“All I want is a fuss,” Gary declared that first year we were dating when I asked him what he’d like for his birthday. And it had been a delight to plan and throw a fuss. First, a party; then I chanced on a book signing by a cartoonist who drew a fuss for Gary—more like a scribble. Add cake, some friends and a bottle of good wine. I set the bar for the birthday fusses to follow.

But in spring of 1996, after our first wedding anniversary, planning a fuss didn’t feel delightful. Gary had been a crab for a month, complaining about indigestion, gobbling Pepcid, but refusing to do anything about it.  Instead, blaming me, arguing that I’d given him an ulcer because of my chronic heartburn. The only fuss I wanted to make this year was a begrudging one.

The week before Gary’s birthday in April, when he was out of town for business, he called me daily.  His indigestion had escalated, and he was ready to see a doctor. He wanted to see a doctor.  “Get me an appointment for the day I get back.”  I’d been suggesting a doctor all spring and now he was in a rush. Worry nagged at the back of my mind. I found an opening with a new doctor—we were new ourselves to Salt Lake City, having moved there from Minneapolis two years earlier. Much had happened, my new professorship, my dream job, getting married, buying a house. All that aside, Gary had been gone almost three weeks, and I was glad he was coming home, crabbiness and all.

He looks yellowish, I thought to myself as he walked through the door in the airport, ten at night. Sometimes I wondered whether he took that late flight just to annoy me. But after a hug and then more hugs, my frustrations quieted.  There’s nothing like love to turn aside annoyance. He didn’t look well; he didn’t need to convince me, although he tried all the way home—as though being truly sick could be an apology for last couple of months. And, of course, it was.  My nagging worry escalated when I saw how ill he looked.

The next day was Friday, and his appointment was in the morning. The doctor took lots of blood and didn’t give us any clue about what Gary might have. Gary had originally insisted that he had an ulcer but now revised it, based on his yellow color, to hepatitis.  Maybe he caught it in Slovenia, where he’d been in January, and it had been festering all this time. He asked the doctor what he could eat to avoid nausea and the doctor, holding his cards close, said to avoid fats.

The weekend dragged as we awaited the results. Monday, April 21, two days before Gary’s birthday, the doctor called—that was fast. He needed more blood work.  He suspected a blockage but wouldn’t tell us what that implied, just that he was sure Gary didn’t have hepatitis.

The doctor was downtown. We took the freeway—anxious to get this resolved—instead of the slow way, along Foothill Drive, with the Wasatch mountains on one side and the spreading city below. This is feeling serious, I thought but didn’t say much to Gary.  The doctor took more blood and told us he’d have results the next day. We took the slow route home, past the entrances to Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, with tree covered mountains on the sunny side of the canyon walls and stark precipices on the other. The canyons felt ominous, the barren side flashing again and again out my window. I tried not to look, focusing on the tidy Mormon yards. In Minneapolis you were lucky to have your tulips come up at all, much less bloom.  But here in Utah spring was the stuff of poetry, a proliferation of tulips, hyacinth, and daffodils, not to mention blooming trees. And green lawns where there should have been desert, fed by sprinkling systems—nature truly tamed.

The next call from the doctor came early Tuesday morning, April 22, a day before his birthday. I still hadn’t planned my fuss other than buying a work bench and ordering a cake.  Maybe this would be the end.  We’d find out what had been ailing him, I’d plan a quiet but meaningful celebration for his birthday the next day, and we’d go forward, loving each other. We were about passion, not this stuff. We were about highs, accepting the lows, like now, but then back to love in the extreme. A depth of love I hadn’t known existed—and it was mine—and Gary’s, ours together.

The news wasn’t helpful or hopeful.  The doctor insisted that Gary come to Latter-day Saints Hospital that afternoon and have an un-namable test, an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography. I had to have him spell it out to me. The word “pancreas” was in it. What was he looking for? A blockage.  I didn’t put two and two together—blockage as in tumor? Looking back, I don’t know if Gary did either.  Getting ready to head to the hospital, we dressed in complete silence, finished with hypothesizing about what he had, how they’d treat it, how long he’d be sick.  No birthday talk, either. He’d be 54. Our bedroom, where we’d lain together under a bright moon, now had a new occupant.  Fear.

I remember the green room where I waited while he had the test, small and close with no windows, metal cupboards, the proverbial sink with hand soap and paper towel. A chair for me, but I couldn’t sit down. Pace. Pace as much as one can in an airless room. Open cupboards that weren’t my business—what were they hiding?

How long would the test take? What were they looking for?  It was amazing how much we hadn’t been told.  What was more amazing was that we accepted it.  We didn’t ask.  Was something lurking beneath our consciousness saying it was too good to be true—finding each other mid-life, him after two failed marriages and me after one, falling madly in love, getting a chance to start over in marriage and doing it right? And why was I thinking one test would tell us everything?

Think about the birthday.  That’s positive. What will you do for him?  Who needs a fuss at this point? We already have one.  Maybe celebrate the end of the fuss when we find out what he has and get treatment.  We can enjoy the cake, light candles and laugh as he blows them out. He’ll love the workbench. He’d been wanting a place to do small projects.

Where are they? It can’t take that long to thread a scope through his stomach and into his duodenum.

At the time it seemed like I sat for hours, but thinking back, it feels like a minute, too fast, too soon to be confronted with truth.  Why hadn’t I pushed all of time back, to the spring, made him see a doctor, stood up to him when he deflected my concern? The orderly rolled Gary in; he was waking up slowly. “The doctor will be in shortly. Rest.”

I went to his side, wrapped myself around his upper body, noting that his feet were hanging over the stretcher, uncovered, probably cold. I tried to fix the blanket, cover them, but it was too short.

“It wasn’t too bad.” Gary said. “I don’t really remember much. Nice doc.”

The doctor walked in. “Hi, I’m Sandy Brown. I did your husband’s test.” Yellow golf shirt, and tassel loafers, cordovan and shiny. Why did I notice this and still remember it—his confidence, almost debonair, a guy who, when he’s not playing golf, comes into the hospital to render judgment. When you’re in the presence of a god, who can be scared?

“It’s not really such a bad test, like an endoscopy looking for ulcers, only we go beyond the stomach and thread the camera into the duodenum.  Then we inject dye so we can see what’s going on.” I’d heard all this before the test.  Get on with it. He snapped an x-ray looking film onto the screen but didn’t turn on the light. Such timing. He turned to us, almost assessing our readiness for whatever was coming.

He turned to the screen and flipped a switch. There it was, a snake of dye going through a vein? I watched as he took a pencil and traced the line.  “Here’s the dye, and it should go through to here.” He pointed the pencil forward. “But it stops, gets backed up. Probably by a tumor.  Looks to be small.”

I wanted to whisper “cancer?” I was suddenly back in my Margaret Mead biography, with her and Geoffrey Bateson. Ever since reading about their lives and both dying from pancreatic cancer, ever since my chronic heartburn, I’d worried about pancreatic cancer. But I’d worried that I would get it, not someone I loved.

The doctor didn’t lie. Told it straight but never said the word “cancer”—and added hope. “It looks like we might have caught it small. There’s an operation called the Whipple that takes out the head of the pancreas and the tumor.  It’s the only thing close to a cure. But I think we have a chance here.”

Can a heart really sink, drop into your pelvis and gasp for blood? I knew in that instant he would die. My body knew it and told me its truth. Gary was quiet, preternaturally. He turned to me.

“Looks like you’ll be married three times, too.”

Looks like you’ll be married three times, too.

I know he only said it once, but it reverberated.  It reverberates even today. A future predicted by a single tumor.  His future; my future.

I choked out an answer. . . something like, “I only want you.”  It was another truth, an urgent one.

April 23. Gary’s birthday. I sat in the admitting room of Latter-day Saints Hospital, waiting. Seven maybe eight hours, I was told, for a Whipple surgery. Gary lay on an operating table with lights glaring down on him, doctors hanging over him, hopefully taking out a tiny tumor.  We’d go home in a few days, maybe have a late birthday celebration and get on with our lives.  But I knew that was not what would happen. This was bad; our dreams irrevocably tied to a tumor before they had a chance to come true.

Diana, a colleague at the University of Utah where I’d started my professorship two years earlier insisted on sitting with me. I didn’t think I’d need any help; but she came anyway. In her early twenties, a year married, her husband had been electrocuted before her eyes in a boating accident. She knew way more than I did about what was coming.

Four hours.  It seemed so long, even though the surgery was supposed to take seven or eight. I decided to ask the receptionist how much longer.  I had to do something, let them know someone was waiting, loving that man they were cutting up. And I had a sense; I felt him and knew he needed me.

“He’s out of surgery,” she told me. “Someone will be down soon to talk to you.”

That can’t be. It’s only four hours.  My mind screamed at me.  Maybe the tumor was really small. He caught a break. But I knew once again, in my sinking heart, this was not good news.

The doctor came out still in his scrubs. He’d talk to me and then go clean up, probably shower, maybe cut someone else up, then go home to his wife and children.  Diana and I followed him to a private room. Chairs, a couch, soft lighting, no cupboards or sink—the place where families get the news.

“I have good and not so good news.”

What a way to start.

“The tumor was too large to remove, about the size of a softball. It has invaded the margins of the liver” Jesus, I think, a softball in him? “But it’s not all bad. I did a procedure I learned at Johns Hopkins, rerouted his stomach around the tumor so he’ll be able to eat.”  He stopped and looked at me, then at Diana. “Any questions?”

Any questions? Why didn’t you get it out?  Couldn’t you little by little work and tease it out? And what the hell are “margins of the liver?” I didn’t know what to say. How could I ask these things?

“What does this mean?” I asked.

“Well, without this surgery, I’d say he’ll live six to eight months, but I haven’t had anyone who’s had the surgery live less than eighteen months, so that’s the good news. We’ll do chemo and radiation, try to slow things down, give him some time.”

Did he say he was sorry?  I don’t remember.

“You can go see him now. He’s awake.  I’ve told him, but he might need to talk more.  I’ll meet you in the room.” And he was gone, back to where doctors live and work, their own little world, just like Diana and I had at the university, just like Gary and I had once had at 2067 East 10140 South, Sandy, Utah.

We took the elevator to the room.  “I’m so sorry.” Diana’s voice seemed to feel the words. For the first time I was glad she was there although I barely acknowledged her. She seemed to disappear as we entered the room. “I’ll leave you two alone.” And there we were.

There was no birthday fuss that year. I quietly canceled the cake and took back the work bench I’d bought. I didn’t want anything in our house mocking Gary, mocking me, mocking us. I believe at one point, Gary ruefully remarked, “Some birthday,” but beyond that we didn’t mention it.

Experts on dying say that people want to believe that they leave something behind, a legacy, that their life counted. I say thank goodness for the fuss. I couldn’t give Gary a long and happy marriage, enduring love, or other things we’d hoped to share, but I could give him one last fuss, a celebration that said his life made a difference, a legacy.

That next year, on his fifty-fifth birthday, the one we weren’t sure he’d see, I made the biggest fuss I could put together, an open house with family and friends streaming in and out throughout the day, a table covered in food and a big cake, time with his daughters and their families, and letters from colleagues about his work in urban development, which he read over and over.  He died a month-and-a-half later.

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