Learning to Live

Chapter 51

Shana

My life has always been straightforward; get a good education, graduate, go to college, go to law school and become a lawyer that was my dream. I had everything planned out or so I thought. There was one aspect of my life that I didn't plan for and it was to fall for a guy I met on a Tuesday morning while bagging groceries.

The first time I saw Ian, he was pacing back and forth in the liquor aisle. I didn't know what to think, I thought that he might be crazy or just can't figure out which brand of whiskey he wanted. After knowing him for a while I figured out he was a sober man who was fighting his urges.

Ian once said the first time he fell in love with me was seeing me walking down the sidewalk outside Joe's Café with headphones in my ear and my hands in the pockets of my red Jacket. For me it was different, I fell in love with him multiple times but the first, first ever time I even considered him being an interest, was on the day we were stuck in an elevator and he managed to calm me down from my hyperventilation due to my claustrophobia. The second he told me to focus on him and look into those blue eyes, I was done for. That was the first time I even held eye contact with someone for more than five seconds.

Underneath his charming ways and good looks, I found out every person has a demon and his was called anger. I suspected learning he was going to die from brain cancer made him want to make his path a little clearer, and this was when I really fell for him. Ian has done many wrongs in his life, who hasn't? We've all done things that we regretted. Most men wouldn't want to acknowledge that they've been wrong but seeing him correcting his wrongs and apologizing to people he's hurt in his pass made my heart fluttered.

Before my family broke apart, my mom would tell us when things got hard that god sometimes put obstacles in our way to test us. I guess the Dante household failed that test. Despite his weakness for alcohol and anger our relationship was fine, until we went to Las Vegas. There Ian told me about his fight with cancer and his lost with it. That was a huge obstacle; my heart felt like someone took it out of me. Just when everything's fine, when I was finally in love, god just had to take it away from me. I decided to be strong, I wasn't going to let this be the end of us but it was hard to love a man who didn't love himself.

When Ian rejected other treatments and wouldn't even try to live it made me feel like he didn't love me enough to live. That was my demon called trust, questioning his love for me. Ian had a plan all along; he didn't want to take the treatment to prolong his life just to be sicker. He wanted to live to be with me and with that he got the life he always wanted, his own family.

I wasn't the only one who has been there by Ian's side. Jon has been his best friend, brother and his personal pain. When I first met Jon, I read him almost instantly. He was an immature playboy, a rich brat and wild at heart. I didn't tolerate him one bit. Everything he did made my blood boil and it was fun for him to see me annoyed, so he did it even more, annoying the hell out of me. He was annoying but Ian relied on him like a brother and so did Jon. He brought out the playfulness in Ian and Ian kept him grounded.

One day after I broke up with Ian after Vegas. Jon came by my house; it was a surprise seeing him. He told me the events of what happened in Vegas after I left. That Ian punched him and he was worried for his friend. With a bruised nose he was more concerned about me and how I was doing. Then I saw that he wasn't the immature guy I didn't tolerated, he was kind and compassionate and really listened to what I have to say. He told me Ian was broken and loves me very much and pleaded for me to go back to him but I couldn't at that time because he really did hurt me.

After Ian's passing Jon never left his house for weeks. His parents were worried, I was worried but he wasn't alone Bryce was there. Bryce told me what Ian told him that day, that he never wanted Jon to be friendless and asked if Bryce could be there for him. Ian got everything planned out; he bought Harley parts for Greg so he could get his Mack up and running, he left thousands of dollars to Cynthia's bakery, He donated Hundreds of thousands to Bryce's cancer foundation which is now called the Ian Somers Cancer foundation but most and sweetest of them all, he wrote our unborn daughter a letter each year of her life until she's eighteen, each to be opened on her birthday. Ian spoke about it once to have a house by the lake with a huge yard and white fences and he made it come true. He bought a house by a lake. It was large and beautiful and it was everything we planned but I expected it was the house we were going to be a family in, the three of us.