A Death & A Deliverance - Part I

The first time I met Jinny, I couldn’t stand her. She was the gushy, chatty girlfriend of my son, Julian, and she walked around radiating almost unbearable positive energy despite the fact that, at 32 years old, she was terminally ill. It was almost too late before I began to see her in  a different light. 

THIS IS PART 1 of a SEVEN-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Things had been falling apart. Unraveling. My sweet daughter-in-law, a beautiful brown-skinned girl named Jinny, had been released from the hospital, sent home for hospice. She wasn’t my daughter-in-law exactly. There’d been no exchange of vows before a judge. She was my son’s beloved.

The first time I met Jinny, I couldn’t stand her.

My son, Julian, had barely talked to us about her. “I met this girl …” he said, but no description, and I wasn’t that curious because back then Julian, who’d already been married and divorced, had lots of girls. All he said about Jinny was that he’d first made her acquaintance at Nordstrom where they’d both once worked. And that she had breast cancer.

That gave me pause. Jinny was only 32. How did someone that young get cancer? The whole story was unreal to me until I finally met Jinny. And afterwards, it was still unreal.

We met in a parking lot outside a sushi restaurant on Burnet Road in Austin. It was October, 2019, three months before the official onset of COVID. No one had any inkling of the fast-spreading disease that was about to assault us. As far as we were concerned, it was just a cool, dark evening and we were there to meet our son’s girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t known for very long who had a serious illness.

The first thing I noticed about her was she was heavy-– not someone who looked like they had terminal cancer. She had a smooth, wide, plump face, pudgy arms and a round, protruding belly. Her expression was pleasant and sweet.

She had a pretty mouth, and from the moment we were introduced she couldn’t seem to stop talking, the wide, fleshy lips opening and closing, opening and closing on words that meant nothing and were as interchangeable as pebbles on a beach. Oh Jesus, I thought meanly, telling myself I for sure didn’t like this girl and the ocean of words she was spewing.

“Isn’t this great sushi,” she cried, chewing. And: “You’re such great parents, Julian’s turned out so well, I love him and he loves me, I’ve never met someone so wonderful, I can’t imagine living without him, and have to thank you for raising him as you did because he’s the nicest man I ever met.”

What gibberish, I thought. Julian had been my wild child for years. This was a young woman I didn’t want to spend a single second more with.

Next: Read A Death & A Deliverance, Part 2 >>