My retirement officially began the beginning of last month. Jane’s retirement was supposed to begin on the same day.
We had a thousand plans for the years we believed we had ahead of us. She was looking forward to playing more tennis, writing a couple of books on teaching science, doing the travel that teaching prevents. We both had interests in politics and community service.
And we were so looking forward to spending time with each other–time we had not had when we were teaching because of the demands that profession places on its practitioners.
My own priorities involved writing about journalism and English, working in the garden, and pursuit of some of the political issues that have bothered me for years.
Jane’s death changed everything.
I still want to do the reading, the writing, the gardening. I want to pursue the political issues that need to be addressed.
Instead, my energies are burned up by fighting through the cancer bureaucracy, trying to learn all I can to raise awareness about a disease no one seems to have heard of, and raising money in support of research into that disease.
Because dreams are valuable. And while my dreams have turned to nightmares, I can, perhaps, prevent some other folks’ dreams from turning into this slow nightmare.
I remember walking through the halls of Brigham & Women’s Hospital the night before Jane died. I looked down at my feet and suddenly realized that somewhere that fall the spring had gone out of my step. I was walking the way my Grandfather had. I asked myself when I had suddenly grown so old.
I walked down to the mailbox this morning–and asked myself the same question.
The American Cancer Society and the Jimmy Fund both talk about creating more birthdays through research. The slogan sounds nice.
But creating more birthdays does far more than just adding years to a patient’s life. It preserves families. It preserves marriages. It preserves the futures of both the patient and their loved ones. It creates laughter. It creates joys that would otherwise not exist. It keeps the spring in a spouse’s footsteps.
One third of the population will have to deal with cancer at some point. It used to be a hopeless diagnosis. The first question people asked in my youth of someone diagnosed was, “How long do you have?” There are still cancers about which that is the only real question.
But for many cancers, the questions are now about treatment options and survival rates. And that raises hope for the cancers for which there currently seems to be no hope.
We could not prevent Jane’s death from neuroendocrine cancer. But the day will come that, for some other patient in her circumstances, we will have the tools and the knowledge to prevent his or her death.
And that may help put the spring back in my step.
