his life one more time. Years after her tragic death, his wish becomes reality when she is back in his life. But how...and why? When John meets a mysterious man, he makes a painful discovery: Ma...
