I had new clarity that we are not in control. We are not the final authors of our lives, nor are the endings ours to write.
Debra Larson
O
ur first baby was six days old when my husband Andy said, “I have something to tell you.” We were standing at the foot of our bed after I’d just set our sleeping newborn in his bassinet. “It wasn’t good news about my neck.” My heart lurched. Still off balance from a 36-hour labor and struggling through ongoing sleep deprivation, I couldn’t absorb that Andy was telling me he had cancer. The soft fleece of his shirt pressed on my cheek as he embraced me, and we stood together silently for a long time. Six weeks earlier, the doctor had insisted the almond-sized lump on his neck was a run-of-the-mill benign mass. A swollen lymph node, harmless, happened all the time. They sent him home with instructions to stop worrying and focus on his baby’s arrival. “You mean they’re not going to biopsy it?” I’d asked, incredulous. It wasn’t like any swollen gland I had ever seen. “If that doctor won’t do it, we’ll find one who will.” Andy’s doctor agreed to a biopsy. Three days before I went into labor, Andy had the simple operation. The doctor released him, saying, “Now relax, everything will be fine.” It wasn’t. Andy was now telling me he had stage-three nasopharyngeal carcinoma, manifested as a tumor in the cavity behind his nose. This rare and serious cancer was not uncommon in Asian males and English furniture workers. Andy was neither. He was a 31-year-old Caucasian American. Now he was a dad, too. But the joy of our newborn, John, was riddled with worry. Would Andy witness little John’s first steps? First words? Would our baby even know his father? Every muscle ache or sniffle Andy had could be the beginning of the end. I feared the cancer had reached his bones. Or his lungs. If so, it would have been untreatable. We waited for symptoms to appear. It just didn’t seem right that Andy should die so soon after having a child. Nor did it seem fair that after charming me in high school and dating me off and on for almost a decade, our “forever” should last only three years. Our story was not ready for an ending. The next six months were full of tests, each holding our lives in the balance. Weekends were particularly miserable. Worst-case scenarios played out in my
head as we awaited test results that only seemed deliverable on Mondays. Andy became a marked man. They tattooed him with tiny but visible dots, the reference points for the radiation machine. And a constant reminder of his sentence. He had one on either side of his neck and one centered on his collarbone. Why did the marks have to be permanent? Somehow this seemed like a lack of confidence in the efficacy of the treatment. It was as if they could disfigure him because they didn’t expect him to have to live with it. Concerned family members offered suggestions. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have any more children…until, you know.” I remember thinking, Know what? That their father would be around? Sometimes metastases didn’t show up for a decade, or more. Did that mean we should wait, fearfully, for ten years, and if my husband were still around we would work on creating the rest of the family? Every night, after every nursing session, I walked with baby John in our freezing, old house. If I didn’t, he would scream, and Andy needed quiet to sleep. So I paced with my baby an hour at a time, in the dim orange glow of the streetlights that seeped in at the edges of the drawn shades. Sometimes I fell into a mantra as I walked, my arms burning with fatigue. “Please, baby,” I’d whisper with one step, and, “Sleep, baby,” with the next. I often paused at the crucifix hanging in our hallway. “Please, God, let my baby have a father. Please, God, let us have just ten years.” I wanted to know what my husband, whom I’d met in high school, would look like as a 40-year-old. In those silent early morning hours when the world sleeps but lone minds stir, I thought about how we believe that we control our lives. We guide our futures with the jobs we take, the person we marry, the friends we cultivate. But it’s a false sense of security. At any moment, those choices can mean nothing. I had new clarity that we are not in control. We are not the final authors of our lives, nor are the endings ours to write. But comfort comes in forcing oneself to carry on. Letting fear take hold kills us, because it removes us from our daily life. Throughout the years to come, we welcomed three more children, immersing ourselves in the demands and distractions of parenthood. Over time our worries faded, but it took five years before cancer wasn’t my immediate thought when Andy didn’t feel well. The dread was still there, though, and likely always will be. Andy traveled to Portland in August to help John settle into his dorm room for his first year of college. And those permanent dots on his neck? Now I like them. The center one peeks out at the “V” of his shirt, right at my eye level. A spot unnoticed by most has the power to flip my sour mood in a blink. He lives.
Debra Larson lives on Lake Tahoe’s north shore. Visit her at debralarsononline.com. 74 septemberw2013 skirt!magazine