The Trip My Son Would Not Cancel

Grant left for college in Columbus and then Chicago and he did well, and I was proud of him, I truly was. He married Sloane, who is polished and pretty and has never once looked comfortable in our kitchen. They have no children, by choice, which is their business. He came home less and less. Christmas, sometimes. A summer weekend when the guilt got heavy enough. He would stand in the yard checking his phone and telling me the market was up or down and looking at the farm the way a man looks at a thing he is glad he escaped. Marion never said a word against him. She would light up when he called, which was not often, and she would tell me afterward, quietly, doing the dishes, that he sounded tired, that Chicago was hard on a person, making his excuses for him before he had even asked her to.

Colleen stayed.

She married Dale Renner, who runs the feed store on Route 9, a good steady man, and they built a house not two miles from us and had three kids who called us Papaw and Mamaw and tore around our yard every Sunday after church. Colleen never had Grant’s shine. She was a nurse’s aide out at the county home in Delphos and then she took the LPN course at night when the girls were small, and I know for a fact she turned down a better-paying job in the city because it would have meant not being close to her mother and me. She never said that either. She just stayed, the way her mother stayed for the Vanderpool boy, because staying was the kind of thing our family did without announcing it.

I did not understand, for most of my life, what a rare and costly thing that was. You do not, when it is being given to you freely every single day. You only find out later.

Marion started failing in the spring of 2023. Congestive heart failure, Doc Feeney called it. Her heart was tired, is the plain way to say it, and it kept getting more tired, and there was medicine that helped and then medicine that helped less. There were good months. But the arc of it only went the one way, and everyone who loved her could see where it was headed, though we did not say so out loud in the house.

Here is what I want you to understand. Everything I am about to tell you, Grant knew. I called him. Colleen called him. We did not hide a thing from him.

The falls started that winter. She went down twice in the kitchen and once in the bathroom, and each time it was Colleen who came at whatever hour, Colleen who sat in the emergency room in Lima with her mother’s hand in hers while I stood useless in the corner, Colleen who set up the shower chair and the rails and drove out three, four, five times a week after her own shift to bathe her mother and change the sheets and cook a week of meals and freeze them in the containers she labeled in her round careful handwriting.