He started with Mick, the 9-year-old who never let people see him cry. "There are a lot of different cancers in the world," Morris said. "There are some cancers that doctors can help and there are some cancers that doctors can't help, and Mommy has one of the kinds that doctors can't help." Even after years of watching his 44-year-old mother getting sicker, Mick looked surprised. Morris forced himself to keep going. "Mommy is probably going to die from this," he said.
Mick ran to the bathroom and Morris could hear him crying. He had wanted so badly to be strong for the boys, but he started crying too.
He went to Vance, the 4-year-old, and told him a simpler version of the story. "The doctors can't help Mommy. . . . Mommy is going to go to heaven." Vance "absolutely melted down." They all cried.
"It was the worst feeling I've ever felt in my life," Morris, whose wife died in August 2010, says now. "That was harder than when she actually passed away."
I asked Morris, who lives in Radnor, and other parents to discuss their experiences with "the talk" because I had felt the same way about telling my sons that their father's brain tumor was fatal. Of all the miserable tasks cancer brought us, nothing was worse than deciding how to balance the bad news with hope and normalcy, than worrying about how their father's death and the way we handled it would change the men my boys would become.
Like Morris, I read articles but found them unsatisfying. They told me to be honest because my sons, at 12 and 16, would sense the truth. But it didn't feel right to tell them what I knew all along: glioblastoma is incurable. I didn't give the really bad news until it was probably obvious.
Later, I wondered if this wasn't just one more aspect of dealing with cancer that leaves a lot of us feeling guilty and inadequate.
