For Anne in her palliative care bed, every day is “Sweet Dessert Day”
Rewind to the early 1980s: Like so many first-time parents, Anne and I were brimming with righteous resolve to shield our offspring from the evils of junk food. “Sweet Dessert Day” was our grand idea, a weekly treat so exclusive it might as well have come with a golden ticket, much to our elder son’s chagrin as he watched the calendar more closely than any tax deadline. Fast forward to our second son, born in 1987, and those once-noble standards dissolved faster than a Popsicle in July; he managed to inhale chips, cookies, and chocolate bars with the glee of a kid who’d just discovered a secret candy vault, leaving his older brother wondering if he’d been part of some elaborate parenting experiment gone awry.
Isn’t it a cosmic joke that my precious Anne, once the unyielding gatekeeper of the junk food cupboard, now finds herself at the centre of a dessert buffet in her hospital bed, as she slowly expires from the unspeakable cruelties of brain cancer? The same woman who meticulously counted the grams of sugar in every snack her sons brought home now gleefully launches into pink layer cake before the main course, with vanilla ice cream and butter tarts following close behind. Fate, it seems, had a sweet tooth all along, and now Anne is living her long-lost immigrant Canadian dream – one sticky dessert at a time – while her sons shake their heads, recalling their sugarless childhoods as a distant memory compared to “Sweet Dessert Day” every day in the palliative care ward.
What sort of fiend, what devilish trickster, would dare to snatch a treat from my sweet Anne as her candle flickers low? Anne, herself a delightful cupcake in spirit and visage, faces the merciless jaws of illness, yet even as she’s devoured from within, she remains a morsel of joy, deserving every sugary delight.
If you feel like keeping track of Anne’s cancer journey, I’m chronicling it in prose and poetry here:
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/news/
In happier days, before Anne was felled by this insatiable disease, I wrote extensively about our growing up on junk food. You can read these ironic accounts here:
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
