My Wish for My Family

Question from a blog reader: "What is your greatest wish for Tony and the kids in the future, if you are no longer with them?"

This sounds like it could be a trick question, like asking your husband or boyfriend, "Do these pants make my butt look fat?" If he says no, you'll accuse him of lying and flattering you to caress your ego. If he says yes, you'll have to kill him.

I can say I want Tony and the kids to forget all about me so they don't have to feel any sorrow and go on to have a wonderful life. But that would just be lying so I can flatter myself about my magnanimous heart.

Or I can say I want Tony and the kids to never forget about me and continue to celebrate and think about me on my birthday, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, and Labor Day (Isn't that about women in labor?). But that would be killing the magnanimous feeling in me.

In the beginning days of my life with cancer, I said that I didn't mind if Tony remarried after I was dead, but my kids were never, ever to call their stepmother, "Mom". I insisted that they only had one mother, dead or alive, and no other woman was going to steal that title from me just because she had the competitive advantage of being alive.

I've since gotten over that. If the kids need to have a living mother and need to call her "mom", then that's what I want, too.

I'd like Tony to find love again. I'd like Josie and Toby to have a mother who can give them the things that a dead mother can't.

In short, my greatest wish for Tony and the kids after I'm dead is that they have whatever they need to be happy. Whether that means forgetting me or clinging to the memory of me is up to them.