By the time she was twenty, she had resumed referring to me as Dad rather than Dale.
She told me she wanted to be a nurse when she was twenty-four. Do you know why? Because Brenda, a nite nurse, was the only person in the hospital who treated her grandmother like a human being when she was dying. Casey never lost sight of it.
When she entered the program, she was twenty-six. Weekend clinicals, nite classes, and working days at a veterinary clinic. Sitting upright at my kitchen table with a textbook open to a page about wound care, I watched the girl go off to sleep.
I couldn’t stand how proud I was of her. our family’s first. My grandfather was employed in the mill. I was employed at the plant. No one would ever look down on Casey the way they looked down on us, and she would work in scrubs with her name sewn on the pocket.
When my back began to suffer in October of last year, I assumed it was the accumulation of years.
It wasn’t.
Cancer of the pancreas does not compromise. It has already moved in and changed the locks by the time it makes an announcement. Phase four. liver as well. The doctor didn’t waste my time with fairy stories and was a kind man.
“Months,” he replied. “Not years.”
I interpreted it as you could anticipate. After that, I sold my truck, completed the paperwork, and informed precisely three people. Ray. Hoss, the president of my club. Casey, too.
I will always remember telling her. We were outside the veterinary facility in her car. At first, she didn’t cry. She assumed the role of a nurse, jotting notes on the back of a receipt and inquiring about staging, treatment choices, and second opinions.
Her pen then quit functioning. She gave it a shake. fired it once more.
There was nothing I could do to stop my young daughter from falling apart after she put her head on the steering wheel.
After two weeks, she informed me that she was leaving her program while sitting across from me at the hospice.
She declared, “I’m three months out.” “Next year, I’ll be done. You are allowed to defer.
“No.”
“I’m not sitting in a pharmacology lecture while you’re—” she said, pausing. “I won’t do it.”
I became as loud as a man with two functional lungs can get. I informed her that knowing she would walk that stage was the only thing keeping me upright. I informed her that everything I had been to her for the past fifteen years was a lie if she dropped out of school for me, since the whole purpose was that her life was becoming more important than mine.
She pledged to continue her education. However, neither of us spoke the solution out after doing the calculation in our thoughts.
May 16th was the date of graduation.
I had no intention of seeing May.
This is the bit that no one knew.
Casey was down to $9,400. Her scholarship paid for much but not all of last semester’s tuition and fees, and even though I had money to donate, she was too arrogant to accept it.
I happened to find out. One evening while she went to have coffee at the hospice, she left her laptop open, and the school’s billing site was there. payment schedule. monthly sums. A small red banner warning that if the sum wasn’t paid before graduation, her account would be placed on hold.
She was putting in additional time at the veterinary clinic. She appeared gray because of this. She never spoke to me about the fact that she was killing herself to pay for the degree while seeing her father’s death.
The last remaining item I possessed was worth $9,400.
