at the gross injustice of all of this, at the unseen forces that shape our lives. Why is this happening to us? he wants to know. He feels an irrational guilt, too. He thinks that he should have done something to save me, that he should have known cancer was growing inside me. The guilt eats at him like a parasite. He goes about his life, almost as if everything is normal, working his long hours and thinking about convoluted investment structures that comply with the Internal Revenue Code, putting on his dapper suits to meet clients and close deals, in a sick, twisted manner finding some escape in the pressures of work. The hard things for him are the memories of our life before cancer, especially now, as we near the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis. The NBA playoffs this year trigger thoughts of last year’s playoffs and how we were so utterly and stupidly clueless then. My return to cooking reminds him of what he calls our “Halcyon days,” those innocent days before cancer, when our lives were carefree and happy. But as for me, what’s hardest of all for him is operating under the strain of trying to be normal.
He agreed that buying a car would be a good idea, and as he sat with Lenny, our car salesman, making small talk, he wondered what would happen if he yelled, “My wife is fucking dying!” And then we smiled pleasantly and drove out of the dealership with Lenny being none the wiser…
16
A Nightmare
Today, July 7, 2014, is the one-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming, but the memories do come back to me unbidden, sometimes triggered by being in a particular place or by what someone says or by nothing at all; sometimes, they feel like waking nightmares. They play out in my mind’s eye like a Greek tragedy in which I am watching myself with dread, knowing that I, the protagonist, will meet a terrible fate even as I go on so innocently and stupidly believing that my pain was just IBS or some other obscure intestinal disorder, but certainly not cancer. As the tragic hero of my own play, I will be brought down by my fatal flaw, my hubris, which would have me believe that I am young and strong (with my five-times-a-week workout schedule) and that I am immune from cancer. But as a member of the audience, I know what’s coming, and I want to scream at my alter ego, warn her so that her fate might be something other than what it already is.
I remember feeling sick that first Friday in June after eating my favorite yogurt, and so began four weeks of bloating, belching, cramping, nausea, loud gurgling noises in my stomach, and mental and physical listlessness that would come and go with ever-increasing frequency and intensity. I remember asking Josh the following week to pick up Gas-X for me on his way home from work per the doctor’s orders because it was probably just irritable bowel syndrome. I remember on multiple occasions lying in bed after my nanny had left for the day, dazed, and Josh coming home from work late to find the children were still running around in all their craziness because I simply couldn’t manage to put them to bed.
I had just finished reading French Kids Eat Everything and was determined to get my kids to eat everything, too, by, among other things, sitting down with them to dinner every night; I remember how I just couldn’t eat as I sat slumped on the couch. I remember lying in the bathtub on the Tuesday evening exactly a week before going to Los Angeles for the wedding and family reunion, hoping that the hot water would ease the pain, and then throwing up and not having the energy to finish the memo I had to write for work about a hugely important Delaware court decision. Later, my internist told me I should have called him then, that I should have gone to the ER then; so many “should-haves.” I remember going to see him two days later and how concerned he was because my symptoms had gotten worse since my first visit, two and a half weeks earlier, and how he had me see a gastroenterologist immediately because I was supposed to go on vacation the next evening, and how he thought that was a