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The story of Trina and Whizzer is as follows. Trina had a respectable life with her husband and kid. Her husband, Marvin, had an affair with Whizzer. Then Marvin left her. For Whizzer, the home wrecker.
So Trina hates Whizzer. Or at least she tried to, for a while. Because you're not supposed to be friendly with the person that tore apart your family. Somehow, her hatred didn't stick.
Make no mistake, by no stretch were Trina and Whizzer friends, but at some point in the process of getting to know him as he worked his way into their strange family, Trina found she could no longer blindly despise the man.
She had no interest in familiarizing herself with the allures of the man that had enamored her ex-husband so thoroughly that he had finally decided to end the admirable life he was living for his more controversial preferences. Over the course of holiday dinners, shared activities like Jason's baseball games, and even a few drunken one on one conversations, however, she found herself disconnecting her dissatisfaction with the situation of her divorce from her opinion of Whizzer.
She wasn't friends with Whizzer, but she respected him. For how tall he stood despite the hardships he had faced in his life, and how relentlessly he proved himself to be worthy of helping to parent Jason. She was grateful for how his presence had somehow changed Marvin, made him better as a father, a friend, a lover.
So when Whizzer got sick, her initial attempts at apathy quickly proved themselves to be woefully unsuccessful. This was a man she had every right to despise. Whizzer played the antagonist of her life. He was the villain in her tragedy, who had in months stolen away everything that she had worked for, and yet she mourned the thought of his suffering.
She didn’t deserve to be hurt by this man again. The pain and chaos he brought to Trina’s life already exceeded all reasonable levels. Whizzer has no right to cause any more suffering.
He does.
Trina wishes more than anything to remain indifferent to Whizzer’s illness, but in the last few years Whizzer has become more to her than the one dimensional saboteur that destroyed her marriage. He shares her life. The man is so deeply loved by all of the people that matter most to her. Jason never shuts up about how impressive Whizzer is. Her son spews an endless chain of admirations. "Everything he told me about how to get girls to like me worked, even though he's not into that sort of thing", and "look at these pictures Whizzer took at the park, aren't they so cool," and "have you seen him play baseball?"
Mendel has grown fond of Whizzer as well, and is always the one to admit to Trina how wonderfully Marvin’s lover gets along with Jason when they all go out together. Trina herself has even begun to enjoy his company during the occasional times when she and Whizzer sip wine and joke a little too scathingly about Marvin's downfalls after everyone else has cleared away from the dinner table.
No, convincing herself not to care isn't working for Trina. The next best option is to try and stay as stable as she can in the face of the tumult overtaking her family.
Trina tries to stand firm and stay sane as everyone close to her is sent tumbling by a flood of grief and fear. The same rough waters surge around her, but she clenches her teeth, digs her heels into the ground, and remains a stationary point for the others to return to when they are able to fight their way back to normal life. She has repressed her emotions for years, stamping out her furies with Marvin for Jason's sake, swallowing down dissatisfaction with the way her life has turned out—Trina is more practiced than anyone at quelling emotions and maintaining the resolved march of ‘normal’ life. Despite this, even she sways.
She finds herself staring off into space, distracted from washing dishes and allowing the water to run. Or expecting Whizzer to follow Marvin in the door when he comes to visit and having a surge of despair slam through her gut when she remembers the reason for his absence.
It is impossible to not be affected by someone who is so integrally entwined in her world. So Trina stumbles, but fights to stay on her feet while everyone around her falls into the black expanse of grief that closes in on her family. She fails to fully repress her emotions, but labors to keep them under control. Trina stands strong, because this family needs an anchor to hold them to the ground and stop them from being swept away.