Five years into our marriage my wife was infected with brain cancer, unfortunately cancer ran in her family. It had the tendency to skip a generation or two but someone always got it when they least expected it.
When we were children it was her great grandmother. Since we lived next door to each other I was as much a witness to it as she was and we watched a caring old woman turned delusional and cruel. Spewing obscenities at he family, thinking they were trying to kill her, until the day the cancer finally took her.
During that time we used to have late night phone calls and send each other messages. I tried to talk to her all the time. However because her family was going through such a hard time, and we were just kids, we kept our relationship a secret.
Her father and I eventually started to bond on the days leading up to the funeral, I wanted him to like me so I started dressing in the types of suits he wore and adopted his mannerisms. Eventually I got a job at his law firm as a paralegal and I never let his traits go.
I figured that since he was so successful, if I continued to act like him, dress like him and speak like him. Than maybe I would be successful like him. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time thought it was both cute and weird.
After knowing each other for a lifetime my wife and I got married at eighteen. Eventually of course we had the conversation. On a quiet night she told me that if what happened to her grandmother ever happened to her, she would want me to immediately move on and find happiness with someone else. I of course told her that I would never do that, I would love her until the very end, no matter what.
The year before she was finally diagnosed at twenty three, she started to act differently. My once caring wife who always loved and supported me started to act distant. She started to hide things.
I would often find that if she was in a room talking on the phone, when I entered she would put the phone down. It was unsettling because she never really kept secrets. I would also find her writing a lot. However whenever I asked to see it she would tell me that it’s none of my business and that she just needs some privacy. Sometimes she would even tell me that she’s growing up and I should give her some space.
I didn’t think nothing of this because we were both still young and we both had a lot of room to grow left in us.
On the day we got the diagnosis my heart sank, I loved my wife and despite how strange she had been acting, I promised to stay by her side at all times.
It was terrifying however watching her fall apart. She would constantly revert to her old self when we were kids and keep trying to get space from me. It’s was like all the progress that we had made together in the past few years didn’t matter.
On other days she would become vicious and angry at me, telling me that I was smothering her and that she would not turn out like her grandmother. However the truth is she already had. I felt like she was possessed by a different version of herself.
Around six months into her sickness I caught her on the phone, I didn’t walk into the room but I listened. She was flirting with some guy, telling him how much she loved him. She even said that she wanted to marry him. I was dying inside but I had to know more.
I continued waiting for her to be on the phone, when she was I stood close by and listened to her laughing and joking. Saying that she had to go or she’d get caught. She also spent a lot of time in the attic.
I put all the pieces together, she had been cheating on me for a while and I was pissed off. All the secret phone calls and letters were for another man and she had been sending them even before she was diagnosed.
I didn’t care anymore, about love or anything else. There was an intern at the firm and I made myself comfortable with her. In the last six months of my wife’s life, as she got progressively sicker and struggled with pain and her body shutting down. I snuck away almost every day for hot and passionate visits with the intern.
When my wife finally passed I didn’t feel a thing. I dressed up, went to the funeral and had her cremated instead of buried. I took her ashes straight from the mortuary and than drove barely a mile away. Dumping it on the side of the road.
I took everything that belonged to her and threw it in the trash and moved the intern, who I was now planning to marry, into our bedroom. I was finally done with that cheating bitch.
A month into my happy relationship with my new wife I found a box in the attic. It was letters, hundreds of them, all dated throughout the past year. They were all written by my wife, with juvenile drawings of hearts on the front. I guess it was finally time to learn who she was cheating on me with.
I opened the letter and read it, than another, than another until I had read them all.
I called the Doctor after. According to him, Brain cancer can cause delusions in some people, make them think, hear and see things that are not actually happening. I guess it made my wife think she was a child again.
It all clicked at once in my mind. All the things she used to say to her alleged lover was things she used to say to me when we were children. All the letters she had written were to me, in the same way she did when we were children. She must have kept them hidden from me because I looked and acted too similar to her father.
While I was cheating on my wife and ignoring her pain when she was dying, She was falling in love with me all over again. Now the woman who had gave her heart to me twice in one lifetime lay mixed with dust and dirt on the corner of a road.