“He says he thinks it’s cancer,” she said. “He said they can’t be sure until after the biopsy…”
She was upbeat. She was positive. But the word cancer was still there.
That was two years ago. It was, at that moment, the worst thing that had ever happened to us. Worse was coming but we both put the best spin on it we could. We tried to be strong for each other.
I woke up to that memory this morning. It haunted me through breakfast, through the dishes, through the morning tour of the garden. I don’t want to remember but I can’t stop. I want to go home but I can’t. The place that was home–the place I am writing this from–ceased to be home when she wasn’t here anymore. Now it is a house on a hill, no more a home than anywhere else I lived before we married. It is the place I sleep, the place I eat, the place I work.
Our books are here. Our furniture is here. Our dishes are here. But they are mere objects and reminders of who we were together.
There is a card Jane gave me on one of our early anniversaries on the book-case to my right. “Who, being loved, is poor?” It has been on my bookcase, no matter where we were, since the day she gave it to me. It was one of the first things I unpacked when we moved into this house nearly 18 years ago.
By that measure, I am wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. But today it is as though all that wealth is tied up in things that make it untouchable. I am at once the wealthiest man in the world and the poorest.
Death is a felon–and Cancer is his most sadistic partner. There are no nice cancer deaths. Each is wrapped in a unique and searing bubble of mental, physical, and emotional pain. And the pain is not singular. It ensnares not only the patient who physically has it but the people who love them as well.
In the obituaries they use the term “survived by.” The reporters who write those words have no idea how ironic that phrase is. Nor do those who have not experienced this kind of deep personal loss. The word is totally appropriate–not as a euphemism but as a real description of the status of those left behind. We have survived. But survival is not exactly the same as living. We are ships with neither rudders nor anchors in waters infested with reefs, rocks and shallows that can hole a fragile hull in an instant.
People ask why I do what I do. They ask why I don’t just move on. They ask why, 19 months and nine days after my wife’s death, I still wear my wedding ring.
I still love my wife. I want you to continue to love your spouse. But I want you to have that person physically with you.
I have survived a great shipwreck–the greatest shipwreck imaginable. I want to make our ships safer.
