Families

In addition to his wife's (actress Cicely Adams) cancer, Jim Beaver writes about his own father's failing health; his father-in-law (actor Don Adams') poor health; a health crisis for his brother-in-law; and his mother-in-law's fall which results in a broken arm. All of this in the first four chapters.

I nodded to myself as Beaver described his own family's manner of communicating health concerns "Numerous times in recent years I've found out that somebody fell off the house or had something amputated or was diagnosed with Glaubner's disease not when it happened, but days, weeks, even months later."

It is also the way of my people to assume that someone else will tell me, the one who does not live in Maryland, what is going on in our family. As if to prove the point, shortly after reading this passage I received an e-mail from my husband, who had forgotten to give me the message he received from my sister (his BFF on Facebook) the night before that my mother was having surgery that day "you knew about this, right"? was the tagline of my sister's original message. Of course we didn't know. Who would have told us? I laughed with my sister about the "Hayes way" when I called her last night.