Matters of Chance: A Novel

By Gail Albert

This searing novel, a National Book Award finalist, “transforms one woman’s experience with cancer into a work of vision and intelligence” (The Washington Post).

“I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.”

Mona’s perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness—leaving her searching her past for answers. Fate has led her from a tough Brooklyn girlhood to a happy marriage with a wonderful man, but what has she forgotten along the way? In this classic New York novel of the 1980s, as Mona struggles to understand her own life story, she uncovers the shocking memory of a murder and traces the shape of her own mortality.

This stunning work was a finalist for the National Book Award for First Novel; now, its brilliant, ambitious exploration of an unfinished life is about to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480410619

Gail Albert

Gail Albert is a writer, licensed psychologist, photographer, and certified teacher of Jewish mystical and meditative practice. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. For most of the 1990s, she directed a program in New York City that brought psychiatrists to mentally ill homeless people; currently, she has a private practice in Woodstock, New York. Her first book, Matters of Chance, was a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection and was nominated as the Best First Novel of the Year for the American Book Awards. Her second book is called The Other Side of the Couch. One of its chapters was republished in a book for the general public on psychotherapy (Inside Therapy: Illuminating Writing About Therapists, Patients, and Psychotherapy), which includes chapters by such people as Erich Fromm, Theodore Reik, Janet Malcolm, Mark Epstein, and Irvin Yalom. Her third book, Mending the Heart, Tending the Soul: Directions to the Garden Within, was published in 2012.  

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Matters of Chance

A Novel

Gail Albert

To Lewis Cole and my husband, Harry

Contents

Part I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part II

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part III

15

16

17

18

Part IV

19

About the Author

Part I

1

HANNAH WAS MY BEST FRIEND until her father killed her mother with the bread knife when we were eight. Hannah found the body lying on the kitchen floor late one October afternoon and ran screaming down the stairs into my aunt’s arms. Later my uncle said that Hannah’s mother had always nagged too much; and he cried because they’d all known each other since before the war.

Hannah’s father was sent to prison in upstate New York, and his spinster sister Irene moved in from Philadelphia. A schoolteacher, misplaced in our part of Brooklyn, she never let any of Hannah’s friends inside the apartment. I was the only one of us even allowed on the stoop: I’d passed her test.

I stood on the pavement; she looked down at me from her wooden folding chair at the top of the brownstone steps.

Tell me, she said, the names of twenty Presidents of the United States. They don’t have to be in order. Her mouth was tight, and I felt her eyes on my gypsy hair and scraped knees.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, I said, and Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson, and Washington and Lincoln, and . . . Counting on my fingers I slowly ticked off thirteen more. . . . Did I say Madison? I asked at last.

No, she said. Not yet.

That time Hannah and I played geography and hangman until sunset, while I bit my tongue to keep from spelling m----r for murder or k---e for knife. I loved Hannah and I hated Irene for shutting me out.

I still dream of Hannah twenty-six years later, and wonder what became of her. I see her as unmarried, sometimes living alone and sometimes living with a bent and white-haired Isaac, out of prison at last. I ask if he collects Social Security, unable to remember the rules for convicted murderers.

Indeed, I think that Isaac was actually convicted of mans­laughter, although I’ve never quite seen how stabbing your wife with a bread knife is anything less than murder. The knife had always been there, ready to cut great slabs of the pumpernickel Isaac brought home from work. I can see him using it on Rose instead of on the thick black bread if she pushed him just too far when he already had the knife in hand. And yet I can’t, for all the years I’ve thought about it.

I get angry too; everyone does. With my husband, say, or with my children. When my boys were very little, I’d sometimes slap one of them in a rage, so mad I wanted only to keep on hitting until my child begged me from the floor to stop. But I never gave way to more than those few slaps, no matter what I felt like doing.

Once I even locked myself in the bedroom to protect Daniel from me; he was in the middle of an unending toddler’s tantrum and I couldn’t make him leave me alone. I locked myself in and covered my head with pillows while Dan screamed and banged and hammered on the door. I was pregnant for the second time; Bob was interning and on duty at the hospital thirty-six hours out of every forty-eight. Huddled on the bed, knowing I’d be alone with Dan for ten more hours, I was afraid I’d kill him if I came out of the room.

Then why did Isaac stab Rose to death? I knew Isaac, I knew Rose, as well as a child knows close neighbors when you’re poor together, and sometimes I feel I understand and then again I don’t.

We moved from Brownsville to a better part of Brooklyn when I started high school. Hannah moved then too, back to Philadelphia with Irene. We exchanged cards at Rosh Hashanah a few times, but no more than that. We talked so little in the years after Isaac killed Rose; how could we write?

It’s Sunday night, almost eleven; Bob and I have been reading in the living room, trying to keep up with this week’s journals; the boys are asleep and the room is quiet except for the rumble of buses outside. Remembering that I have to boil an egg for Dan’s lunch box, I take the article I’m reading with me to the kitchen, grateful that Adam, at least, eats simple ham sandwiches that need no thought the night before.

Whatever the reason, I picture Hannah as a veterinarian, in white coat, surgical mask perhaps, in her office in some upstate town. Last year it occurred to me that Sing Sing is upstate and that I always see her near her father.

At least the murder must have settled Hannah’s life. She is a spinster like Irene. Wanting to marry, perhaps. But unable. I imagine the polite prospective in-laws asking about her absent parents.

My father killed my mother, she patiently explains. He’s out of Sing Sing now and lives with me. I’m sure you’d like him. But it’s too late, they’ve run out.

People are peculiar, I announce to Bob when I sit down again in the living room. He looks up, startled, with no context for my observation. Then he grins, the skin around his gray eyes crinkling, and asks what set me off this time.

I am an associate professor of neurobiology at a well-known university. My husband is a doctor, a cardiologist, a Jewish blond from California, with the dazzling smile of a Los Angeles lifeguard hoping to catch the eye of a Hollywood film maker. My marriage is happy, my children normal, and my department voted me tenure a year ago.

At school I teach my students everything I know about the brain, and in the afternoon, after classes, I record nerve impulses from the brains of rats to study precisely how each bit of nerve tissue controls their memory. And the more I study, the more sure I am that I’m not even asking the right questions. I don’t know if I’ve ever asked the right questions.

Why did Isaac murder Rose? Did Isaac know he was going to murder her? Did he even mean to kill her when he did?

It’s April 1977, two weeks before my thirty-fifth birthday. Isaac killed his wife over a quarter-century ago. As my father killed my own mother—and himself—in a head-on collision with a truck in the Utah desert four summers ago. My father, who never scratched a fender in thirty-six years of driving on New York City streets, in that empty countryside smashed into a trailer truck on the wrong side of the road. They’d never left New York before; I sent them on that trip, and they died in a gully by the roadside.

Bob has just gone downstairs to walk our dog, McCrae, in Central Park. The cherry trees are blooming; from our windows, the Park looks soft and romantic, its tree-lined winding paths a nineteenth-century vision of an English garden.

We live on the fifteenth floor of a co-op in Manhattan, high above the Central Park Reservoir. Our bedroom overlooks the Park but I see none of it now. With Bob outside, I’ve gone to bed; retreating to the warm, king-size, soothing waterbed; ignoring the city and the Park to look up at space and sky, floating in space while the bed makes warm waves beneath me.

On the walls of the room are photographs of the Utah desert; of Canyonlands, Arches, and Cedar Breaks; of rocks red with iron, green with uranium. I float in space on a warm sea, looking at the desert pictures and the sky outside. I’ve attained the American Dream and it’s come near to killing me.

I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville, and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.

2

IN BROWNSVILLE, the woman who lived above us was a witch. My mother warned me always to be polite to her, to carry her groceries, and to open the door for her. To keep her from giving me the evil eye.

When I was two and my father was in basic training in the infantry, my mother had a second child, a son. In an argument with my mother three months before the birth, Mrs. Goldstein cursed him. My mother was five months pregnant; Mrs. Goldstein had caught her foot in the fire escape upstairs while washing windows. She called down for help, but my mother was afraid to climb the open stairs.

I was dizzy all the time; I couldn’t help her, my mother told me. She killed your brother because I didn’t come.

Let him choke the way I choke here now, she’d cursed. And when he was born, six weeks early, he turned blue and choked and died. He tried to live, lying in an incubator for ten days of gasping struggle, but in the end the curse was too strong. Or so my mother said.

We lived in an apartment building four stories high, two brick wings around a pink concrete courtyard. The lobby was all marble, floor and walls, and a marble fireplace stood opposite two marble window seats that looked out upon a second weed-filled courtyard in the back. My parents said there had been armchairs in the lobby and a red velvet canopy out front when the building was new in 1923, long before they lived there. The skeleton of the canopy was still standing so I believed them. Now my friends and I roller-skated in the empty lobby on rainy days.

It was still the nicest building on the block; the others had neither courtyards nor lobbies. The block itself was not the best, but it was second best, with three trees and a number of small brownstones across the street; and down the block, a dentist lived in the brownstone that had a white rosebush in front.

We had a two-bedroom apartment one floor up and overlooking the street. My parents slept in one bedroom; I slept in the other with my grandfather.

Isaac and Rose lived just across the street, in the same brownstone as my aunt and uncle, and Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein lived above us. On warm days, I might clamber out my parents’ bedroom window to the fire escape, to lie reading on a blanket in the sun; and sometimes I’d climb up the iron staircase one landing to Mrs. Goldstein’s window. Careful not to be seen, I could watch her husband put his arms around her, or pinch her as he walked by. At night I heard their bed creak through the ceiling.

Mrs. Goldstein didn’t like to bring her garbage to the dumbwaiter for collection every night; often she threw it out the window instead, into the back courtyard, bits of it dropping onto the laundry my mother hung out to dry. My mother said it was people like Mrs. Goldstein who were making the building go downhill. But her own three daughters finished high school and married well, moving out of Brownsville to fairy-tale Long Island suburbs. She had pictures of them on all the flat surfaces of her furniture, posed in front of their suburban homes.

When Isaac killed Rose, many of the neighbors said they understood: Rose nagged too much. But Mrs. Goldstein could never forgive a Jewish man for killing his wife. In her own kitchen, she raged. With her daughter to find her dead on the linoleum.

On the other hand, she was glad when Irene moved in, glad to have a schoolteacher across the street, and she took to stopping at Irene’s with gifts of homemade noodle puddings and honey cakes. Irene invited her in when she asked in no one else, and visited with her in turn.

On summer days they sat on wooden chairs around a tiny table on Irene’s stoop, sipping iced tea from special thin-walled glasses. One of Mrs. Goldstein’s daughters had moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, and Irene would talk about the city while Hannah and I played our endless games of checkers and geography and hangman. I think Mrs. Goldstein approved of me, polite and bookish as I was, and I loved to listen to them talk; but I was afraid of her. She was a witch.

I don’t like you playing over there, my mother said each week. Not when Hannah’s aunt won’t even let you inside. And with Mrs. Goldstein over there all the time . . .

She doesn’t talk to me, she talks to Irene, I answered. But to myself I admitted that she worried me.

You should get married, Mrs. Goldstein said to Irene when she knew her well enough. Hannah and I must have been ten by then. She smoothed the paper napkin on her lap and waited.

I’m better off alone, Irene said. Men are good-for-nothings anyway. And here, who could I meet here? In Philadelphia, there were men with futures. But here? The men who live here are pigs.

She sipped her tea, delicately holding out her pinkie finger. I met a man at school last week who wasn’t bad. We had lunch together in the candy store. But who wants to marry a woman with someone else’s child?

She broke a slice of honey cake in half and swallowed it without dropping a crumb, then wiped her mouth with a napkin. At least Hannah takes after Isaac instead of her mother.

She paused before beginning the familiar litany, her eyes on the cake still left. I told Isaac he never should have married her. He was too good for her. You know, he had two years of college. He laughed at me when I told him. When I visit him now, I always remind him how he laughed at his big sister.

Mrs. Goldstein spilled a bit of tea. Still, a woman needs a man. You’re young; my middle daughter is as old as you and she just had another baby.

They looked at us then, aware that Hannah and I had stopped our game to listen. Actually, I thought Hannah looked just like her mother, at least as I remembered her, and not at all like Isaac. She didn’t much like school either, for all of Irene’s pushing her and making her do homework. Not that she was dumb. But I knew that Hannah liked boys.

Can we walk around the block? Hannah asked. It’s still early. When Irene hesitated, Mrs. Goldstein intervened. They need a little exercise. They shouldn’t sit here listening all day.

Hannah grabbed my hand and pulled me off the steps. We’ll be back in half an hour, she said. And don’t call the cops if I’m a minute late.

She half ran down the block, pulling me along, slowing only as we reached the corner. You hear that Mr. Goldstein is carrying on with Mrs. Sachs?

I grinned. I hear Mrs. Goldstein screaming at him through the ceiling. If he’s not careful, she’ll put a curse on him.

My aunt says she’s used to his carryings on. She just likes to yell.

Well, I wouldn’t get her mad if I was him. I thought then of my parents and of the coldness so often still between them. Sometimes I don’t know why people get married. My mother says it’s a curse that women fall in love. I blinked and changed the subject. Do you like my new skirt? It’s tight.

But that too was a delicate subject. My mother let me pick my own clothes, and she didn’t mind them flashy. I was even wearing stockings and sling-back shoes to school, the only girl in the smartest track to wear sling-backs. I had a giant blister on my heel where my left shoe rubbed. I looked at Hannah’s saddle shoes and socks. Irene insisted that she dress respectably.

When we turned the corner, Hannah unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse. At ten, she was just beginning to get breasts; I could see the nipples through her undershirt and blouse. It was safe enough around the corner: a different neighborhood, where only a few people knew our families. Irene didn’t speak to any of them anyway.

Mr. Goldstein had some beer last week, and he pinched me when my aunt wasn’t looking.

I thought of my Uncle Jake and grimaced; he pinched too and he always stank of whiskey. What did you do?

I told him I stuck to boys my own age. It made him laugh.

We stopped then while I bent to fix the Kleenex in my shoe; my blister was getting larger. A few months before I’d had to wear slippers without backs for two weeks to give my feet a chance to heal. But I loved my shoes.

We crossed the street just behind a big red truck, its horn bleating to scatter the crowd of skaters. When I was six, and learning how to skate, I’d turned too fast and fallen in front of a truck that large. I lay in the gutter forever, trying to crawl out of the way, watching the truck bear down on me, everything in slow-motion. It stopped just a few inches from my legs, and the driver jumped out, shouting at me as soon as he saw he hadn’t run me over and shaking me by the shoulders when he stood me up; I still couldn’t get my legs to move. I’d never told my parents.

I knew that Hannah was looking for some boys to flirt with; I was along for camouflage. To Irene, I was safe company for Hannah in spite of my sling-backs; she’d never gotten over my naming twenty Presidents of the United States. And maybe she even knew I was afraid of boys in spite of how I dressed.

There’s Stanley on his bicycle, I said, hoping to placate Hannah.

He’s a creep.

I knew he was; for me that was the central point. He had a crush on me, and I spent an hour or two each week listening to his baseball talk in return for borrowing his bicycle to go around the block. I’d never owned a bike and I was willing to use him cold-heartedly for the privilege. It might have been easier to let him kiss me, but he wasn’t interested, or maybe he was even shyer than I was.

He coasted toward us eagerly, the afternoon sun reflected on his glasses. His face was round and soft like his body. A creep.

Hi, Mona! Hannah. You want to ride my bike?

I grabbed it before I softened, and left the two of them alone.

I rode terribly, scared and wobbly, too slow or too fast, likely to fall if I had to veer or take a corner. The sidewalk was always crowded too, with carriages, and chairs, and ladies with heavy grocery bags. An old man stood up as I approached and I crashed into the brick wall of the building to avoid him, scraping my elbow and arm, but not the bike. I never came back without a crash.

The old man shouted after me, cursing in Yiddish.

Drop dead yourself! I called, hoping he didn’t understand me. He didn’t know my parents; I was two blocks from home.

My skirt was above my knees, crumpled under me on this boy’s bike. Someone whistled. If I looked up, I’d crash again, a good reason not to look. What I needed was my own bike, not a stolen ride once or twice a week. But there was no point asking; we had no extra money. I blushed, remembering how I’d shared spaghetti at Sheila’s house last week. I’d eaten without thinking, not noticing that her mother had no plate for herself until it was too late. But I loved her mother’s cooking: spicy, with garlic.

The wind blew as I came back around the corner, up the little slopes by the laundromat. The bike veered; I really couldn’t ride in this skirt. Ahead of me I saw Hannah and Stanley. I rode right up to them, falling over as I stopped. Stanley caught me; he was stronger than I was, for all his softness. Boys were always stronger than girls.

Hannah glared at me. We have to keep walking, she said. You wasted fifteen minutes. She started off; I was grateful as well as embarrassed. Now I didn’t have to spend time with soppy Stanley.

You want to come over here tomorrow afternoon? he asked. His eyes were damp and shiny, his cheeks pink.

I’ll have to see, I lied. I don’t know if my mother wants me for something.

Hannah called to me from down the block. I thanked Stanley again and ran after her. She was mad.

That was rotten of you, she said.

It’s the only way I get a chance to ride.

Well, you started on this walk with me, and then you left me in the middle with that creep. He’s not even older than me.

He’s not so bad, I said defensively.

Then visit him by yourself. You can listen to him talk about his stupid hamster.

My mother says he’s a very nice boy. Not like most of the others.

Then your mother likes creeps. I never get off that goddamned stoop and you spoil it.

I looked at the sky. There are no boys out anyway.

And aren’t you just glad, she said bitterly.

I didn’t answer and we walked on in silence. I didn’t like going home either. I kicked an old bottle cap along in front of me, fearful of scuffing my shoes but needing to do something. At last, I looked sideways at her. I’m sorry, I said.

She nodded glumly; I was afraid she was going to cry.

Maybe it will be better when we’re grown-ups, I said. So little I could say to her.

She snorted. Like the people around here?

She was too direct; I backed off. Somewhere else, like in the movies.

3

MY MOTHER WAS PLAITING MY HAIR into long braids down my back; I was no more than six, watching our reflections in the mirror of her vanity. She was telling me the story of my father’s courtship; of their first meeting at a dance at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side.

That was when we still had money, she said, when your grandfather still had his upholstery business. I wore a white dress that I bought at Ohrbach’s; it had a yellow rose in the sash. I saw your father watching me across the room and I asked my girlfriends who he was.

I squirmed in anticipation; I loved the answer that was coming. A bum! I shouted. They said he was a bum!

She nodded, and twisted a rubber band around a braid. A bum, they said. Watch out for him. He’s always in the pool hall.

And when he saw you looking at him, he came up and introduced himself, I said.

He did. And his manners were very fine. He reminded me of Cary Grant, he was so smooth and handsome. He said I was the most beautiful girl in the room and I asked him if he really spent his time shooting pool. I was at City College then and I had no time to waste on men with no future.

My father was poor, and an immigrant, brought here from a farm in Poland when he was ten. My mother’s family had reached America when her brother Obbie was four; but she and her older sister were born here.

They all grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side through the 1920s and 1930s. My mother’s mother died while she was still a child, but both her parents had been able to read in several languages, and her father owned a small upholstery business until 1939, when his older brother embezzled the partnership into bankruptcy and fled to South Africa.

By then, my father’s father was dead too, after falling down a flight of stairs while carrying a block of ice to a customer in a fifth-floor walk-up. With his mother and a young sister to support, my father left the pool halls, and went to work as a truck driver. My parents met again, at another dance, and this time my mother was interested.

I had to leave college, she told him. Now I work at Woolworth’s.

But everyone knows they don’t hire Jews, he said.

She laughed and gestured to her pink sweater. I wear a crucifix around my neck, right here. I told them I was Catholic and they believed me.

My father was shocked; then delighted. He knew immediately he’d marry her.

She knew too, that same night. They left the dance, and walked to the East River, to sit on a bench by the Drive. I looked out at the river and I told your father that I was going to leave the East Side when I married, and cross over to Brooklyn. He said he was going to open a garage someday; then he asked me to marry him.

They married late in 1940, and my mother talked my father into starting night school for his high school diploma. In Brooklyn, they took a cramped but sunny apartment; when my mother became pregnant a year later, they moved to the two-bedroom apartment in Brownsville that I grew up in.

In December Pearl Harbor was bombed and we went to war; I was born in April 1942, the week U.S. bombers raided Tokyo for the first time. My father read the papers every day; my mother tried to pretend the war didn’t exist. The draft notice came at last when I was eighteen months old. My mother was pregnant with their second child, the son who died.

My mother pleaded with my father to ask for a deferment until she gave birth. She argued that he could be deferred indefinitely: he supported a wife, child, mother and sister; at least he could wait until her pregnancy was over. He argued that it was his obligation to defend America, dishonorable to ask for special treatment; anyway, everyone he knew was in the army. They still argued it years later, when I could hear them for myself.

In Poland, the Gentiles stoned me when I walked to school, my father would say. Here I’m American, like anyone else. They let us come here, they let us live, they let us vote. It’s an honor and a duty to fight.

My grandfather would agree with him. In Russia, they took us in the Army to clean the boots of Cossacks. They drafted us for fifteen or twenty years; when we came out we were good for nothing, like my father’s brother. Here, they treat everyone alike. Sam was right to go as soon as he was called.

My father left for basic training in Florida. In the rural town next to the base he was an oddity, a Jew, and was asked quite humbly, as one should ask a legendary creature, if he really had horns and a tail. He promised to break the nose of the next man who asked.

Then my mother called: she’d given birth early, there was something wrong with the baby. He came home by train on emergency leave.

The initial explanation for my brother’s death was Mrs. Goldstein’s curse, the evil eye. But there were two others. The last one I heard only after I had given birth to my first child.

Your father was going into combat, my mother said. I used to sit with you in the closet in the bedroom, smelling your father’s jackets, keeping him alive for us.

She shook her head sadly, watched me change Daniel’s Pamper. I was scared all the time, she said. I had no room in me for someone else. I killed my son by not wanting him.

That was the final explanation for his death, given to me only

Reviews for Matters of Chance

[judylou_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When a successful, happily married scientist is diagnosed with a terminal disease, she begins a series of explorations of her life, both in the past and in the present. Her cardiac surgeon husband supports and encourages her to seek out alternative treatments as a support to the mainstream medical interactions she is undertaking.While researching alternative methods, she practices meditation, visits faith healers, changes her diet completely and learns that there is some evidence to suggest that by ridding the body of past traumas, it is possible to rid the body of the current trauma of illness. “I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville, and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.”So Mona attempts to recall all that has happened in her past. She grew up in New York in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother, her difficult father and her grandfather. Her best friend was Hannah. “Hannah was my best friend until her father killed her mother with the bread knife when we were eight.”Remembering these and other traumatic events from her past naturally influences Mona’s family life. She is also trying to cope with a schedule of chemotherapy, coming to terms with the possible outcome of the illness and her regret at having to give up her research. Her children are confused, her husband tries to maintain order, but she is full of doubt.Set in the 1970s, this book could have been set in any decade. The characters are believable and interesting and the writing engaging. Not an easy subject, but an easy read nevertheless.

[marquis784-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Matters of Chance by Gail Albert

Original copyright 1982
Reprint August 2013
digital copy from NetGalley for review


In New York, Mona, a 34 year-old professor of neurobiology with two sons age 9 & 7 and a husband who is a cardiac surgeon. She feels fortunate to have moved out of Brownsville, leaving her tough Brooklyn childhood behind her. When she discovers she has cancer she needs to reconcile with her own impending mortality. Mona begins a journey into her past and present for relevance and meaning in her life. With the support of her family, she begins to seek treatment including the unconventional, all while trying to recall traumatic childhood events. This is a touching story about terminal illness and reconciliation.