Promise Me

Just when I was ready to take the bandage off my nose, an axe took off my head.

Beth Cardall’s Diary

Physically, Marc did okay for the next three weeks, but it was clear that the cancer was spreading. Almost as difficult as watching his decline was watching Charlotte experience his loss. Telling her that her father was dying was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. It was hard to know how much she really perceived. What does a six-year-old know of death? For that matter, what does anyone really know?

By August, Marc had difficulty walking and I took a leave of absence from work to care for him. On a cool morning in September, I had just finished bathing him when he asked, “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” I said, drawing a terry cloth towel across his back. “Haven’t I shown you?”

“In spades,” he said quietly.

“Why do you ask?”

“I wonder if you would love the real me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” he said.

I pushed the exchange from my mind, chalking it up to the myriad drugs the doctors had him on. About a week later I was feeding him lunch when he mumbled, “E pluribus unum.”

E pluribus unum?

“I need to confess something.”

The way he said this filled my chest with fear. I instinctively knew that whatever he was going to say was bad. “I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “If it’s going to hurt me, please don’t tell me.”

“I don’t want to die a liar. I don’t want our relationship to have just been a lie.”

My panic was now so thick I could barely breathe. “Please, Marc, don’t do this.”

He said, “Ashley wasn’t the only one. There were others.”

Others? I looked at him waiting for the other shoe to drop. When he didn’t say it, I asked, “How many?”

“Maybe eleven.”

Eleven. I began to cry. My heart wasn’t a yo-yo; it was a paper target on a shooting range. It was roadkill. “You couldn’t have just kept this to yourself?” I got up and walked out of the room.

Nothing was the same after that. Marc was a stranger to me—a man I’d never really known. I didn’t speak to him for the next three days. Oddly, I wasn’t angry—emotionally, that account had been bankrupted—I was something more. I was indifferent.

Marc stayed in our bedroom while I slept with Charlotte in her bed. I don’t think it was coincidence that his confession was the start of his great decline. He lived for just three and a half weeks more and I cared for him through it all. It wasn’t easy. I’m neither a doormat nor a saint. I stayed with him because of Charlotte. She was still sick, complaining every few days of a stomachache, no doubt made worse by her fear and anxiety over what was happening to her dad. I wasn’t about to punish her for the sins of her father. Besides, Marc had nowhere else to go, and regardless of how much I’d been hurt, I couldn’t live with my daughter’s father dying alone, even though more than once I wished I could have.

On the third day of October the hospice workers started their vigil. My husband, they told me, was actively dying (which sounded to me like an oxymoron). I had no doubt that Marc was sorry for what he’d done, sorry for his betrayal, even more sorry, I think, that he had told me. Those were his last words to me, the saddest last words one could leave this world with: “I’m sorry.”

A week later, on October 10, he passed quietly in the night. Charlotte cried for her father the entire next day and every day after for the next two weeks. By then my heart already felt like it had died a hundred times over.

Marc had a small life insurance policy, only $25,000, which wasn’t enough to do much more than cover his medical deductibles and funeral expenses and to catch up on the bills that had piled up since we had both stopped working.

That is where Charlotte and I were as the year came to a close. Winter came again and the days shortened and seemed darker and colder than ever before.

Then the holiday season crept upon us. I did not welcome it. I was feeling anything but festive, anything but believing. I was trustless of life and men. I would say that I was without faith, but no one is truly faithless; they just have faith in the wrong things: fear and defeat.

Then, when I least expected anything new in my life, he came.