My name is Eleanor Walsh, and for ten years I stood beside my husband Curtis as the wife everyone expected me to be—polished, accommodating, present at every firm dinner and charity gala that required his attendance. For the last three of those years, I became something Curtis never anticipated: the primary caregiver for his father Arthur, a widower whose Parkinson’s disease had slowly stolen his independence while leaving his sharp mind cruelly intact. While Curtis filled his calendar with golf tournaments at the country club and networking dinners that somehow always ran late, I learned how to properly change wound dressings, manage complex medication schedules, and sit patiently through mornings when pain made even simple conversation move at the pace of molasses.
I read the Wall Street Journal to Arthur when his hands shook too violently to hold the pages steady. I helped him dress when his fingers could no longer manage buttons. I sat with him through the bad nights when tremors kept sleep at bay and frustration brought him close to tears.
Over time, through thousands of small moments that Curtis never witnessed, Arthur stopped introducing me as “my daughter-in-law Eleanor” and simply called me “my daughter.” Curtis rarely visited, and when he did, he stayed for exactly twenty minutes—long enough to be seen doing his duty, not long enough to actually participate in the reality of his father’s declining health. When Arthur passed on a gray Tuesday morning in March with my hand holding his as his breathing finally steadied into silence, the grief I witnessed in my husband lasted precisely as long as was socially appropriate. He wept briefly at the funeral, accepted condolences with the right mixture of sorrow and strength, and delivered a eulogy about his father’s business acumen that somehow never mentioned the man’s kindness or his dry sense of humor or the way he’d loved crossword puzzles even when his hands made holding a pen nearly impossible.
Two days after we’d buried Arthur in the family plot beside his wife Catherine, I came home from the grocery store to find my suitcases lined up in our circular driveway like soldiers awaiting deployment. Curtis was waiting on the front steps of the house we’d shared for a decade, dressed in his tennis whites, apparently having scheduled this conversation between his morning workout and his afternoon match. He held an envelope in one hand and his phone in the other, checking messages while I parked and walked toward him with my heart already understanding what my mind was still trying to reject.
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