It Takes a Worried Man: A Memoir
Brendan Halpin
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0812966872
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In September 2000, Brendan Halpin discovered that his thirty-two-year-old wife had stage four breast cancer. On October 7, he sat down to begin writing about what happens to a man who fears that his best friend might leave him forever.
While his wife’s condition is always in his thoughts, Halpin’s memoir focuses more on the day-to-day, moment-to-moment concerns of a young English teacher forced into the role of temporary single parent to his young daughter, forced to test his relationship with his wife, and forced to face his own fears.
It Takes a Worried Man brilliantly skewers everyone from medical professionals to family members and details how work, pop music, and movies about flesh-eating zombies helped to save Halpin’s sanity. His rants about popular culture, God, and children’s birthday parties add levity and a fast pace to the narrative.
were many many Saturdays when everyone would kind of stagger down there at like 10:00 a.m., sit around and shoot the shit for a couple of hours, talk about how we all had work we needed to do (sometimes if somebody really felt the need to pretend they were going to study, they would bring books that they never opened), drift out at about noon to get sandwiches or make mac and cheese in the kitchen, drift back with food and say Okay, after lunch I am absolutely starting my work, and then sit
eventually make her better. I get through this okay, though I almost start to cry when I realize that some passer-by is listening to us. We get to the restaurant and eat outside and watch people heading over to the Red Sox game. It’s a practically perfect night. We go to the playground across the street after dinner. As strange as it sounds, it is a wonderful, wonderful night. We walk back to the hospital and find Kirsten in an examining room behind the emergency room. Sh seems to be in pretty
wispy-mustached perv of a teenaged boy. Ahem. But some have greatness thrust upon them, and in Kirsten’s absence I have taken over the number one spot. One day I tell Kirsten in the hospital, “I never wanted it like this!” I feel like the understudy who steps into the starring role because the star met with some kind of horrible accident or something. And I don’t know why this surprises me, but being number one is somewhat of a mixed bag. It is nice, sure, but it is also kind of exhausting, as
apartment, or whatever that you have had for years suddenly becomes intolerable after you know you are going to leave. At least that’s the way it’s always been for me–I never got all misty-eyed thinking of the colleagues I’d never see again, or thinking of the street I’d rarely walk down again. My reaction has always been, “I can’t wait to get away from this horrible place and these horrible people,” and while it would seem logical that little annoyances would bug you less in these circumstances,
angry about this, but I do feel in some important way that I have turned a corner. Maybe now I can get up more days than not and not worry about everybody dying. Maybe I can start keeping my own house clean. Maybe. After she says that, she also clears Kirsten to do all the stuff she’s been doing anyway, which is a relief. We go out to lunch, and we stop by the thrift store run by the local AIDS charity, and they are selling vinyl records for a quarter. The fact that this is an AIDS