He still gets quiet, occasionally, on the anniversary of our mother’s diagnosis, a private kind of grief I’ve learned to simply sit beside him through rather than try to talk him out of.
But he never once, in two years, missed a single one of Nora’s dermatology appointments, driving her himself most times even when Renee offered to take that particular task off his plate, like some part of him needed to be the one standing in that exam room every single time, watching the doctor confirm, again and again, that his daughter’s story wasn’t going to end the way his mother’s had.
I think about that first hour sometimes, holding my newborn niece while my twin brother fell apart in a hospital chair, both of us grieving the same woman in ways neither of us had fully faced yet.
I don’t think what he said that day makes him a bad father. I think it makes him a man who loved his own mother enough that losing her nearly cost him a single terrifying hour with his daughter, before he found his way, shaking and ashamed, back to the one decision that actually mattered.
