After I departed to take care of my mother, who was nearing the end of her life, I put my faith in my husband to maintain order. When I got back, I found myself in a nightmare that I could not have possibly imagined. However, there are moments when life pulls you into areas you never thought you’d be able to stand, and I never expected that I would be expressing something that is so raw and intimate.
My name is Isabella, and I am currently 25 years old. Up until very recently, I was married to a man named Caleb, who is twenty-seven years old. In the same way that many young couples do, we believed that love and determination would be sufficient to take us through any challenge.
We had been together for five years, and we had been married for two of those years. The careers that we both had were not very glamorous, but they were sufficient to allow us to purchase a modest townhouse in a peaceful suburb located just outside of the city. We had the impression that we were taking the first step into a route that would eventually take us to all that we want, including a family, stability, and a future that seemed to stretch out before us like an open field because it seemed like a solid foundation.
Those evenings when I would sit at the kitchen table with my planner, jotting down potential baby names in the margins of my notes or penciling in approximate timeframes of when we would be ready to start trying to conceive are still fresh in my mind. When Caleb would sneak up behind me, he would peek at my notes and say things like, “Our kid is going to be the cutest one in the neighborhood,” while wearing that grin that was half serious and half playful. It would make me giggle, and I would throw a grape at him, and he would grab it in his mouth like some idiotic teenager.
During those moments, I had the impression that everything was finally falling into place, and that we were on the verge of constructing something that would be truly remarkable. Then, however, life took a different turn. One phone call was all it took for everything that we had been preparing to fall apart.
This was my mother. The woman who had raised me by herself after my father had passed away when I was a child, my closest friend, my anchor, and the person who had raised me. She was given a diagnosis of cancer in the fourth stage.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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