Before I Go (12 page)

He then asks if we’ve looked into supportive care, and gives us a card with the number for hospice services and a pamphlet titled “Coping with Terminal Cancer.”

In the Zagat of doctors, this guy would have zero stars.

AT HOME, JACK throws his keys onto the kitchen counter. They skid across the laminate and stop just inches before the sink drop-off. He walks to the fridge and yanks open the door. Grabs the cranberry juice, takes three gulps directly from the bottle, sets it in an open space in the door that’s strictly just for sauces and salad dressings, and slams the door closed.

He’s mad. It happens so rarely that I just watch him, like he’s a curiosity—the three-headed lady or the alligator boy in a traveling state fair. I once asked him if he ever got furious, ever worked up to the point of throwing something or growling with rage. He shrugged. “I’m from the Midwest.”

His back remains toward me, his hand still resting on the fridge door. I gently pick up his keys and place them on the hook by the door.

We stand there in silence, not moving, like kids who have just been touched in a game of freeze tag.

And then Jack speaks: “That doctor was an idiot.” His voice is gruff, worn.

I nod, even though he can’t see me.

The silence is back and it hangs in the air between us. A privacy curtain to hide our true thoughts.

Jack breaks it again. “I’ll be in the office,” he says, but the word “office” cracks in the middle in a way that makes my 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 had
breast 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 a
book 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 in your basement looks like it was installed five, ten years ago. Just a Band-Aid.”

“But our home inspector said the hump was fine—normal settling of a house this old,” I say.

He shrugs, ignoring Benny’s incessant whines at his feet for a head scratch. “You gotta bad one. Happens.”

“So what do we do?” I bend down to scoop Benny up with one hand and he rewards me with tiny sandpapery licks all over my jawline.

“Y’need ’bout seven, mebbe eight new beams.” He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and holds it in between two fingers like a tiny cigarette. “But that ain’t cheap.”

“How much?”

“You looking at two hundred a beam, so fourteen, sixteen hundred bucks.”

I thank him, shut the door behind him, and then lean my back up against it. I put Benny’s wriggling body back onto the floor and he scurries off toward Jack’s office. If my mom were here she would recite one of her clichéd mantras, like “When it rains it pours.” Or “Every cloud has a silver lining.” Why does every quote about bad stuff happening have to do with weather? And are there any about tsunamis? Because that feels like the more appropriate meteorological condition for my life right now.

I glance at my watch.

Nine thirty-two.

I need to caulk the windows.

I need to figure out how we’re going to pay for the new beams in the basement.

I need to call Dr. Saunders and see how to get on that clinical trial.

I take a deep breath, leave my post at the door, and walk down our scuffed wood hallway. I turn right into our bedroom, with every intention of pulling up the comforter, smoothing the pillowcases, and leaving my tidy bedroom to start my day.

Instead, I crawl onto the mattress, burrow under the covers, and promptly fall asleep.

The weekend passes in a blur wherein I find myself looking at mostly three things—the starfish ceiling fan, Jack’s concerned face peering in at me from the bedroom doorway, and the back of my eyelids. At times, I wake to find pieces of fruit—apples, bananas, oranges—on my nightstand that Jack has left for me like offerings to
Pomona. I eat them without tasting them to keep the rumblings in my stomach at bay. In one of my more lucid moments of consciousness I notice the pamphlet that the second-opinion doctor had given us lying next to a cluster of grapes. I can’t remember if I left it on my nightstand or if Jack has placed it there. Slightly annoyed, I stuff a pillow behind my back so I can sit up a bit and flip through it while I munch on the orbs of green fruit.

The title, “Coping with Terminal Cancer,” is plastered onto a picture of a storm cloud where the sun is just barely peeking through. The literal silver lining. I roll my eyes.

Inside, it announces there are seven stages to grief. My irritation lessens when I see it’s in list format. Lists, I get. Lists, I understand. I read number one.

Shock & Denial

Yes! I have experienced both shock and denial. I feel like I’m fourteen and taking a quiz in
YM
. I have gotten this answer: correct! Next.

Anger & Bargaining

Anger, yes. Bargaining?

You may try in vain to negotiate with the powers that be: “If you just heal my cancer, I’ll spend the rest of my life volunteering and giving back to charities.”

Hmm. Incorrect! I skipped that step, which makes me uneasy, because I don’t like to leave anything undone. I decide to come back to that. Moving on.

Depression

This stage may not set in until even months after diagnosis, but is typically accompanied by a long period of sad reflection and isolation. You may feel lethargic and may not even want to get out of bed.

Now I’m downright smug. I was diagnosed less than a week ago and I’m already at stage three. I’m an Advanced Griever. If there was a class in grieving, I would be an A-plus student.

I put the flyer back onto my nightstand, roll over, and go back to sleep.

On Saturday night—at least I think it’s Saturday night—the familiar clink of metal flatware hitting a bowl floats in from the kitchen and I know that Jack is eating cereal for dinner. I have the urge to get up and cook a proper meal for him, but it passes as quickly as it comes. I close my eyes again and drift off for the fifth or sixth time. I’ve lost count.

By Sunday morning, the thought of sitting up doesn’t overwhelm me, so I do. Then I stand. My legs are a little wobbly and blood rushes too quickly to my head, but it feels good to stretch. I head down the hall and am sniffing my sour armpit when Jack walks toward me holding a clementine. He pauses midstride when he sees me.

“You’re up,” he says.

“I need a shower.”

“Bathroom’s that way,” he says, and points with his left hand. He’s wearing a ridiculous grin.

“I want a drink of water first.”

He steps to the right, blocking my path. “I’ll get it for you,” he says. “You go on into the shower.”

“What’s your deal? Move,” I say, brushing by him. “I’m not an invalid.”

I enter the kitchen with Jack and Benny both at my heels and when I stop short and suck in my breath, Jack nearly topples me over from behind.

“Daisy—wait.”

To call the kitchen a disaster would not do it justice. I scan the room from left to right and top to bottom, taking in the bowls, Tupperware,
and mugs peppering the counters, containing dregs of milk and bits of swollen cereal, and various levels of what I assume is now-cold coffee, the fluffs of Benny’s dog hair that roll like tumbleweeds on the fake Saltillo tile, the square cardboard box with grease spots and the words “Hot fresh pizza” on the side sitting on the glass kitchen table. I don’t have to lift it to know that my finger smudges from Thursday still mar the surface beneath.