“Breslow thickness?”

The disembodied voice kept rhyming off abstract facts.

“The doctor wants to see him to discuss the results,” she said. “We have an appointment on…”

“Wait. What?”

I couldn’t keep up with her monotone. She tripped over details read off the page in front of her; terms and details unfamiliar to either of us. I stopped listening at the one word I knew all too well—malignant…

Malignant meant cancer. Cancer was bad. From my experiences with it, cancer was usually lethal. But the voice on the phone kept going, expecting me to keep up with the particulars she rattled off. It amounted to one fact—my husband was very sick.

A whisper of sound distracted me. Taryn’s blanket had slipped to the floor. Her little legs kicked in the chair, as her arms waved randomly. Only nine weeks old. Too young to comprehend any of this.

A tear slid down my face, as I put the phone down. Brad was 32 years old. How could a mole he’d had his whole life have turned so noxious? I gathered my child to me to smother the thoughts that ricocheted around my brain.

“No…” I breathed.

“No,” I begged.

But the words had been said and no one was there to take them back. No one could prevent my brain from contemplating the worst-case scenarios my mind conjured up either.

“Remember Shirley?” my brain taunted. “How about Walter? Or your Dad? They all had cancer. None of them survived…”

“No!” I wailed, as I pressed my face into Taryn’s startled body. As much as I willed the thoughts away, the reality would not be denied.

I was 31. Brad and I had just welcomed our first child into the world. Our first wedding anniversary was days away.

And our first home together still had plenty of renovations slated. This shouldn’t be happening!

The walk-in doctor’s office didn’t care, though. This was just follow-up. The mole they removed from Brad’s leg required more attention than they could give. It was cancerous, and he would need a specialist. A plastic surgeon, an oncologist, a radiologist, and more, but for starters a family physician who could start the ball rolling. And he needed them all immediately. How could I not freak out? Everything escalated from there.

The next day I begged my general practitioner through tears, “Can you take Brad on? The walk-in clinic said he had to have a doctor—a family doctor—refer him to specialists. I don’t even know what else we’ll need, but… Please! Please.”

Sympathy reflected in Deb’s eyes. She was professional and put that first, but still had a tissue at hand. Faced with my tears, she had little choice, though. We needed all the compassion we could get.

While I raced from doctors to phone calls to gather the first people around us, Brad was stoic in the face of it all.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “The doctor said they got it all.”

But even he was shaken by the speed at which things happened. And the words that the walk-in doctor left him with during his follow-up appointment rattled him more than he cared to admit.

“Cancer is like a dandelion seed head. With a puff, the seeds fly everywhere. Once dispersed, they are nearly impossible to track down. What I have done is like closing the barn door once the horses have escaped. The cells— those horses—are out there. Now we must track them down. And if even one escapes, it multiplies…”

Those cells were multiplying as he spoke.

Typically, the first steps after a cancer diagnosis are a battery of diagnostic tests. Anyone who has gone through it knows the routine; blood-work, scans, biopsies, and a myriad of appointments.

There is no time to catch your breath, nor comprehend what is going on. Calendars get cleared and refilled with trips to area hospitals and clinics. Our social life now revolved around meetings with doctors and their underlings, timid interns prone to looking at their shoes.

Days exploded from there on. Brad met his plastic surgeon and her team. They scanned his body for moles, swollen lymph nodes, and any other abnormalities they could find—which they did. Another surgery was scheduled to re-excise the area where the original mole was. Time was of the essence. They weren’t fooling around.

The dreaded ‘they’. Suddenly, we had a ‘they’ in our lives. And they proceeded to dictate much of what we ate, how we felt, and the schedule on our calendar for the next few years. I hated them, as much as I prayed that their efforts would make a difference. But they didn’t.

Oh, those efforts were far-reaching and commendable, but ultimately came too late. The hole they carved out of his leg when they re-excised the area meant he couldn’t drive for six weeks. He had to have his leg elevated for 20+ hours a day to reduce the risk of swelling, and to help aid healing. We begrudgingly welcomed into our home a collection of nurses—strangers—to tend his wounds.

And I fluttered around in the background trying to keep it all together. I became driver, cook, nurse, second set of ears during doctor appointments, and single parent to our little girl. When it came time to go to the hospital, though, I faded into the background. I was not the patient. This was about Brad, not me.

So, I sat through hours of doctor appointments with a baby on my lap and keys in my pocket. As a family, we were an inconvenience during Brad’s appointments. I learned to leave when those inconveniences intruded on the matter at hand.

Taryn and I wandered the hospital looking for places to feed and change her; a bathroom stall, an empty exam room, a distant garden. It was all about doing my best to make us disappear. I didn’t want to bother anyone. We were a bother enough already. This was about Brad. No one told me the family was just as important. No one explained that this was for our protection. I became a ghost in my life.

As Taryn approached her first birthday, the time came for me to return to work. I no longer needed to go it alone. Daycare would help. And Brad’s leg had healed from his initial surgery. Despite ongoing interferon treatments, he returned to work as well.

So why couldn’t I shake the feelings of abandonment and loss? Plenty of women struggled with putting their children in daycare, but this somehow felt harder. I tried to remind myself that we would have more helpers and thus embrace normal again. But nothing felt normal after hospitals dominated Taryn’s first year. It was her and I against the system fighting to save her father. My identity was linked to protecting us. She was my reason to stay strong.

“Maybe if I get pregnant right away,” I thought “she won’t have to be in daycare long…”

It was not a good reason to have a baby, but we had always planned on more. And before we could rethink timing, it was too late. We were expecting, whether it added more stress to our overwhelming journey or not.

“Brad was taking interferon when I got pregnant,” I stated when they confirmed the pregnancy.

“Could it affect the baby?”

No one knew. It placed me in a higher risk category though. And sent me off to specialists of my own. The perinatologist suggested that I could be at higher risk for miscarriage. There weren’t any real statistics they could pull from though. They knew of a handful of women with multiple sclerosis who had taken interferon and become pregnant. My sister contacted the makers of the drug for more information, to no avail. Apparently, few men taking the drug for malignant melanoma impregnated people. We would have to wait and see.

When the prenatal screening came back with a high risk for Down syndrome, we were back to the perinatologist again. Despite a clean bill of health from the subsequent amniocentesis, our frayed nerves barely made it through the process. Despite the good news, Brad shook his head as we left the hospital.

“Never again,” he said.

We would never get the chance to try again regardless.

By the time our second daughter was born, we were dazed, but elated. We were a united front, a family. We chose life, despite the spectre of cancer. Our babies were born. Our home was a constant DIY-home-improvement project. Various doctor appointments littered our calendar; baby checkups, oncology appointments, dates for bloodwork, operations. The lists were exhaustive. Through it all, Brad continued to plan and look to the future. He renovated, we sold our house, we bought another…

Before the deals closed though, fate intervened.

I can’t move my hand…”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What should I do? Can I get you something? Should I call 911?”

I raced between him and the phone. The fridge for telephone numbers and the stove where dinner was cooking. The baby in her chair and the toddler staring wide-eyed in the background…

“Just give me a minute…” I said.

But our minutes were now fleeting. The cancer had spread to Brad’s brain. After a week in hospital, the experts weighed in.

“We can’t operate,” the head surgeon from the neurological oncology department declared.

“Treatments won’t make any difference. You have six months to a year to live.” I missed the announcement. I was at home waiting for my mother, so that she could take care of my children while I stood with Brad. The doctor didn’t concern himself with such matters though. Again, Brad was the patient and his family merely incidental. I didn’t see the team of interns who looked anywhere but at Brad lying alone in his hospital bed. I only arrived in time to hear Brad tell the on-call doctor that he was going home, despite protests.

“May I pray for you and your family then?” We weren’t religious people, but it was the best he could offer.

Six months. It wasn’t enough by far. We were supposed to move in a few weeks. Our oldest had just turned two and my baby was a mere five months old. There was too much to do. Too much living yet to be done. Radiation and chemotherapy might buy us time, but doctors made it clear they weren’t cures. There was no cure now. Brad’s new palliative care doctor explained that it was now quality over quantity.

I became numb. My words, lost. Brad discussed his imminent death with doctors, while I had nightmares about his funeral. Our conversations rallied around the naturopathic remedies we clung to for hope, the ongoing renovations that Brad stubbornly pushed through, his sudden debilitating headaches, and the mundane details of what to make for dinner. I was fragile and pushed on the best I could but struggled with banal tasks.

How does one cope in that situation? There wasn’t any other option. I either coped or became another burden on Brad. He was processing the fact that he would not see his children grow up. That they would not know him. That his parents would be devastated. And that I would eventually move on to someone new.

I tried my best to not think beyond the next meal and doctor appointment. It was all about now.

While neighbors drove off to their nine-to-five jobs, we watched the world slip away without us. Brad was in a race against time that he would never win. All we could do was face the day.

I tried to stay strong but struggled through almost everything. I railed against wallpaper that wouldn’t come off the walls in Taryn’s room. I burned myself on the oven but refused to acknowledge any pain in the face of Brad’s much larger ailments. The silencing of my voice came at a cost I would grapple with for years to come. But in that moment, I wasn’t the main player in our drama. It was Death. And fair was non-existent in those days.

So, what could we do but live. Brad was my inspiration. He refused cancer the upper hand. Sure, there was chemo, radiation treatments, oncology and palliative appointments, not to mention desperate last-ditch trips to a naturopath to see if she could do anything. But he also staunchly went on with living life.

We moved. He took up juicing and swallowed extraordinary amounts of naturopathic pills to stave off the ill effects of chemotherapy. He planned out and built a bathroom in the basement of our new home. We even went camping with friends, plus went on a much-needed road trip with his parents. All to build memories where soon there would be none. We lived.

I wish there were more conversations, but headaches stole more hours than I care to remember in Brad’s last days. By August, I was numb. Shock kept building as the inevitable outcome inched closer. And cruelly, before Brad hit the sixmonth mark, he was in hospital again. This time, the last. To the end, I don’t think I ever accepted Brad’s impending death. I lived and lived and kept praying that we could keep on living for just one more day. But one day, there was only me left to keep on living. Brad passed the torch of life into my unstable hands. He was a month shy of his 35th birthday. I was 34 and had a 10-month-old and a 2 ½-year-old. Now the story was only mine to tell.

“When I am going to wake up?”

“I am the only one to make decisions.”

“I still can’t believe it. I miss him so bad.”

“Not a day goes by that I don’t cry. I don’t understand what I am supposed to learn.”

“Now is when I have to reinvent my world. Without Brad…” These were fleeting thoughts captured in my journal in the months after Brad died. This was how I began to process and how I learned to live all over again. It took months to stop crying. Years to come out of active grief. And I still process what it all means.

Sometimes life is given in an abundance of years. Other times, your window to explore life’s beauty and mysteries is far shorter. I survived then and still seek life today. Brad stoically faced his life-threatening illness by embracing life and giving me the gift of two beautiful girls to live it with. As he dreaded, their memories of him are fleeting, but I don’t let them forget all he was. He knew life was worth living. I try to prove that to our girls by pointing out everything from simple marvels to extraordinary moments which live on in memory—a tree planted, time spent with family, the marking of death…

Life is a gift. Death, sometimes our best reminder.

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