After My Husband’s Funeral, My Son Left Me at a Remote Road, Saying, ‘This Is Where You Get Off.

My name is Eleanor Grace

Richard and I had built everything together—this orchard, this home, this family. He died of pancreatic cancer, a brutal 14-month battle that stole his strength bit by bit. He didn’t want our children, Darren and Samantha, to know until the end. “Let them live their lives a little longer without the shadow,” he had whispered.

. For nearly five decades, I was a wife, a mother, and the quiet heart of Hazelbrook Orchards, a small organic apple farm in Pennsylvania. My hands, though stiff with arthritis, still remember pruning trees at dawn with Richard, my husband. Three weeks ago, I buried him.