Excerpt
"It was cancer, that started it all - or – what started to end it all. John remembered him and Mary sitting there in a dimly lit doctor’s office, complete with skeleton and prehistoric computer, listening to a monotone voice and staring at an x-ray of a pair of lungs that didn’t mean anything to them. They could have easily been anyone’s lungs; the doctor’s lungs, a homeless person’s lungs, the lungs of some woman at a retirement home, or, even better, just decoration. But they weren’t just anyone’s lungs, they were Mary’s lungs and they had cancer in them".

“Ma'm, do you even realize how sick you are?” Mary didn’t, but she did. She had not been feeling well for months, starting with a little pain in her throat, which she just figured was a cold. However, it never went away, it got worse and before long, she was coughing all day long, had terrible pains in her leg and couldn’t eat, walk or do anything else but sit all day. A smoker that can’t stop coughing, with an unidentified illness that progresses through the entire body. Only two lovers in denial would not be able to identify that as cancer, and in love the couple was, even after more than thirty years of marriage.

Unfortunately, there was someone else who didn’t identify the disease as cancer, and that was...