I’m seventy-three years old, lying in a hospice bed with stage-four lung cancer, and for six long months not one of my three children has walked through that door. I raised those kids alone after their mother left. I worked seventy-hour weeks as a construction foreman. I paid for their colleges, their weddings, even helped them buy their homes. And the moment the doctor told me I was dying, they scattered — like the burden they’d carried finally slipped off their shoulders.
