breath catch.
I nod again, even though he still can’t see me.
He leaves the room and I wait until I hear his footsteps retreat down the hall, the door to his office closed. Then I walk over to the refrigerator, open the door, and move the cranberry juice back to the top shelf where it belongs.
AFTER REARRANGING EVERY item in the fridge and tossing my bad impulse purchases into the trash, I sit at our tiny kitchen table for two. I drum my fingers on the glass surface, leaving smudge marks that I’ll just have to buff out later. Good, I think. It will give me something to do.
And that’s when it dawns on me that for the first time in my life, I don’t have anything to do; I don’t have a plan. The first time I hadbreast cancer, everything moved so quickly. There was a sense of urgency—we caught it, let’s cut it out, chemo it, radiate it, get rid of it. Go! Go! Go! I barely had time to think, process what was happening. Now, there’s too much time. And what’s happening is not something I want to contemplate.
I know there are decisions to be made, but no one is pressuring me to make them. And I realize it’s because my choices are rather like asking someone on death row if they’d like to die by firing squad or electric chair. That’s effectively what the second-opinion doctor said today. You can have chemo and radiation and die. Or, you could just die.
Now, the way Dr. Saunders was pushing the clinical trial is making more sense. He was giving me a third option—the only one where dying didn’t have to be an immediate side effect.
Dying.
A laugh bubbles out of the side of my mouth. Is that what I’m doing? The very idea seems ludicrous. Dying is for old people and orphaned children in Africa with distended bellies and dads who get struck down by cars when they’re on their bicycles in the wrong intersection at the wrong time of the day. It’s not for twenty-seven-year-old women who just got married and want to have babies and feel fit and healthy and not even in a little bit of pain. I feel like I’m at a restaurant and the waiter has brought me the wrong dish. Dying? No, there’s obviously some mistake. I didn’t order that.
But I can’t send it back. And now I’m looking at four months or six months or one year, and what am I supposed to do with that?
On our fourth date, Jack and I went to Barnes & Noble and slowly browsed the shelves, petting each other’s arms like only two people who are first falling in love do. We played a silly game where we would take turns picking up a random book and then reading the first line of it—or making up one of our own. Then the other person had to guess if it was real or not. While playing, we stumbled on abook called If: Questions for the Game of Life . Sitting in the middle of an aisle, we fired questions at each other for hours. Stuff like: If you had to get rid of one limb, which would you choose? (Jack: left leg. Me: left arm.) If you could only eat one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? (Jack: his mom’s chili spaghetti. Me: guacamole.)
But the one that I can’t stop thinking about, even though I can’t remember who actually asked the question: If you knew you were going to die in one month, what would you do? I said something like: pack a suitcase, book a transatlantic flight, rent a house on the Amalfi Coast, and stuff my face with loads of authentic Italian pasta and wine.
Now all I can think is: how naively ambitious of me. I’m a little embarrassed by that self-assured twenty-one-year-old who didn’t let the prospect of death get her down. She’ll just carpe diem! over a bottle of red until she draws her last breath. Silly girl. What did she know?
But there is something I admire about her: at least she had a plan.
ON FRIDAY, THE structural engineer who comes to inspect the hump in our den doesn’t have much better news.
“It’s a lacka support,” he says, chewing on a toothpick. “That central beam
I nod again, even though he still can’t see me.
He leaves the room and I wait until I hear his footsteps retreat down the hall, the door to his office closed. Then I walk over to the refrigerator, open the door, and move the cranberry juice back to the top shelf where it belongs.
AFTER REARRANGING EVERY item in the fridge and tossing my bad impulse purchases into the trash, I sit at our tiny kitchen table for two. I drum my fingers on the glass surface, leaving smudge marks that I’ll just have to buff out later. Good, I think. It will give me something to do.
And that’s when it dawns on me that for the first time in my life, I don’t have anything to do; I don’t have a plan. The first time I hadbreast cancer, everything moved so quickly. There was a sense of urgency—we caught it, let’s cut it out, chemo it, radiate it, get rid of it. Go! Go! Go! I barely had time to think, process what was happening. Now, there’s too much time. And what’s happening is not something I want to contemplate.
I know there are decisions to be made, but no one is pressuring me to make them. And I realize it’s because my choices are rather like asking someone on death row if they’d like to die by firing squad or electric chair. That’s effectively what the second-opinion doctor said today. You can have chemo and radiation and die. Or, you could just die.
Now, the way Dr. Saunders was pushing the clinical trial is making more sense. He was giving me a third option—the only one where dying didn’t have to be an immediate side effect.
Dying.
A laugh bubbles out of the side of my mouth. Is that what I’m doing? The very idea seems ludicrous. Dying is for old people and orphaned children in Africa with distended bellies and dads who get struck down by cars when they’re on their bicycles in the wrong intersection at the wrong time of the day. It’s not for twenty-seven-year-old women who just got married and want to have babies and feel fit and healthy and not even in a little bit of pain. I feel like I’m at a restaurant and the waiter has brought me the wrong dish. Dying? No, there’s obviously some mistake. I didn’t order that.
But I can’t send it back. And now I’m looking at four months or six months or one year, and what am I supposed to do with that?
On our fourth date, Jack and I went to Barnes & Noble and slowly browsed the shelves, petting each other’s arms like only two people who are first falling in love do. We played a silly game where we would take turns picking up a random book and then reading the first line of it—or making up one of our own. Then the other person had to guess if it was real or not. While playing, we stumbled on abook called If: Questions for the Game of Life . Sitting in the middle of an aisle, we fired questions at each other for hours. Stuff like: If you had to get rid of one limb, which would you choose? (Jack: left leg. Me: left arm.) If you could only eat one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? (Jack: his mom’s chili spaghetti. Me: guacamole.)
But the one that I can’t stop thinking about, even though I can’t remember who actually asked the question: If you knew you were going to die in one month, what would you do? I said something like: pack a suitcase, book a transatlantic flight, rent a house on the Amalfi Coast, and stuff my face with loads of authentic Italian pasta and wine.
Now all I can think is: how naively ambitious of me. I’m a little embarrassed by that self-assured twenty-one-year-old who didn’t let the prospect of death get her down. She’ll just carpe diem! over a bottle of red until she draws her last breath. Silly girl. What did she know?
But there is something I admire about her: at least she had a plan.
ON FRIDAY, THE structural engineer who comes to inspect the hump in our den doesn’t have much better news.
“It’s a lacka support,” he says, chewing on a toothpick. “That central beam
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