Still in Castleford after all these years, I think. No one asked me to come home when Mother got ill. But I knew how shaky Mother's finances were with Rob at school, and I frankly wasn't sure what her health benefits as a teacher would cover in terms of care at home. Mother had cancer, but not the horribly progressive kind; hers came in the form of a tumor attached to her lung—my mother had not smoked, ever—the kind of cancer that hundreds of thousands of people discover they must take on every year and, if discovered early, can be successfully treated. So Mother had surgery, followed by
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