Prologue

Our Lives Before

I took a last look in the mirror, eyeing the fashionable shag haircut and smoothing a few strands from my eyes. I threw my brown The Sak crocheted bag over my shoulder, smiling at the thought of the credit card inside bearing the name Susan Lamont, my alias, that waited to be used for the first time.

I almost skipped down the hall of the Victorian two-bedroom apartment that I shared with two other girls. My bedroom—a makeshift third bedroom—consisted of the second parlor, walled off with pocket doors from the first parlor that we used as a living room. It wasn’t private, but it was darling. The apartment was on a tree-lined street in hipster Cole Valley, a world away from hippy Haight-Ashbury, a few blocks up.

As the fog rolled in, a nightly occurrence in San Francisco, I shouted good-bye to my roommates. Some days the fog was so thick that it never broke at all, blanketing the residents in a cold damp mist. Tonight, in this summer of 1997, it didn’t bother me. Tonight the city had a special shine even through the fog. Tonight this city was mine.

I jumped behind the wheel of my shiny new black Jetta, expertly maneuvered it from its tight space between two other cars and threw it into first gear. I was headed to the theater district, to a new restaurant with owners as new to the restaurant business as I was to my job.

I was meeting a friend for dinner. But not just any dinner. I was now a restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. I would eat dinner incognito, my first of three visits over the course of the next few weeks, then write my opinion of what I ate. Thousands would read what I had to say and make dinner reservations based on my review.

As I drove to Indigo Restaurant, I thought what a long and sometimes speed bump-filled road it had been to get here.

I had chosen my career as my life, shutting the door on God and religion, and turning my back on any kind of long-term relationship years before. Being singularly driven to succeed, I believed, was something I could master, and far less messy than a life with a spouse and family. Marriage went against my philosophy that relationships had a useful lifespan, and when they were no longer useful, they should end.

Being married to my job was a decision my family didn’t understand. When my oldest brother Rick asked when I would marry my current boyfriend du jour, I answered, “I don’t have any plans to marry him or anyone else.”

My brother, then married more than twenty years, answered, “Oh, yeah, I forgot that you live in the land of alternative lifestyles.”

“Single” wasn’t considered an alternative lifestyle in San Francisco, which was one of many reasons I loved the city so much. Career equaled identity to most of my friends. I knew I could thrive in such an environment.

My younger sister, who also had been married for many years, was less concerned with my getting married than my moving back to Ohio where I grew up and where she still lived.

“When I start having my kids,” she pleaded, “I’ll want you near me, near them.”

“Dorothy,” I explained as patiently as I could. “I will never, ever move back to Ohio.”

In fact, I couldn’t imagine ever leaving San Francisco. It was a magical place that had filled me with wonder from the first time I set foot in it to look at the California Culinary Academy. I was smitten by everything from the fingers of fog that reached across the headlands to the bustling crowds of people who seemed so smart and worldly.

I had worked hard to get where I finally was: leaving Ohio by myself to move to California, cashing in my 401K to go to cooking school, leaving my beloved San Francisco to move to Los Angeles to work for Bon Appétit magazine, then returning to the city by the bay to work as a part-time editorial assistant at the Chronicle. Now the paper was in the middle of nasty litigation with the woman who had been removed from the critic’s job before it was given to me. But it was given to me. It was rightly mine.

Here I was, a small town girl from the Midwest, leading the ideal urban life in sexy San Francisco. Leave all this? I couldn’t imagine what could possibly drive me to do something so crazy.

On that first night, I ordered pan-seared salmon with tomato fondue and pesto and instructed my friend to order roasted chicken atop okra risotto. We split smooth and silky lavender crème brulee for dessert. I paid careful attention to the service (“consistently good, and the staff seems to know the food well,” I later wrote in the review) and the decor (“remodeled in sophisticated blue and white, the tiled bar outlined in pencil thin neon”).

At the end of the night, I took careful notes and meticulously planned my next visits to this restaurant and others to fulfill my obligation of writing two reviews per week. I was positively giddy at the prospects.

This was the best night of my life.

At the same time, in a small suburb of Columbus, Ohio, Grace was sure she was having the worst night of her life. Finally, the kids were asleep, and her mother had reluctantly gone to bed. Grace sat across the kitchen table from her husband, the two of them just staring at each other.

Hours earlier, the phone had rung—a sound that in retrospect the couple would remember as a warning bell of something awful to come.

Ken had answered the phone in the bedroom. “Ken, this is Dr. Mathias. I need to talk to Grace. It’s not good.”

“I’m here, doctor,” Grace said, having picked up the phone in the family room, as the kids played nearby under the watchful gaze of their grandmother. Grace sat on the floor next to the couch, nodding and taking careful notes in her precise handwriting. “Mmm, hmm. Yes. OK. Yes. I understand. I will,” she said.

She hung up the phone, put her head in her hands, and cried. Ken knelt beside her, enveloping her in his arms. Her mother, Pat, stood from the chair where she was sitting, and Grace went to her next, seeking comfort even her mother couldn’t give her.

“It’s malignant,” she said finally, watching five-year-old Ben and three-year-old twins Molly and Sarah who played with foam puzzles on the family room floor. Grace’s world had just spun out of its orbit, yet the kids had no idea and happily worked to make the pieces fit.

The tumors were small, the doctor had said, but Grace needed to call the office on Monday so they could discuss their options.

After the call from Dr. Mathias, Ken and Grace packed the kids in their minivan along with Grace’s mother and headed to City Center, a shopping mall in downtown Columbus. They walked the mall, trying to act normal, to not fall into despair.

Ken looked at other young families walking around, happy and carefree, and wondered, “Why us?” Much later, he would come to tell himself, “Why not us? Why are we so special that we should avoid life’s pain?”

When Monday came, Grace made the appointment with Dr. Mathias for the next day. Meanwhile, Ken called St. Brigid of Kildare Church and asked to speak to a priest. He had been a practicing Catholic his whole life but had never felt such a desperate need for that faith to work somehow. When he told the priest his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer, the pastor told him, “The first thing you have to remember is, it’s not the end of the world.”

It would be years before Ken understood that comment.

Still seeking solace, Ken went to the Little Professor Bookstore the same day on his lunch break, not far from where he worked as a civil engineer at a local architecture company. He picked up a book from the medical section, looking in the index for the words “breast cancer.” He glanced around the bookstore to make sure no one was watching, then sat on a stool and read the relevant chapters. He couldn’t bring himself to buy that book or any other—at least, not then—because that would have made the situation too real. He looked for statistics, answers to what the future held for them given the diagnosis, but ended up feeling confused and agitated.

At the appointment on Tuesday, Ken asked the doctor if there were any books he could read that would help him understand and give him a perspective of what was to come.

“Don’t read any books,” Dr. Mathias said. “Don’t look at statistics because if you look at statistics, she shouldn’t even have breast cancer. If you have any questions, come to me.”

But what, Ken persisted, was the prognosis?

“We can’t tell what the prognosis is. We can only make our decisions for the course of action based on what we know right now.”

A lumpectomy wasn’t the best option, he explained, because there were two tumors. They all agreed on a mastectomy and scheduled the surgery for Friday. Dr. Mathias removed the breast and the surrounding lymph nodes. Grace returned home a few days later with a drain in her chest.

After the surgery, the doctor thought the prognosis looked good because the tumors were small and the tests on the lymph nodes showed no signs of the cancer. After twelve weeks of healing from the surgery, Grace began a twelve-week regiment of chemotherapy, once every three weeks. They scheduled the chemo on Fridays so she would have the weekend to recover from the side effects: intense vomiting that would begin exactly eight hours after the drugs had dripped into her veins.

She lost weight from her tall, already lean frame, and lost her hair. When it started to fall out in clumps, she asked her husband to shave her head. Ken borrowed clippers from a neighbor, and they closed the door to their small downstairs bathroom. Shaking, Ken began to shave his wife’s head.

What are we going to tell the kids? Ken thought, as he ran the clippers over and over his wife’s head, her golden brown hair falling to the floor.

Grace put on a wig, and because they were both engineers, they gave the kids the scientific truth: The drugs Mom was taking went after all the fast-growing cells in her body because the “bad” cells that made her sick were the fast-growing kind. But hair was made of fast-growing cells, too, so the medicine would kill the hair. When she stopped taking the medicine and the bad cells were gone, her hair would grow back.

The kids listened, not fazed, or perhaps not understanding. Grace didn’t parade around the house without a wig, scarves, or a denim ball cap. It wasn’t often they actually saw her bald, and they didn’t seem to notice.

But they did notice. Ben started kindergarten that fall and announced to his friend, Alex, that his mother was bald. At a soccer game one Saturday, Alex said, “Mrs. Heigel, Ben says you don’t have any hair.”

Grace leaned down and lifted her wig so he could peak at her smooth bald scalp. “It’s true, Alex. But let’s keep it our secret.”

After the chemo, she was, for a time, cancer free.

Then in May of 1999, on a regular visit to her oncologist, the doctor found another tumor, again in the breast, but nearer the bone. She had outpatient surgery to remove the lump, and then another outpatient surgery to remove her ovaries to stop the body’s production of estrogen that the doctors believed was feeding the tumors. Radiation started right away, for six weeks, every weekday.

Then, again, for more than a year, she appeared to be cancer free.

In the autumn of 2000, a regularly scheduled scan found spots on her vertebrae and kidney and in her lungs.

Grace was shocked. “I feel fine,” she said. But the scans didn’t lie. From the car, she called Ken. “They found spots,” she said.

Ken went to the Internet, again looking for comfort. Instead he found words such as “metastatic” and “terminal,” and phrases such as “zero survival rate.” Still, he thought Grace could live for a while, maybe even for a few years. But Ken knew better than to ask the doctor how long she would live.

He called his parents. “Pray for Grace,” he told his father. “Pray hard. The cancer has spread.”

Grace started another round of chemotherapy that seemed gentler on her body, with fewer side effects. Her hair fell out again, but she didn’t seem as sick.

Grace prayed for healing on a women’s retreat at her church. “My hope is that my faith grows from this painful experience,” she wrote in her journal. “I feel more confident that God will heal me, but I need to continue to ask for healing, even though I have so many people praying for me every day.”

But by Christmas, the cancer in her bones collapsed her vertebrae, paralyzing her from the waist down and forcing her into a wheelchair. Ken’s and Grace’s families and friends drew closer. For a time, neighbors would help Ken carry Grace in her wheelchair to their second-floor bedroom every night. Then one of the neighbors went to friends, gathering donations so they could install a lift on the staircase to make transporting her easier. Parishioners at their church started regularly sending meals.

Grace was determined that year to go to the Easter vigil at St. Albert the Great in Dayton. Ken’s brother-in-law Scot was coming into the church. Ken, Grace, Ben, Molly, and Sarah made the trip to Dayton, watching Scot, with Ken’s dad as his sponsor, become confirmed. They returned home on Easter Sunday.

At 2:00 a.m., Grace woke Ken. “I can’t breathe,” she said. They rushed to the hospital. After a CAT scan, the ER doctor came in and told Ken that Grace had a blood clot in her lung.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is that?” Ken asked.

The doctor looked at him gravely. “It’s a 10.”

Ken felt his heart stop, a cold fist reaching into his chest. He left the ER to call his parents as the first rays of sun reached from the sky. “Mom?” he said. “I’m at the hospital with Grace. It’s bad. It’s really bad.”

His parents were at his side when Grace’s oncologist told him the plan. “We’re going to give her a drug to dissolve the blood clot,” Dr. Shapiro said. “It’s risky, but we’re still going to fight.”

“You need to call St. Brigid,” Beverly whispered to her son, after the doctor left them. Ken did so, asking for a priest. Then he called two friends from the parish, asking them to pray, too.

“We will,” they assured him. “We’ll call everyone. We’ll pray.”

Ken sent his own prayer heavenward: “Please, God. Not yet. Not yet.”

After the doctors administered the drug, Monsignor Hendricks and Father Sizemore entered the darkened room, wearing their full black priestly attire and carrying a Bible. They anointed Grace with oil, praying for her to have courage and strength in her illness. Ken was comforted by the sacrament and felt a sense of peace.

Grace spent a week in intensive care, but the blood clot dissolved. She then moved to a rehabilitation house to regain her strength. She came home three weeks later, in time to celebrate Mother’s Day.

She was too weak to navigate the stairs any longer, even with the lift, so Ken redecorated the first-floor home office, setting it up with a hospital bed, IV stands, and monitors. Ken’s sister-in-law, Linda, a registered nurse, moved in to help with Grace’s care.

But after a week at home, Ken again called for an ambulance. They were unable to manage Grace’s pain. As she lay in the hospital recovering from a blood transfusion that gave her some relief, Dr. Shapiro told Ken she was no longer responding to treatment. There was nothing more they could do.

For the four years they had battled the disease, Ken had been strong, always looking outside himself to care for Grace and protect the children. At that moment, alone by the bedside of his sleeping wife, he cried.

He then moved Grace to Kobacker House, a hospice center. Ken would go to work in the morning, then take the kids to Kobacker in the afternoon to visit their mother. Some days, he couldn’t bear for them to even go to school, so he would just take them to hospice all day.

“Why aren’t the kids in school?” Grace would ask, confused in part from the powerful drugs meant to keep her comfortable, but also denying to herself the seriousness of her condition.

One day, Ken walked down the hall with Ben, to the end of the corridor. He sat him down in a chair, then knelt in front of him and put his hands on the tiny boy’s knees. “There’s nothing more the doctors can do for Mom, Ben,” he said, his voice cracking. “She’s going to go live with Jesus.”

The little boy’s sky blue eyes filled with tears. “Are you sure?”

Ken nodded. “There’s nothing more they can do.”

“Do the girls know yet?” Ben asked of his little sisters.

“Not yet,” Ken said. That night, at home, he told them. The girls wanted to go outside to play, but first Ken sat them on the stairs, close together. “There’s no more the doctors can do for Mom,” he said, using the same words he had spoken to Ben. “She’s going to go live with Jesus.”

They looked at him, not quite understanding, and anxious to get outside with their friends. “OK,” they said.

Too tired to explain more, he let them go.

The next day the three children sat at the kitchen table, coloring and talking in hushed tones, as their Aunt Kim, Ken’s sister, washed dishes nearby. Suddenly, Molly began to wail. “No, no!” she cried.

Kim went to her, clutching the girl in her arms. Molly had risen from her seat and stood beside the chair, clinging to the edge of the kitchen table, shaking violently. “Mom is NOT going to die!”

That day at Kobacker, the doctors discussed with Ken the option of Grace coming home to die. The thought tormented him. He wanted her to die with dignity and in the most comfort possible, but he worried how the children would react to the room, to the whole house, if she died there.

As he fell asleep that night, wrapped tightly in a fetal position, Ken felt God come to him. He felt a physical presence wrapping itself around him, holding him tight. At that moment, he turned the battle over to God.

“Your will be done,” he thought as he faded to sleep. He slept, and awoke in a peace he hadn’t felt in months. He went to Kobacker that day, carrying the same calmness, knowing God would carry him through whatever happened. When he walked into Grace’s room, she was sitting up, her head wrapped in a scarf. She looked at Ken and smiled.

“I want to go home,” she said. She came home the next day.

A few days later, Ken sent the kids to school as he always did, trying to keep their world as normal as possible for as long as he could. When Linda, Ken’s sister-in-law who had moved in to help with her care, checked Grace’s vital signs that morning, she told Ken this would be the day, Grace’s last. He went back to school and brought the children home.

At 3:10 that afternoon, surrounded by her mother and father, her husband, Linda, a priest, and her nine-year-old son, Grace died.

Ben looked at her still body, holding on to her cold hand, and asked, “Is she with Jesus now?”

His father said, “She is.” Ben smiled.

Earlier in the week, Ken’s parents had gone to buy the funeral plots, and as they left, Linda told them, “Buy three.” Everyone stopped and looked at her.

“You may get married again,” she said to Ken.

“Absolutely, positively, I am never getting married again.”

“Oh, you better buy three,” she said. So they did.

After Grace died, Ken went to pick out the headstone, taking Ben, Molly, and Sarah and two of their cousins, Michael and Katie. He wanted something black and shiny, but let the kids choose the actual stone. They wanted funny inscriptions and drawings, Disney characters or wedding rings, but in the end, they chose something simpler: an outline of the University of Dayton chapel, which her gravesite overlooked on a hilltop not far from campus.

At the funeral, Ken eulogized his wife of twelve years. “Her determination showed in everything she did. She always had a set of goals.”

He looked out at the hundreds of mourners packing St. Brigid of Kildare. “As for goals, Grace and I learned that God has his set of goals, too. This is part of his plan. God has put us in place and around people to give us strength and courage to accept life and death.”

He then focused on Ben, Molly, and Sarah, who looked so small in the first pew of the church. “His plan continues,” Ken said, now speaking only to the three of them. “Grace is still part of that plan. This is not the end of life, but the beginning of new life, Grace’s eternal life. She is going to be with us wherever we go.

“Hopefully, we have learned something from Grace’s journey. For me, Grace has given me the strength to accept. For all of us, Grace has given us the ability to pray to God for strength and thankfulness.”

He took a deep breath and continued. “There is no more wheelchair, no more tests, no more treatment, no more doctor appointments. Grace has won the battle. She is a survivor. She has been healed.”

Later, after the graveside service, the family walked away, leaving behind the black headstone, engraved with the silhouette of the chapel and inscribed: Grace Kelleher Heigel, born November 28, 1965, died June 4, 2001. Next to that was Ken’s name followed by his birth date. And next to Ken’s name was a blank space, smooth and unmarked, an afterthought, a just-in-case.

Someday—I hope not too soon—it will be my name in that space on that shiny black gravestone.

This is the story of how someone who turned her back on God found her way back when she didn’t even know she was lost. It is the story of how I answered his call and did what I swore I never would do, how I became the wife to Ken and the mom-on-earth to Ben, Molly, and Sarah, and how my reluctant devotion gave me the gift of grace.