Today we ended the game with an even score. All that’s left to play now is the last game of the regular championship season. There’s still a chance of moving up on points and being given the go-ahead. As a coach, I’m not bad at all. But as a sick man, I’m a mess. I just don’t seem to know how to be sick. Paola scolds me every day, and I take the scolding willingly. It’s a sign she cares about me. I never forget that I have only one main goal: to get her to forgive me. But it has to be for the right reasons.
This morning, as I was pouring milk into glasses for the kids, she suddenly, nonchalantly, asks me the most important question on my mind. “When will you tell the kids?” she says.
“Tell the kids what?”
“That you’ve got a short time with them, that you’re, you know, dying?”
“Tell them that?” I am stunned that my wife thinks I should tell them. “That I’m dying?”
“Yes,” she says. “They should know.”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “Never. Why would I do that?”
“You don’t see it,” she says.
“No. What is there to see?”
“That they will be here, in this world, without their father by their side. You just don’t see it?”
“I don’t see how it can help them,” I say. “There’s nothing to discuss. They don’t need to know.”
I ended it. I won’t tell them. There’s little left to me now with them. And I don’t want it tainted by the fact of my dying.