My husband's father has lung cancer. He's dying on the other side of the country. We're still not sure how slowly or quickly he is dying, but he's dying a little faster than most of us these days.

My father-in-law is a strange man, an isolated man, a lonely man, an alcoholic who never has been (and now never will be) sober, a life long cigarette smoker. You could say that the tobacco addiction is killing him, but the alcoholism has certainly contributed to him being too weak for chemotherapy, so who knows. He is also, like his son, a sex addict. My father-in-law makes me, always has made me, uncomfortable. My husband is like him in many ways. They have the same eyes: large and dark. But the souls behind those eyes are different: one I've chosen to bind my life to and one I hide from, saddened.

When I was first getting to know my husband, he confused me. He seemed friendly and charming, yet oddly socially inept. He would do and say things that were a little too intimate a little too quickly, and he'd make me uncomfortable. He once asked if he could see a ring I was wearing, so I took it off to show it to him. He put it on and walked away. What an odd thing to do. What was that supposed to mean? One of his roommates saw me looking bewildered, found Mark, and retrieved my ring. He was embarrassed, but also, I think, amused: he had gotten away with something, had held a little piece of me too close for too long, yet still kept my friendship.

After a while I got used to these things: used to the way he would ask sales clerks personal questions or go up to a stranger on the street and ask her favorite flavor of milkshake or give his business card to a woman at the next table in a restaurant. I would see how some of them became uncomfortable and some of them thought he was wonderful. It was Mark. It was who he was: his weird sense of humor, his unique playfulness, his uninhibitedness. I used to chide him for it at first, because I remembered how weird it seemed before I got used to it, because I would see that he upset some people. But after a while, I came to admire it. I'm ultra-inhibited. I'm sometimes shy. And here was a man who was himself, whatever other people thought of that.

But it wasn't entirely Mark, after all; a lot of that was a sex addict at work. Mark is almost, I was surprised to find years later, as shy as I am. But his addiction overcame that, and he was testing, pushing, seeing how far he could go, how intimate he could get, how quickly. I imagine other addicts do this in different ways; they push and test to see who can give them access to drugs or alcohol or money, just like Mark tested to see who might give him access to sex. Of course, he wasn't necessarily thinking of sex. It wasn't obvious. The push for too much intimacy was thrown at everyone, regardless. It became his default manner of interacting with the world, and sometimes he'd get lucky and get a hit too.

Like Mark, his father asks questions that are too personal. Then he doesn't accept or understand the answers, as if he wants to see into your soul, just dive into it without a hello or a preamble, and reshape it to suit his own needs. He has always wanted to get to know me, but the only way he knows how to interact with people, after a lifetime of disconnectedness and addiction, is just too strange and uncomfortable for me. I don't take his phone calls. I'm polite when I see him, but nothing more. I hide who I am and sometimes lie to protect my true self. The more he wants to know who his daughter-in-law is, the more I will not show him.

Mark tries, but his father doesn't know him either. He wants Mark to be something he is not, to be a certain kind of son, to take over his business, to nurse him as he's dying. And even if Mark does these things, his father won't be satisfied, because Mark is Mark, not the fantasy. The son and daugher-in-law do not fulfill, just as no woman ever fulfilled the fantasy of either man, never gave them the love and completeness they longed for, but could only find in themselves, in spirituality, in God.

Now my father-in-law is dying somewhere across the country, and he will never know me. And he will never really know his son. And worse of all, he will never know recovery. He will die an alcoholic, a sex addict, a smoker. He'll die in a dark fantasy, in shame and in loneliness. And it's times like these I long for a reincarnation or heaven, a second chance for this lost man, a God to take him after death and help him heal and rebuild his soul. And this is the reason I don't believe in hell, because whatever he has done in his life, he has done in ignorance and pain, and he has never known peace and light he should, we all should.