point, a couple of months after Julie died, I now recognize as when real grief well and truly began. For a time, I was incapacitated with grief, and a flood of unprocessed emotions, haunted by regret, self-doubt, and an unhealthy dose of demon guilt.
One of the real blessings of my life is that almost every Sunday, I talk to my father for an hour on the phone. I feel very lucky to have his wise counsel. As the full weight of what had happened hit me, I called my dad.
I was being torn apart by the guilt and feelings that I had not done enough for Julie, consumed by a flood of thoughts, not all of them very rational. I found myself relentlessly going back to 2013 in my mind, and looking at pictures of Julie from the spring of that year, just before her diagnosis, marveling at her beauty and youth and vitality, and her unfettered joy and limitless possibility, even as I now knew that inside of her a killer was loose.
I told my dad, “Look I’m really hurting. I think I fucked it up. I think I didn’t do enough to save my wife. I should have been able to see this back in 2010 or 2011, or certainly in 2012. But I didn’t. I failed Julie.”
And my father said, essentially, You think you have that kind of power, do you? The truth is, there was nothing you could have done. You might not ever be able to reconcile that Julie was at the same time young and vital and also doomed—that it was too late, from the start. But for your own sake and the sake of the girls—for Julie’s sake—you’ve got to try.
The die had been cast. Julie’s death had been inexorable. Control, an illusion. All else—all the scrambling, the working of the odds, the second, third, and fourth opinions, the clinical trials, the alternative therapies, and on and on—all were just the rituals strewn along the path to the inevitable.
But that—cancer kills—is hardly a revelation. The revelation would come in how Julie responded to her fate. For the little girl born blind, she saw more clearly than any of us. In facing the hard truth of her terminal illness, and never averting her gaze or seeking refuge in fantasy, she turned her life into a lesson for us all in how to live fully, vividly, honestly.
For all my fidelity to the numbers that ended up being so brutally accurate—sitting in Julie’s darkened recovery room after her first surgery in the summer of 2013, poring over the available studies on Stage IV survival rates by the glow of my iPad—I still did not want to believe or concede to those numbers. And for all her belief in the power of the intangibles that had made her whole life possible, Julie’s fidelity was always to the truth, whatever that might be and wherever that might lead. She might have believed a bit in magic, but she never indulged in magical thinking.
And so my father’s advice was a welcome salve at a very hard moment. There was, in the end, nothing that could have been done. Moreover, in the end, the recognition of the inevitable had been an article of faith for Julie, too, and apart from leaving Mia and Isabelle, she harbored absolutely no regrets. In the course of this experience, we resolved together to deal in reality—especially in the face of the cottage industry of denial that exists among some in the “cancer community”—but Julie was the exemplar of reality. In our life together I learned so many lessons from her, but none more so than this: It is in the acceptance of truth that real wisdom and peace come. It is in the acceptance of truth that real living begins. Conversely, avoidance of truth is the denial of life.
Julie had faced more hard truths than anyone I will ever know. More hard truths than in any three lifetimes. So she was very wise indeed, well before her grandmother’s colon cancer came stalking her at the age of thirty-seven. And through her writing, she came to process her own life of struggle and in so doing became empathy itself, providing a vocabulary to an ever-widening community of people living their lives and struggling to face their own hard truths.
Once, in thinking about what it was she most wanted this book to be, she wrote:
To the degree that my book speaks truth about