Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,107

my feelings. I want to know. Do you think he’ll find it repulsive?”

“I don’t think he’ll find it repulsive,” I say, realizing that I’m being careful with her feelings too. “But he may have to get used to it.”

“He’s had to get used to a lot,” she says.

She tells me about a fight they had a few nights ago. Matt was watching a show, but Julie wanted to talk. Matt was uh-huh-ing her, pretending to listen, and Julie got upset. Look what I found on the internet, maybe we can ask the doctors, she said, and Matt said, Not tonight, I’ll look tomorrow, and Julie said, But this is important and we don’t have a lot of time, and Matt looked at her with an anger she’d never seen in him before.

“Can’t we have one night off from cancer?” Matt yelled. It was the first time he had been anything but kind and supportive, and Julie, taken aback, snapped at him. “I don’t get a night off!” she said. “Do you know what I’d give for a night off from cancer?” She fled to the bedroom and closed the door, and a minute later, Matt followed, apologizing for his outburst. I’m stressed, he said. This is very stressful for me. But not as stressful as what you’re going through, so I’m sorry. I was insensitive. Show me the thing on the internet. But his words shook her. She knew that it wasn’t just her quality of life that was changing. Matt’s was, too. And she hadn’t been paying attention to that.

“I didn’t tell him about the thing on the internet,” Julie says. “I felt so selfish. He should get a night off from cancer. This isn’t what he signed up for when he married me either.”

I give her a look.

“Well, sure, the vows say ‘in sickness and health’ and ‘for better or worse’ and all that, but that’s kind of like clicking okay to the terms and conditions when you download an app or sign up for a credit card. You don’t think any of that is going to apply to you. Or if you do, you don’t expect it to happen right after your honeymoon, before you’ve even had a chance to be married.”

I’m glad that Julie is thinking about the impact of her cancer on Matt. It’s something she’s avoided talking about by changing the subject whenever I mentioned that maybe it was hard for Matt to go through this too.

Julie would shake her head. “Yeah, he’s amazing,” she’d say. “He’s so solid, so there for me. Anyway . . .”

If Julie had any awareness of the depth of Matt’s pain, she hadn’t been ready to face it. But something shifted with Matt’s outburst, forcing her to acknowledge a difficult tension: their togetherness on this unfortunate journey, but also their separateness.

Julie is crying now. “He kept wanting to take back what he’d said, but it was already out there, hanging between us. I understand why he wants a night off from cancer.” She pauses. “I’ll bet he wishes that I would just die already.”

I’ll bet sometimes he does, I think for a second. It’s hard enough in a marriage to do the give-and-take of putting one’s wants and needs aside for another, but here the scales are tipped, the imbalance unrelenting. Yet I also know it’s much more complicated than that. I imagine that Matt feels trapped in time, newly married, young, wanting to live a normal life and start a family, all the while knowing that what he has left with Julie is temporary. He sees his future as a widower, then as a father in his forties rather than his thirties. He probably hopes that this doesn’t go on for another five years, five years at the prime of his life spent in hospitals, caretaking his young wife whose body is being cut apart. At the same time, I’ll bet that he is touched to his core by this experience, that in some ways it makes him feel, as one man told me in the months before his wife of thirty years died, “forever changed and paradoxically alive.” I’d wager that, like that man, Matt wouldn’t choose to go back in time and marry a different person. But Matt’s at a life stage when everyone else is moving forward; the thirties are a decade of building the foundation of the future. He’s out of sync with his peers, and in his own way, in his own