It had been a quiet evening. Marie had been doing searches on the Internet for a travel package to somewhere warm and friendly when her daughter, Steffie, called.
After the opening lines, Steffie told her mother that Dad’s girl friend was in the hospital. Marie asked why. Steffie gave the initials of a crippling disease.
Marie made no response, let silence trickle, then asked about her grand children. Steffie gushed about this one and that, and the call ended.
Marie sat a moment, then looked up the disease. She learned it had no treatment, no cure and that the sufferer would move into a vegetative state.
For a moment it seemed so surreal.
Six minutes ago she was debating between four different All-Inclusive Hotels in the Caribbean where she would spend her accrued vacation.
Now, she was hearing how the woman her husband, her ex-husband, Charley, had dumped her for , was dying of a horrible incurable disease.