There’s only one visible scar from the whole ordeal. A gouge above my left eye. But you should have seen the other guy. He took his wounds to the grave.

Brien and I, for decades, had slept coiled together, after saying, “I love you,” and turning off the light. Feeling the rise and fall of his warm chest against my cheek was what got me through the night. I remember our toes entwining like tendrils.

After the cancer invaded his bones there was less touch. One day, as we walked across the parking lot of the food coop, I wrapped my arm around my husband’s waist, as I had so many times over the years.

Brien flinched, “Don’t!” One of many firsts among the lasts.

A few years before Brien’s diagnosis, I would wake up around 3:00 am. Squinting as I made my way through the darkness toward the bathroom, I felt something claw at me. All my defenses were stripped bare by some dark dread in the dead of night. There was no story, just a headline hovering in a murky amber glow: DEATH IS TERRIFYING.

I once heard a meditation teacher say that the transition from this life to the next is like passing through a portal. So, during my early morning shuffle to the bathroom— breath catching in my pounding chest as death lurked—I made myself breathe and mindfully step through the bathroom door. A kind of death rehearsal. Though everything in me protested, I went ahead and took that one boundless step into the unknown and exhaled as I made my way through to the other side. Each time I practiced crossing the threshold of that mind-made abyss, I felt a little bit less afraid.

But practice doesn’t always make perfect.

Probably the best preparation for letting go into the unknown was marriage, itself. At our wedding in the Peace Garden I wore a black dress, which seems strangely, and horribly, prescient now. Brien and I—both from families fractured by abuse and addiction—held hands and shook as we took vows that included “until death do us part.” When I uttered the words “my husband” for the first time, my heart plummeted toward my feet as the awareness of his potential death hit me squarely between the eyes. I could be a widow now.

When Brien got the cancer diagnosis we didn’t frame it as a battle. But by the end—seeing his stiletto-thin body wrapped in a shroud—the brutal toll was undeniable. After nearly three years of taking it on the throat, the lungs, the liver, the brain—and all those bones—the little that remained of his physical form was decimated.

Brien wanted to tread lightly on the earth, even after death. So, his un-embalmed body was lowered into a vault-less hole in the frozen ground—to be tendrilled by boneset and nightshade come summer.

Once we had tossed dirt into the grave, where he rested deep down in the earth, I could collapse. Which I wasted no time in doing.

Dropping to my knees into a snow drift, I wailed at the top of my lungs, “FUCKing cancer!”

Just the other day, wearing cheaters to pluck my eyebrows, I noticed the ropy white scar. Among all the lines scored into my face during Brien’s illness, this one carries a memory I’d forgotten.

One night, while Brien tossed and turned from the steroids in his chemo cocktail, I was awakened by a full bladder. My lower back groaned as I rolled out of bed. Every cell longed for deeper sleep than I’d experienced in many months, so I hoped to get in and out of the bathroom quickly. Sometimes I felt grateful that I’d faced my fears of death on those menopausal trips to the bathroom. On this night there was no existential practice, simply exhausted resignation. As I went to step through the doorway, I swayed blearily and hit the jamb squarely with my left eye. My cranium screamed and I was so adrenalized that the rest of the night I thrashed next to Brien.

I winced into the mirror the following morning, fingering my inflamed eye socket and the red gash above it. I needed that like a hole in the head! I thought. Literally.

What I needed was for nothing else “bad” to happen. To either of us. The worst was already underway, and I needed all of my physical and emotional resources to prop up my husband as he started whole brain radiation the following week.

A brain tumor was the latest in a series of setbacks. I still refused to call it a battle.

Brien made an epic comeback from the brain metastasis. He had taken “early retirement” in March and by late summer he was feeling well enough to take bike rides by the river, practice his mandolin and go to a Spoon concert.

When he’d gotten the terminal diagnosis the year before, he’d told me, “I really don’t have a bucket list. All I ever wanted was to be in love…truly and deeply…and I have that with you, Milissa.”

There was something though, that we’d talked about for years. Taking a trip to Ireland—land of the O’Brien and O’Connell clans—was a dream we hadn’t been able to manifest for Brien’s 50th birthday. So, I channeled every bit of the haggard energy I had left, after months of taking Brien to chemo and radiation appointments. I updated my passport, held a fundraiser, booked the reservations and got us over to the homeland to celebrate our 25th anniversary in September.

Brien was well enough to take short hikes along verdant waterfalls, and to tap his foot to Celtic tunes he’d learned to play on his mandolin. Lifting a pint and toasting, “Slainte! To your health!” he exuded robustness.

In addition to hanging out in pubs listening to trad music sessions, our itinerary centered around visiting holy wells to pray for a miraculous recovery. For millennia, people had left offerings of coins and bits of red fabric in honor of the goddess Mab at these archaic sites. There was sometimes a copper cup placed in the crook of a rock to take a sip of the healing waters.

Ferrying across the stormy Bay of Galway to the island of Inisheer, we rented bikes and rode up a curvy dirt road. The sacred well was encircled by rough-hewn stones characteristic of the Aran Islands. Brien had read that if you circumambulated this well seven times—while praying the rosary—healing would be assured. I had always known him to be an atheist who eschewed anything mystical, so I was shocked when Brien had confessed that a Druid spirit accompanied him throughout the thirty-five radiation sessions of his primary treatment. On the last day of that first round with cancer, Brien heard the Celt say, You have passed the test!

Brien, ever the skeptic, had become a believer. He went on with life for the next year, trusting that his head and neck cancer was cured. A probability that his oncology team confirmed—given his youth, good health and positive response to treatment.

As the mystic in the partnership, I have to admit I felt more than a little let down when the cancer exploded throughout his body. And Brien, of course, was crushed. But he carried on: taking fistfuls of supplements, doubling down on acupuncture treatments, juicing twice daily, and committing to a spiritual practice that involved chi gong, meditation and Celtic tarot cards. All in addition to ongoing rounds of chemotherapy.

Despite his earlier enthusiasm, Brien made what seemed to me like perfunctory ablutions at the well on the island’s summit, and then left to visit the ruins of a castle nearby. Going toward the worldly—rather than the mystical—was more in keeping with the pragmatic man who had been by my side for almost three decades. Still, I felt a little concerned. I couldn’t help noticing that toward the end of our trip Brien had begun to speak of his life in the past tense, which made the bottom drop out of my stomach.

A lifelong devotee of divine intervention myself—whether it was through chanting to Vedic gods and goddesses or reciting a modified version of the Hail Mary that turned “sinners” into “seekers”—I didn’t hesitate to take it upon myself to make healing happen at this holy well. Time slowed, as I went around clockwise, then questioned if I should have gone counterclockwise in keeping with the pagan tradition. I tried to hold fast to the prayer that he would be cured, as a searing panic rose from my belly to my chest and into my throat. After the third time around the rocky well, I felt my feet turn leaden as my mind began to race. Of course he’s going to die…and sooner than later…but he can’t he can’t he can’t.

I tumbled into the dark well of my mind, and all faith was gone.

A new headline appeared: MY HUSBAND IS DYING. We didn’t know when or how, but he would certainly perish from this force of nature that had been unleashed in his body. Grief leaking into my bones, I hopped on my bike to rush downhill. I was desperate to wrap my arms around Brien—even if I had to do it gently. The tires didn’t grip on the loose gravel, though, and braking only caused me to skid and be bucked over the handlebars. Bumping on my belly down the road like an otter, I finally flew over a large stone and landed on my jaw with such force I was amazed I didn’t have to spit out teeth. Blood as red as the offerings to Mab dripped from the road rash on my chin.

I felt all alone in the world. Until I brushed myself off and saw a plump sheep, wriggling its head through a gate to gaze at me. And my wounds.

During treatment, Brien blended emollient oils—including sea buckthorn and pomegranate—to heal the radiation burns on his face and neck. As a fundraiser for the Ireland trip we bottled his formula and dubbed it Link’s Rad Oil. As Brien wrote on the promo, If it can heal skin this damaged, imagine what it can do for yours.

After the bike accident on Inisheer, I took homeopathic Arnica for the bruising, and Brien suggested I use his oil blend on the abrasions. “It’s full of antioxidants,” he said, patting some on my scabby chin. “I think it will help you heal.”

Just four months after we returned from Ireland, Brien ended up in hospice, at home. After all our forays to cancer centers, we were holed up in our house, with snow like we hadn’t seen in years piling up outside.

Brien refused the hospital bed wheeled into the living room, instead camping out on the futon couch that we’d slept on as newlyweds. Down to half of his healthy mid-life weight, Brien’s tailbone began protruding through his skin. It gave me the polar opposite feeling of spotting crocuses peeking out through the snow. I cajoled, I shamed, I pleaded with him to lie on his side so that the pressure sore could heal—or at least not get worse. He’d given up reading the daily newspaper, shut down his laptop and, mostly, he just sat cross-legged—like a sage—on the futon. The responsibility I felt as a “good” caregiver, to keep his skin from breaking down, was pretty much pointless in those final days, but I still struggled with him over it. I couldn’t face that the bedsore would soon be part of a body he left behind.

One day I was curled beside him on the futon, as Brien caressed the tender crook of my arm. “It’s not just me anymore,” he said. “There’s me…and there’s you…and 50,000 monarchs migrating over California.

It wasn’t all peace and love in the end though. He believed the mob had stolen his stash of medical marijuana and he went rifling through the closet looking for a gun one day. He dashed on wobbly legs, without his walker, to grab car keys, because he needed to “get out of here!” And we spent sleepless nights when he insisted on sitting upright or pacing about—his cancer-addled bones brittle enough to break with a fall.

“If you do that I can’t take care of you at home anymore! I can’t let you fall!”

The last night when he went into a coma—oddly enough—I felt mostly relieved. Not only was I completely exhausted from ongoing worry and sleeplessness, but I feared I was failing as a caregiver. So, I have to admit, when he lost consciousness, and I could finally lower his head onto the pillow, there was a chance to exhale.

For me.

Finally, I could just lie down next to him and feel the weight of my head on his rising and falling chest.

By the next morning, the breath was slow—and very, very deep. There was one last inhalation, expanding his chest. And an exhale that seemed to fill the room before spiraling out—taking him to the other side.

Dabbing a drop of Link’s Rad Oil on the scar on my left brow is one of my new nightly rituals. Before turning off the light, and saying, “Goodnight, I love you, Bri.” Before waking in the night and realizing there are no toes under the sheets to entwine with. Before my 3:00 am trudge to the bathroom. Before collapsing back into bed, limp.

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