Janice

"So I had the wonderful job of explaining to the nurse, who was truly in love with my father, that it was over and she had to leave immediately. I made it comfortable for her financially, but it was still brutal. A month or two later my father and Janice got so very sweetly married. She told me she had always been in love with my father, but had to wait almost fifty years for that love to be consummated. They were together for nearly two years lolling happily on the world’s most luxurious cruise ships, getting off one and boarding another with maybe a week’s pause between."

"The soap opera saga began: It turned out that the husband of Janice, my mother’s best friend for fifty years, had also recently died. They were the model family I wished I’d belonged to when my parents’ marriage was on the rocks. Janice still lived in San Francisco, and after my mother died, my father secretly began seeing her. He was flying up and down the coast, back and forth to San Francisco, to be with her. Every once in a while I’d hear from the nurse about how my father was coping, but one day she called saying, “Your father’s acting very strangely, disappearing for days with no explanation.”"