Part 2: Why the Willow Weeps
by Jonathan Shute

Janice was a misery junkie . From an early age she saw this world as little more than a parade of sad circumstances and loss. She had a fraternal twin named Jason who died a senseless death when they were eight years old and she had not been able to summon a happy thought since. They were playing together in the front yard when Jason climbed their favorite tree to untangle the rope of the tire awing . He fell from the branch barely ten feet off of the ground, simultaneously breaking his neck and his twin sister's heart. Jason died in her arms that morning and took the better part of Janice with him. She resigned herself to wait out this life without her brother or her smile. Her parents did everything in their power to heal the family and mollify their only remaining child after the accident but Janice would not be soothed.

Her mother worked as a nurse in a field hospital during the war and had witnessed the most horrible suffering imaginable; broken men with amputated limbs spurting blood by the bucketful. None of her haunting memories of war torn men compared to the depth of despair she saw in her daughter's eyes following Jason's death.

The carnage of war inured her to tragedy, steeling her against despair over the loss of her son but little Janice was as delicate as a flower . She feared that her daughter would never recover without similar toughening. With the best of intentions she visited the little girl with memories of the battlefield hospital, hoping to somehow mitigate the smaller tragedy and thicken her skin. The gruesome pep talksonly bolstered Janice's moribund worldview and further distanced her from anything resembling a happy childhood.
The cancer took her father when Janice was eleven and she made the decision to follow her mother's path in caring for the afflicted. She lost her mother to a different type of cancer a month before she received her own nurse's certification.

After graduation, Janice was assigned to an internship in the terminal wing of the hospital's cancer ward, a temporary situation that she never relinquished. Nurses were ordinarily rotated out of hospice duty after six months or so because the hopeless scene bred attrition in the ranks. The death ward was a staffing nightmare, a notorious breeding ground for everything from alcoholism and drug abuse to burnout and suicide . After the fourth time Janice declined rotation from the ward, she was promoted to a supervisory position and never again offered a change of scenery.

Janice found herself singularly well suited to the life of a caregiver for the terminally ill and the dying patients were as much a comfort to her as she was to them.