The Color of Water-Week 4, Post B

Significant Quote:
"I was home and I got a call from a doctor at the hospital about six in the morning. He asked if I was Mrs. McBride. I said I was. He said, 'Mr. McBride just passed away.' I said, 'That's impossible. He wasn't that sick.' The doctor said, 'He had cancer,' and hung up. That's the first time they told me he had cancer. That's the first I ever heard of it." (243-244) This quote was shocking to me. James's father had been in the hospital so many times before he died there and the doctor's knew he had cancer and they couldn't bother to tell his family. Ruth often stated how she could hear the doctor's talking about her behind her back, thinking she couldn't hear them. She knew they were opposed of her marriage to a black man, but it seems uncanny that this view of their relationship would stop these doctors from telling her that her husband had a fatal disease. Who knows if they even did all they could to treat him? Maybe he could have survived.