sobering
DECIDING WHERE TO live so my recovery from addiction could be supported took us five minutes. Richard’s company had clinics in Seattle. The city was beautiful and progressive. There might not be so much God talk at meetings. I just needed to find a way to make the move happen. Within a month, I had an interview for a museum job. I moved across the country when I was ninety days sober, and stayed alone for four months, the first time I had ever lived by myself.
In the first week, I found a twelve-step group where kind women told me their stories, took me for brunch and walks and what seemed like buckets of espresso. Dylan left sixth grade at spring break and came to stay in my little apartment on Lake Washington. She listened at the edges of meetings in church basements, and we went for drives around neighborhoods and visited schools. Six months later, Richard and Joshua drove across the country, and we began our new life in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, nearly an hour from the city.
I hoped something rural would save us. That tall trees and waterfall-filled pools and spring frogs would make us anew. Instead, now that Richard was safe, his anger seemed to spout like molten rock. I was no longer the one who fueled all of his resentment. One weekend, Joshua wouldn’t comply with being grounded. He grabbed his pack and left the house. Richard followed him onto the porch and pushed him back inside. Joshua hit his father, and then Richard was on top of him, holding him down, the same way I’d seen him behave with his son years before. I pulled Richard away from our child, but he refused to walk away. I dialed the police. Richard stepped back, shaking with fury. Joshua kicked over the barbecue and fled, walking up the long graveled hill that led out of the forest where our home was tucked, a woodland cottage that seemed idyllic only in my imagination. In the weeks that followed, the two of them battled in sarcasm, curse words, criticism, shouting, and shoves.
Nearly eighteen months sober, I offered my husband a way out of his pain, though we both knew it was an ultimatum.
“Therapy or you move out,” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he insisted.
That spring, we separated. He moved into a colleague’s cabin in the middle of a floodplain in Kent. The Green River rose. Water drenched everything. We began therapy.
“You haven’t been married to your wife for eighteen years,” I remember our therapist saying in our first session together. “This is a new marriage.”
We’d been sitting far apart on the couch when we heard these words, and I stole a sideways glance at his beautiful profile, the ruddy cheeks, strong nose, solid brow. Was he excited about the possibility that we could leave behind the old relationship, stop holding grudges against each other for our habitual reactions, forgive what we had done? Could we do the earnest work of letting go of our ideas of who we were in our story of each other? Richard turned toward me and registered my fear in the way I bit the left side of my mouth. Our marriage had shown us that we were willing to have our hearts broken, but by the time he moved out, we seemed to prefer constant disappointment. Now, here was another possibility: a new marriage. Something of that notion felt brave and worthy and possible.
“You mean her recovery,” Richard said. “Because she’s changed so much, since she stopped drinking.”
The therapist watched us contemplate a reset on our relationship.
“You’re saying we’d have to stop relating to our history,” Richard said.
“I’ll teach you new skills. You’ll practice them at home. But Richard, this isn’t just about her changes. This is about the identity changes in your relationship. I want to show you how to turn toward each other.”
We had to unlearn everything. Through weekly meetings with our therapist and homework assignments over the course of a year, we learned how to listen, how to fight well, how to bond in the aftermath of a “regrettable incident.” We began to share our fondness for each other, to say the kinds of things we’d said in the beginning: Baby, the way you never miss a day of work is highly impressive. I told him how I adored his grace and charisma, his observant mind, his principled and empathetic heart. We learned to share our dreams for our life again. And what we spoke was risky, powerful, uncomfortable. Now I had to look beyond our tumultuous past and see who this man had become. He had to give up the rebellious, timid girl who fought against the harsh strictures of a demanding father and a stringent upbringing. We had to learn how to communicate to each other beyond reactive stances like stonewalling and defensiveness.
We luxuriated in our newness. After years of arguing, we began to work together, to envision the marriage we wanted. One Saturday, we sat on our bed with the windows open, listening to the frogs croak in the pond in our front yard, while we tried to share how we felt about money. Coming out of poverty, he was a lifelong saver, with a strong desire to minimize risk. Having had children so early, I had a craving for adventure, and would rather throw vacation expenses on a credit card and pay them off through the year. That afternoon, while the frogs rasped throaty interludes, I heard the story of his childhood in a way that I never before could.
“We sometimes didn’t have heat, so we’d sleep in our clothing. I scrounged for coins on the street to play pinball. There was such chaos, thirteen schools, crazy parties, that I couldn’t ever count on things being stable. I want to give you what you want, honey, but I also have this number in mind that I’d like to be in our savings account,” he said.
I listened to his dreams for paying for the kids’ college and retiring debt, then I told him the list of all the countries I wanted to visit. How I wanted to become a decent mountaineer. That quitting alcohol had made me realize how much I wanted to live, but not a safe life: something wild, daring. Then we hiked to the top of the driveway, which backed onto Tiger Mountain. The gravel road met the state forest. We followed along the fire road where truckloads of paragliders climbed to a lofty jump above the city of Issaquah, on the hills they called the Alps. Instead of slogging upward, we wound our way into the forest and its secret springs. We rolled up our cuffs and plunged into transparent pools. He put his hands along my hips, and I felt the safety that didn’t come from his body alone, but from mine also, and from who we were together. We walked back to the house, made a fire in the little pellet stove, and ordered pizza. We stripped our wet clothing and put on pajamas and made a plan. I would support his savings dream by staying out of debt; he would ensure we visited one place on my bucket list every year.
He gave up his sarcasm and righteousness; I surrendered defensiveness for curiosity. We were passionate, supportive, and clear about our vision for our life together. Weekends, after we’d dropped our teenagers at the movies, we shopped for groceries at Costco and then sat by Issaquah Creek, licking soft-serve ice-cream cones and finding ways to ask questions we’d never, in all of our nearly two decades of marriage, thought to ask: Would you live your life differently if no one knew you? Do you wish for a break from the way we’ve always done things? What would you do if you had a year to live?
While we were rebuilding our marriage, Joshua changed his life, finding the tools he needed to live without harmful substances. At sixteen, he was too angry to be with us, so he left to live with a friend’s family. We helped him pay for his expenses while he stayed in the basement apartment and then, months later, he moved home again. We were not flawless, and we weren’t trying to be. We were trying to avoid living by habit and inattentiveness.
On our nineteenth anniversary, at the suggestion of our therapist, we made new marriage vows. We’d made the first vows in our twenties in a Catholic church, because that was what my family wanted. Now we were adults, in our forties. We wanted to do it our own way. We climbed a trail at Mount Rainier, just the two of us, on a weekend in July. We had no campsite reservations because we forgot to plan the trip. We piled sleeping bags, a large camp stove, and a too-large family tent on our backs just in case there was a camping spot at Mystic Lake. Five hours in, past the Carbon River entrance, up five miles, over a suspension bridge, parallel to a glacier, through zigzagging forest paths, across the Wonderland Trail, above the tree line, into a subalpine meadow, past marmots and pikas, through Indian paintbrush, alpine aster, and pink mountain heather, over two small ridges, down a descent, around the lake, we realized there was no room at the campsite.
We walked to the sunny side of the lake and we each said vows written for the occasion. The mosquitoes were there to witness the ceremony. There was no cake. I broke off a triangle of a Toblerone bar and Richard scarfed it down. After ten minutes he said, “We have to go. It’s another five hours back.” I was sad about leaving. We were both exhausted from the climb to the lake. The elevation was as intense on the way back as it had been on the way there. We were hiking a long trail with a 3,900-foot gain, but neither of us mentioned this. When we watched a lithe young man practically levitate up the trail, my new husband said, “Skip along, little man,” and I laughed. Oh, how he liked to make me laugh.
“Under that joke, is there anger?” I said, because we’d become honest like that, asking dangerous questions.
He delivered the truth: “It’s the way I get certain things done.”
“Like marriage?”
He gave me the look like: I’m not wandering into that territory.
Instead, he asked: “What did you think marriage was going to be?”
I told him: “When I was a girl, I thought marriage would be dressing up in ball gowns and going to fancy dances. When I was a teenager, after the sixties, I read The Harrad Experiment and I thought I wouldn’t have a conventional marriage, but instead a feminist one, though I still wasn’t sure what that meant.”
I told my husband: “There have been plenty of men I’ve wanted to fuck, but I haven’t ever wanted to live with anyone besides you.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing when I married you at twenty-one,” I said, stretched out over a bridge, trying to relax under the weight of the twenty-pound pack on my back, “but that’s okay because who the hell does know about something they’ve never tried?”
“Maybe this hike has turned out just like the marriage,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“We set our sights too high and we carry more than we need. There hasn’t been any rest along the way and somehow we keep going.”
When he told me this, I cried. He reached in his pocket and handed me his bandana. He didn’t ask any more questions. There were miles ahead, and if we stopped to talk we would not make it back to the car. Later, he bought us ice-cream cones, and we licked each other’s flavors, and kissed with our sweat-salty lips. We drove home in the twilight talking about the honeymoons we would take, if we could get away.
Nine months later, in June of 2000, while undergoing a yearly examination for physical therapists, Richard scored a false positive in a tuberculosis test, and a subsequent scan of his lungs showed a strange substance around his stomach. He stood in the kitchen buttering a piece of bread when he told me this, like it was no big deal.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Some doctor thinks I have to get on medication,” he said, shrugging, opening a beer.
“You’re going to keep asking questions though, right?”
Over the next three months, some doctors said the substance was nothing. They told Richard he ought to wait it out. But his colleague Sigrid, who was a doctor near Richard’s practice, who saw him every day, who wasn’t satisfied with our watchful waiting strategy, kept pestering him to find a diagnosis for the mysterious matter growing inside him. That August, after an x-ray and a CT scan, he had an answer: a slow-growing tumorous mass had descended through his abdomen and pelvis. Inside, he was growing a shadow of himself.
When I looked at my husband, it was unfathomable that there was a cancer taking over his entire torso. And so when cancer first appeared, we spoke of it as if it were a stranger who’d invaded our home late one night and gobbled the last of the Thanksgiving pie. We spoke of cancer in whispers and questions and disparaging asides:
She’s got a nerve, messing us up like this.
You’re the one who asked her in.
Me? I don’t think so!
Well, let’s get her out of here, then, before she makes a real disaster.
I was in the room when a doctor tried to take a biopsy of the cancer. The needle slid into Richard’s skin and aspirated nothing. We watched the confusion on the doctor’s face. They sent us home to wait.
That September, in the surgeon’s office, we heard the name of the disease for the first time: pseudomyxoma peritonei, a rare cancer of the appendix. Without surgery, Richard had perhaps a few years to live.
The surgery, scheduled for October 2000, was supposed to end the cancer. Called a debulking, the procedure would remove the tumor and as much of the mucus as possible, without infringing on the organs. It would be performed near our home in Seattle.
The day of the procedure, the surgeon, Dr. T, emerged from the operating theater after many hours, his scrubs splattered with blood, and thrust his palms wide apart. He told me how much of the cancer had been taken from Richard’s belly: “Three family-size fried chicken buckets!”
A few days later, we left the hospital. We continued to raise our teenage children. We hiked the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and Canada. We attended to our demanding careers. We had romantic dates. We took family vacations. In the brilliant concord of mutual denial, Richard and I quickly forgot. We thought this had been the first and final surgery. We thought we’d lost the cancer and returned to our beautiful life.
Three years after the first surgery, the cancer returned. We asked questions. We got down to business. We took on this rare cancer like we were managing a rare economic downturn. Soon, Richard was bringing home pages of research about a surgeon across the country, a doctor who was doing an experimental treatment called cytoreduction with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC).
I read the blogs from survivors and others online. “They call it MOAS, for Mother of All Surgeries.”
“Sounds like a slash-and-burn,” my husband said, trying for a joke to make me relax.
“You really want to do this?” I was shocked by the torturous treatment.
“This is my best chance to survive.”
Our Seattle surgeon, Dr. T, didn’t think so.
“I think it’s a death sentence,” he said to us when we went by for a consultation the following week. “Look, you’re being used as a guinea pig for this guy’s research project. The morbidity rate is seventy percent. The survival rate at ten years is thirty-five percent, and we’re not even sure if these are accurate reports.”
I’d never heard the term morbidity. Dr. T saw my eyebrows raise and my hand touch Richard’s arm.
“Morbidity is the number of people potentially disabled by the surgery,” the doctor said, answering my silent question. “HIPEC is a treatment with a high morbidity. This doctor cherry-picks optimal patients to reduce toxicity and complications. But the complications—they’re still happening. Very high risk of death.”
“What if I have a chance to be cancer-free?” my husband asked.
“Richard, you’re fit, and you’re otherwise healthy. We can control this disease with a much less radical surgery. Every few years, that’s what the commitment is.”
We left the doctor’s office even more confused about a course of treatment. The doctor arranged for us to meet with an oncologist, who sat us down in a steel-blue room and blurted out, “HIPEC is torture. This surgeon you’re considering—his protocol results cannot be reproduced. The cancer is cellular. We have to fight it aggressively.”
“Thalidomide.”
“The birth defect drug? Jesus. For how long?”
“A year. At first.”
“And then?”
“We would give his body a rest.”
“And then?”
“He would be on chemo the rest of his life.”
“I want to be healthy again,” Richard said.
“I know you do,” I responded, “but I’m terrified I’m going to lose you in what sounds like an extreme treatment.”
On a scorching August weekend, five months after the CT scan confirmed Richard’s cancer had returned, we flew out to meet the experimental surgeon, Dr. M, and when we arrived at the hospital we witnessed a depleted young man being carried across the parking lot by his mother and grandmother. We were at the threshold of killer cancer.
Dr. M had wise eyes and a no-nonsense disposition. He reviewed Richard’s CT scans, conducted a physical exam, and gave us details of the surgery and expected recovery. When we expressed surprise at the months-long wait time for the surgery, he reminded us that PMP was a slow-growing cancer and told Richard he’d need that time to get strong for the treatment. Dr. M suggested that when we come for the surgery, we live at the hospital for three to six weeks; instead of arranging for a hotel, he advised, I should sleep in Richard’s room to help oversee his care. Dr. M answered all of our questions and informed us that the operation would likely take all day and into the evening.
“I have an Asian woman patient who is half his size,” the surgeon said. “This big guy is going to take some time.”
I scrawled the surgeon’s words on a legal pad that Richard and I had written our notes on during the flight. We knew the recovery was going to be strenuous, and this doctor certainly didn’t minimize anything. We toured the hospital, got on the waiting list, and flew home for Sunday dinner with the kids. We hadn’t told anyone that we were not sure as to the right course of action.
When I did mention to a friend that we didn’t know what treatment to follow, she offered Richard her cabin on nearby Vashon Island, so he might spend the weekend in contemplation of his choice. I spent the weekend alone too, to face my fears. In three days, Richard arrived home with a bouquet of roses. He handed the blood-colored flowers to me in the driveway.
“Thank you for letting me go,” he said, and I knew he meant toward the cancer treatment and his own healing, wherever that might take him. Even as he stood there, I could tell by the somber bow of his body that he would choose the most arduous route. He’d already moved into a grave gaze, a disconnected stance, a serious lexicon, one that I, who had never had cancer, did not know. He was preparing himself for a taking apart, a transfiguration. In that moment, I thought that I’d lost him to something bigger than us.
Aboriginal shamans enact death and resurrection with ritual symbolic removal or rearrangement of body parts, including symbolic disembowelment, and journeys into strange realms. The “chosen one” is ritually killed, set loose on a wondrous journey with the sky gods, and then returned to life as the tribal shaman, with the otherworldly awareness intact. Richard would enact the modern-day version: an extreme cancer surgery and chemotherapy ritual that would scrape his organs and ignite any remaining cancer with a fiery poison. To live through it, he would need to give everything he had. At the time he made this choice, we did not know what this meant.
Richard was placed on the hospital’s schedule earlier than expected. In six weeks, surgery. We steeled ourselves to the task ahead. Preparing for this moment made us work as fast and efficiently as we ever had. Everything was about the details, the getting ready. Making things more challenging was the fact that we weren’t simply going to travel to a cancer hospital and then back to our stable lives. We had decided to uproot. Again.
Three weeks before the surgery, just before Labor Day, I moved with our daughter to a tiny apartment in Laguna Beach, California. Dylan wanted to train at a performing arts high school. She has a beautiful voice, and wanted to study opera. We were willing to change our lives so we could help her do this; it was a decision we’d made two months before Richard’s cancer returned. Joshua was already enrolled in college studying media and communications technology, happily living on his own.
After Richard’s diagnosis, he and I decided that I would still stay with Dylan in Orange County for her senior year, and that Richard would recuperate there for a few months before returning to his job in Seattle. He knew that the cancer recovery was going to take a great deal of energy, and he had resigned from his position as the group director of twenty-one physical therapy clinics; he didn’t feel he could maintain his career in good conscience while trying to heal. In the twelve years he had been a manager and director, he had never taken a sick day. Some people would think they were owed a few. Not Richard. As soon as he learned the extent of the treatment, he began to work with his bosses to make a graceful exit. They told him they would hold his position open for him, whenever he wished to return.
Before we left Seattle, we walked our favorite neighborhoods—Capitol Hill, Wallingford, Belltown, Phinney Ridge—and imagined returning as empty nesters. We toured flats near our favorite vintage theaters and sat in cafés, imagining what life might be like with our youngest off to college, our son happily attending college nearby, and our parenting having shifted to another phase.
In the weeks before the surgery, we concentrated on packing our home, putting our house up for sale, resigning Richard’s job, saying good-bye to all our friends and family, moving to a new apartment, finding a new twelve-step group, enrolling Dylan in school, buying a car for her to drive, making sure we had care for her while we lived in the cancer hospital, coordinating visits with family, managing the medical insurance approvals, and budgeting for months of recuperation. In addition, we entirely changed our diet. Richard underwent a rigorous fitness regimen to prepare himself for this extensive treatment. As a physical therapist, he was already active. He had been lifting more weight, doing daily cardio routines, and now we were eating lean food, mostly following an ayurvedic diet. He was muscled, vital, and strong. By the end of forty-six days, we’d checked everything off our lists. The children were safe and protected. The only thing left was to drop the plan and see what happened.
Richard had gone through his checklists with me. I knew where the wills were located, when to call the family, how to expedite the power of attorney, what I was to do if he couldn’t have sex again (find a lover and not let him know unless he asked). We had spoken of everything. The only thing to do was to wait.
In the weeks to come, I would hear the doctor’s prophetic voice. Turned out, Dr. T was right. There was morbidity and there was mortality—the man we knew as Richard died to us. And with his former self, any notion of an “us.” I hadn’t yet experienced my own collapse of identity, which came in the wake of Richard’s shift out of a personality-driven self. I had yet to realize that the purpose of his body was only ever to be. There would be a hundred thousand whys before my existential mind rested in this easy wisdom.