True Love is Not Sexy
by Julie Young
@biggirlvoice on twitter
The tenderness between a son and his dying father is not something one is always privileged to witness. It's not something I thought I'd see anytime soon. My father-in-law was only 60 when he died on January 21, 2013.
We found out, or rather it was confirmed, that my father-in-law was very sick with stage four liver cancer which had spread to his lungs, a few days after Christmas. Just a few days after that, my husband's grandmother, his father's mother, fell and broke her hip. I watched, helplessly, as my husband went into overdrive, an only son, tending to his father and grandmother; calling doctors and having hope. My husband was fueled by adrenaline as he visited two different hospitals, in two different boroughs, almost everyday for a couple of weeks until his father was finally transferred to Mt. Sinai, the same hospital his grandmother was in.
The hope was that my husband's grandmother, whom I call Miss Young, would get to see her dying son, one last time. Sadly, she never did. Miss Young is 81 and never thought she would have to attend the funeral of her only child.
The day before my father-in-law's funeral, Miss Young came home from the hospital. Actually, she came to our home. In the chaos that was the month of late December into most of January, the fact that Miss Young would live with us, was the silver lining to the sadness of my husband losing his father.
