I was born Naomi Marie Blackwood, became Naomi Canton when I married Nicholas in 1981, and remained that person until three weeks ago, the day after we buried him. I am sixty-eight years old, with arthritic hands that still remember how to bake sourdough bread, and the way my daughter Melissa’s hair felt when I braided it for elementary school. I tell you this so you understand that before everything collapsed, I was simply a mother who believed she had raised good children.
Nicholas’s cancer took fourteen months to kill him. Pancreatic, the silent executioner that gives you just enough time to put your affairs in order but not enough time to actually live with the knowledge. We kept it quiet at first, just between us.
Our children were busy with their own lives: Brandon with his financial consulting career in Boston that seemed to require him to miss every major holiday, and Melissa with her perpetually failing wellness businesses in Denver that somehow always needed another investment from their father. “They don’t need this burden yet,” Nicholas had said, staring at the ceiling of our bedroom, the morphine making his words slur slightly. “Let them live their lives a little longer without this shadow.”
I nodded because I loved him.
But I knew our children. When they finally arrived at our modest farmhouse on the outskirts of Milfield, Pennsylvania, the same house where they’d grown up, where Nicholas and I had built Canton Family Orchards from twenty acres of neglected apple trees into one of the most respected organic fruit operations in the state, they didn’t come with comfort. They came with questions about the will.
“Mom, I’m just trying to be practical,” Brandon said, his voice carrying the condescending tone he’d perfected sometime after his first six-figure bonus. We were sitting at the kitchen table, Nicholas asleep upstairs, when he first broached the subject. “The medical bills must be piling up.
The business needs modernization. The house is too much for someone your age.”
“My age,” I repeated, the words tasting bitter. “I’ve managed this orchard alongside your father for forty years.”
Melissa arrived three days later, bringing five suitcases and the scent of expensive failure.
Five wellness ventures in eight years, each one launched with her father’s money, each one abandoned when it required actual work. But she hugged Nicholas with genuine tears and slept beside his bed the night before he passed, which is why I still struggle with what came after. The funeral was small, just as Nicholas would have wanted.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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