“The Lasagna Test”
After my dad passed, my mom Colleen became quieter. She and my father had the kind of love you rarely see—steady, simple, full of quiet rituals. When she remarried just a year later to a man named Raymond, I wanted to be supportive. He made her laugh again. He brought her lunch, fixed things around the house. “It feels good to laugh,” she told me. That was enough—for a while.
But during a visit, I saw the truth.
Mom was thinner, quieter. When she offered Raymond leftover lasagna and he smashed the dish on the floor, shouting, “I don’t eat the same thing twice!”—I knew something was wrong. She dropped to her knees to clean it up. My heart shattered.
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