I pulled a wooden chair next to the recliner. My father gave me the binder and I paged through it. It looked like medical bills, test results, stuff I didn’t understand.
“I want to talk to you about your mother,” my father said. “I want to tell you everything you didn’t hear from me all those years ago.”
I closed the binder and ran my hand over the cover. “Why now, Dad?”
He rubbed at his eyes. His hair was grayer than I remember. He’d aged in between my visits home. He looked like my grandfather did, and I had to remind myself that he was now a grandfather.
“I’m sorry that it’s taken this long to be completely honest with you, Sam,” my father said. “My excuses won’t erase or explain our actions, but I promise you that at the time, we thought we were doing you a favor by keeping her illness a secret.”
He reached over and flipped open the binder. He pointed to a date at the top of the page. It was the August before my freshman year of college.
“The first appointment where we heard the word cancer,” my father said. “Just days before you left for school. Of course, we hoped and prayed it was a fluke, that a second opinion would change everything.”
He turned to another page: two weeks later. “It didn’t. The prognosis was bad. She started chemo quickly.”
I remembered. I was busy navigating the campus, meeting new friends, going to parties, taking tests. But I knew that something was wrong at home. Every time I called she sounded sick. Every time she spoke into the phone, she sounded weaker. Things happened so quietly and slowly that when I came home, it just seemed normal for her to spend most of the time in bed, or for her and my dad to go out for hours and her to come back looking exhausted.
I sat there with my father for hours as we shuffled through the binder and he filled me in on everything. I heard more than a person should ever hear about chemo and losing hair and vomiting blood. But I’d asked for it, and he was finally giving it to me.
It took two and a half years for the cancer to eat away at my mother. They only told me right before my junior year, when it was impossible to hide it anymore. I knew there was something wrong – she was sick all the time and her skin and hair looked wrong. When they finally told me, I was so angry at the secrets they kept that I wanted nothing to do with either of my parents. I stayed away from them as long as I could.
My father put the binder away in a file cabinet when we finished and came back to where I sat.
“Part of the reason for not telling you was that we were in denial, I guess,” he said. “We thought we could handle it, cover it up and cure it before you ever needed to know.”
He shook his head and shrugged. “We were wrong.”
I sat anchored to my chair. Now I had the facts, but I still wasn’t happy. The weight of anger and resentment still fell on my shoulders.
“Okay,” I said, finally standing up. My father looked up at me, waiting for some sort of absolution.
“Okay,” was all I could muster. “Okay,” I repeated once more.