She Was About To Divorce Her Husband, But Then He Got Diagnosed With Terminal Cancer, So She Stayed
For the last two decades, this 50-year-old woman has been married to her 55-year-old husband, Adam. Around a year ago, she was about to divorce him.
She felt that she and Adam had drifted apart physically, mentally, and emotionally. Nobody cheated. Nobody did anything wrong.
It was just that their marriage slowly broke down. When she made up her mind to divorce Adam, she began organizing how to leave him, though she didn’t jump to speak to a lawyer just yet.
Back in October, Adam received a terrible diagnosis of stage 2 cancer, which has since progressed to stage 4, and that threw a wrench in her plans.
“I didn’t leave. I couldn’t. How do you walk away from someone who just found out they’re dying?” she wondered.
“So, I stayed. I shifted to caregiver, and I’ve played the part well. Everyone calls me ‘amazing’ and ‘so strong.’ I cook for him, I take him to treatments, attend all the doctors’ appointments. I will call the emergency services as needed. I tell him I love him.”
“But deep down…I checked out a long time ago. And the guilt is crushing. I’m not staying out of love — I’m staying because anything else would make me a villain in everyone’s eyes, especially because he would end up uninsured. Life expectancy is 3 months – 3 years in the rarer cases, 4 to 5 years.”
A week ago, she was sobbing in her car, thinking she had a quiet moment to herself, when Adam’s sister witnessed her brief breakdown.
Adam’s sister wanted to know if she was ok, and she blurted out that she was planning on divorcing Adam back before he got diagnosed with cancer.
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Looking back, she knows it was silly to confess that to Adam’s sister, but it just happened. Adam’s sister has refused to speak to her since then.
“I haven’t told Adam. I won’t,” she continued. “What good would that do? He gets to die thinking I loved him through everything. Isn’t that better than the truth?”
“So…[am I the jerk] for staying married to my husband only because he got a diagnosis that progressed to terminal stage 4?”
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