Elliot in Captiva, Winter 2008
“That place where you are is the best place I’ve ever been.”
—Letter from Elliot
I never bought a video camera when my kids were little for fear it would be a curse. It was my one and only superstition. As a newspaper reporter I had met too many anguished couples who peered desperately into home movies of their children as if sheer desire could make their lost babies spring back to life. Those heartbroken parents gave me the vague premonition that if I started shooting videos myself, a day would come when I would pore over them in grief.
Then I decided I was being silly and we were missing out on all the giggly oohs and aahs of revisiting our holidays on the screen. A house like mine and Elliot’s, with five kids from two first marriages, could be complicated. I thought filming our good times together would give us proof that we had finally become a family.
My first impulse turned out to be right. I was just wrong about who would be taken from me. Almost as soon as I started making home movies, we learned my husband was going to die. There was an inoperable tumor in his pancreas, an organ I couldn’t even locate. Doctors said if we were lucky, Elliot would live for a year or two.
Of course I can’t blame the damn camera. The timing simply turned out to be one of those cruel ironies: At the height of our happiest days, we were forced to learn how to live in the face of unbearable loss.
That quiet grey video camera quickly became my ally, my tool for saving tender little scraps of the life I wished I could save for real. Still photos would never do justice to Elliot, whose face is—was—constantly in motion, expressive, animated with warmth and love and humor. His dark brown eyes were infinitely deep.
I saved all his emails too. Fortunately he ignored my cautious warnings not to send personal messages from his desk at Bloomberg News.
“HEY YOU,” he wrote me a few months before he died, when pain searing down one thigh signaled the cancer was spreading. “I just want you to know I’m thoroughly consumed with amorous thoughts.”
Determined to remember as many details as possible, I saved love notes, my endless to-do lists, the kids’ handmade get-well cards and instructions for administering antibiotics through a home IV. That sheet has crinkled spots from drops of saline. Another page has ink blurred by tears. I also scribbled down funny moments that made me smile, hoarding them like a squirrel that would depend on them later for sustenance.
“Honey, I’m on the way to the store,” I said over my shoulder one day as I hunted for my car keys. “Do you need anything besides methadone?”
Elliot burst out laughing. It sounded like I was just running out to pick up some milk, not heavy duty painkillers. There were months when living with terminal illness began to feel almost routine.
More often, though, it was wildly emotional—when we raced to the emergency room yet again or kissed one last time before nurses wheeled Elliot off on a gurney through thick operating room doors for yet another risky procedure—and I wondered, ashamed, if my days felt richer and more fascinating because of all this drama. When this ordeal was over, would normal life seem flat? Like when Dorothy comes home at the end of The Wizard of Oz and the movie switches from color to black and white?
Maybe, but I had bigger things to worry about. I had to memorize our marriage.
The camera captured the ordinary moments: Elliot relaxing on the couch to watch a Mets game, ranting about something outrageous in The New York Times, or regaling the kids with tales of a gigantic food fight back when he was a troublemaker at Hebrew school (“Matzoh balls were flying!”). I was careful not to train the lens solely on Elliot for long. I didn’t want him to know I was engaged in such a morbid project as recording his life for a future without him.
But documenting what matters is what we did for a living—we’d even met in a newsroom—and I wanted to keep him with me this way. There was no real hope he’d get better. Two specialists at the top of their field gave him the same prognosis and a quick check of statistics showed why. Only six percent of pancreatic cancer patients lived five years. Most didn’t last nine months. The best chance for survival was catching the disease early enough for surgery. In Elliot’s case, it was too late.
So we didn’t waste precious time shopping for another doctor who would say what we wanted to hear, or scouring the Internet for a cure, or buying into the quack who argued for an enema made out of coffee. Elliot hunkered down to endure whatever his doctor advised so he could stay with us as long as he could. And I tried to figure out how to do my best for the first man I truly loved, the first to truly love me.
Here was the knife. I didn’t know how to deal with my conviction that by leaning on each other through this unwanted odyssey we would get to know each other even better, and come to love each other even more, and then his death would be even harder to bear. Should I protect myself by backing away?
“I finally found the right man and now I’m going to lose him,” I cried on a social worker’s couch about a week after Elliot’s diagnosis. I’d gone there in search of a guide to keep me from collapsing. “How am I supposed to take care of him knowing we’re going to get ripped apart?”
“Don’t be afraid to get closer,” she said. “The people who recover best after a loss are often the ones with the strongest bonds. The people who have a harder time are usually the ones with conflicts or regrets.”
“But we’ve been married only six years,” I went on. My children had finally grown close to Elliot. All our kids had adjusted. “How am I supposed to stay positive when I know this is going to end badly?”
“Don’t focus on staying positive,” she said, handing me yet another tissue. “Focus on staying in the present. He’s here now. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody knows what will happen to any of us.”
I am so grateful for that advice. “Don’t be afraid to get closer” became my mantra, one I’d repeat to myself when we were teetering on the edge of the abyss. We held on to each other tight, with a desperate determination, and that made us stronger still. We were braver together than either of us could be alone. Even now, I believe with all my heart that the depth of our connection has given me the strength to survive his loss.
Now I find I like to watch our home movies and wish I’d taken lots more. In most scenes you can’t even tell Elliot was sick. He never lost his hair, light brown with lots of gray.
Here he is at the beach in Cape May, playing catch on the sand with the boys. He jumps to grab a ball out of the air.
“Did you get that one?” he shouts to me. “That was my best catch!”
Here he is a year later at the ocean in the Outer Banks, laughing as he runs out of the water to escape a monster wave. He’s thinner now, and if you know where to look you can see the bump of the port implanted under his skin near his collarbone where an IV tube attached for chemotherapy. He looks lean and fit, handsome and exuberant because all our kids are out there splashing.
And here he is showing off a dinner table he’s set for two in our backyard on a summer night. The kids are away, and to surprise me he balanced dozens of tiny votive candles in the crevices of our rock wall. They flicker like diamonds in the dark. “Welcome,” he says with a mischievous grin, “to my little love grotto.”
Some people say they don’t want to remember a man when he was sick—they want to think back on the better days. But those two years and four months of trying to stave off the inevitable were, in truth, a beautiful time. We focused on living, not dying, and I don’t want to forget a minute of it. Writing this book is my way of keeping those days safe, protected from the fickle distortions of a fragile memory. I yearn to have my husband back, I long for his jokes and his passion and his body, but I am at least grateful that we didn’t squander the gift we had for loving each other.
“He’s here now,” I kept telling myself.