The Challenge(4)
Justin and Noel were very different. Noel was down-to-earth, practical, and mature for his age. In some ways he was fearless. Because he’d been sick at an early age, and had to face the realities of his disease, he was undaunted by life, and didn’t let anything stop him. He had an outgoing, more gregarious nature than his older brother. Justin was always more anxious, and more introverted. Because he knew that his brother faced risks with his disease, he felt protective and responsible for him.
His parents expected him to look out for his younger brother at home and at school, and whenever their parents were busy. Neither Marlene nor Bob Wylie realized how burdened Justin felt by it, entrusted with the life of another human being. Justin even felt guilty sometimes that Noel suffered from an illness and he didn’t. He was especially kind to Noel to make up for it.
In a way, Noel’s illness had impacted Justin’s childhood more than Noel’s. Noel took it in his stride. Justin worried about everything, and never expressed it. Still waters ran deep, as his mother said about him. Justin had a much quieter nature than his exuberant younger brother.
Justin liked girls but hadn’t had a girlfriend yet. Noel couldn’t wait to get to high school and find one. He was a bright, handsome boy.
Their biggest medical problem at the moment was not Noel but Bob, their father. Bob had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the summer before, and had gone downhill slowly at first. But the disease gathered speed quickly, and by Christmas, he’d had to quit their legal practice, leaving it all on Marlene’s shoulders. She had handled it heroically for the past seven months—Bob’s care, their law practice, and mothering the two boys. There wasn’t a spare moment in her day when she was not caring for someone: her husband, her two sons, or the clients in their practice. She was exhausted and hid it as best she could, trying to keep Bob’s spirits up, not worrying her sons unduly while preparing them for what they all knew was coming. He had already outlived the prognosis by several months. She had tried to warn the boys as gently as she could, but she knew that neither of them fully understood how hopeless Bob’s situation was. She couldn’t even understand it herself. He had been so strong and capable, and suddenly so desperately sick.
Bob had stopped his chemo treatments in June. They were destroying what was left of the quality of his life and made him desperately ill. He wanted to enjoy the last months he would have with his wife and sons, although he was too weak to leave the house, and often his bed, now. The doctors had agreed that further chemo was useless.
Marlene had nurses come to help her regularly, when she had to work all day or travel elsewhere in the county and couldn’t come home to check on him every few hours. Hospice workers had begun to visit them daily a few weeks before, and that made the process a little easier. But there was nothing easy about it. Marlene was losing the husband she loved and had been married to for twenty years. She was forty-five years old and could no longer avoid the fact that soon she would be a widow. Bob was facing it as gracefully and as lovingly as he had everything else in their life, but she couldn’t hide from it anymore.
She couldn’t imagine life without him. They had lived together, worked together, shared every task and burden. He had protected her and made all their important decisions. And now it was all going to be on her shoulders, and it had been for the last seven months, as he got weaker. Bob could hardly leave their bedroom now, and she could see that talking to him about their legal practice or any problem of the boys exhausted him. She tried to shield him from everything she could.
She had begun to have nightmares about Bob and both boys being in an accident, and all of them dying together, leaving her to face life alone. She was much more anxious about the boys now, and worried about them more, as though trying to protect them would help avert a tragedy, but she knew that Bob’s death was heading toward them relentlessly, and wouldn’t wait much longer. She had done what she could to prepare the boys, as gently as possible, and they were devastated. Justin was in denial and would talk about Bob being at his graduation from high school in a year. Noel, being more interested in medical issues, had read on the internet about his father’s illness, and would go on walks alone sometimes, crying about what they all knew was coming. Marlene wished she could slow down the process, or cure him magically, but she couldn’t. They would all have to face it, and every day she wondered how she would survive without him. She had always been able to rely on him. And without meaning to, she was relying on Justin more than before, since he was older than Noel. At seventeen, he was almost an adult and never balked at the responsibilities she put on him, like caring for Noel.
Their friends and neighbors had been wonderful, and did all they could to be supportive. They visited Bob when he was up to it, dropped off meals Marlene could just put in the microwave so she didn’t have to cook, did errands for her, and offered to pick up Noel from his activities. Justin drove him most of the time, but it was a relief for him when others did it, so Marlene accepted their help gratefully, for her sake as well as Justin’s.
The arrival in the past few weeks of hospice workers to care for Bob was an undeniable and ominous sign that they had entered a new phase, and worse times were coming. Marlene hadn’t even planned a vacation with the boys that summer. She was afraid to leave Bob, even for a few days. She wanted to be there at the end, whenever it happened. They were living from day to day. She could see Bob fading before her eyes, and the strain was brutal for all of them.