Til Death Undo Us. Morgan Q O'Reilly

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      If pressed to name the hardest thing in life, most people would have a difficult time limiting their response to only one thing or incident. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and have determined it’s a definition that changes from year to year, situation to situation, crisis to crisis.

      When I was thirteen, I thought filling my mother’s footsteps as woman of the house and caring for my father, three older and three younger brothers was the hardest thing I’d ever do.

      At fifteen, I figured passing algebra was the hardest thing I’d ever do. The following year I breezed through geometry, against the logic of my teacher, who said men would always do better than women because it required logical thinking. Girls had the top five grades in the class. I was number three. He lost a touch of his smugness. Then again, so did I when faced with Algebra II.

      When I was eighteen, getting a summer job seemed like the hardest thing I’d ever do. My younger brothers were excellent at household chores by then, so Dad had agreed a job outside the house would be good for me. A brief stint as a barista-in-training ended after two days. Luckily, I met my first love then, which eased the sting of failing at yet another attempt to improve my culinary skills.

      Upon meeting Ryan Malone, the hardest thing in my life was learning I’d never be a great wife in the kitchen, but he didn’t care. The easiest thing in my life was loving him and being loved by him.

      I was eighteen, he twenty-three, when we met. A year later, we married and moved away from the East Lansing neighborhood where I’d been raised. The marrying was easy, the moving I found difficult. But we had love and each other. Ryan made everything better with his easy charm and ready smile. Even getting a couple piercings was exciting and fun, despite my painful memories of getting my ears pierced at age ten. Okay, so the actual act of the piercing wasn’t fun, but after the healing, well, yeah, we had fun.

      The three years we spent at Cornell in Ithaca while he got his PhD in physics were a grand honeymoon. I completed my bachelor’s degree in English at the same time. The hardest thing at that time was living on a tight budget with my poor cooking skills. We ate a lot of canned soups, packaged noodles, cereal, and scrambled eggs to survive. Occasionally we were lucky enough to get dinner invitations from his advisors and other students. Buying wine was easy if they did the cooking.

      The next move took us clear across the country to a small town in California with a couple of National Laboratories. Ryan’s first real-world job. Important research. We bought a bungalow and, while he put his education to work, I fixed up our home and took a job with an accounting firm. Numbers and premeasured coffee packets I could handle. Learning to do bookkeeping and tax reports required little effort.

      Life carried on blissfully for a year and we decided to start making babies. There was no hardship in trying. Not with Ryan. We loved well and very often, taking advantage of the romantic settings around us. Alas, to my growing sorrow, no babies.

      Then came the day Ryan started turning yellow and complained of abdominal pains. It took a couple of days, but I finally got him to the doctor. After some tests, I discovered the new hardest thing in my life–sitting in the doctor’s office, holding Ryan’s hand while the doctor explained to us the facts of pancreatic cancer.

      It didn’t did stay at the top long. It moved down the list to be replaced by holding Ryan while he suffered the effects of chemo and radiation. For twelve months I watched the disease eat away at my lovely boy. Pain, and the drugs to relieve it, stole the light from his emerald eyes, but they never stole his smile for long. At the very end, pale and emaciated, his lovely copper hair dull and clipped short, he held my hand as morphine eased his way from this world.

      Numbness got me through the next few days. Cayden, my twin, returned on leave from whatever assignment he’d been on, and joined us. The funeral arrangements, the casseroles from friends who knew I’d starve otherwise, the flowers, the church, even the damn bagpiper Aidan, my eldest brother, had found to play at the graveside didn’t touch me. I sailed through all that with hardly a twitch. But watching Ryan’s casket sink into the ground on an unseasonably blustery, wet, gray day just about killed me. I didn’t want him there in that cold earth. I wanted him warm and alive beside me. Barring that, I wanted to fling myself into the grave and wait for the Judgment with him. Aidan and Cay got me home, and friends helped as best they could. But eventually, I had to stand on my own. And that is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.

       Chapter 1