Or Not to Be (20 page)

Unlike Anna, who talked about our wedding
every year on our anniversary and cried at every wedding we ever attended after
our own, I don’t remember many details about that day. I don’t remember who was
there. I don’t remember what we said. If I broke any wedding vows through the
years, I am innocent due to ignorance.

I do remember Anna’s face. It was pale.
She looked like she might faint at any second during the ceremony. Holding her
breath, she didn’t just hold my hand; she clenched my forearm with her icy
hands like a vice-grip. I was aware that I was holding her up. A nasty
grumbling sound came from my abdomen during a pause in the action of the
ceremony. My hunger made me feel like I might puke. If Anna fainted, I decided
I might as well hurl. I watched her closely for her cue to begin the
festivities of our falling apart as an almost-married couple. She held herself
together, barely, so I managed, too.

Somehow, Anna’s dad kept her mom muzzled
during the part of the ceremony when the justice asked if anyone had any reason
to stop the union. I’m not sure if he physically gagged her, but I appreciated
whatever means he employed to make his wife forever hold her peace. In this
case, forever can be defined as about thirty minutes. Anna was wound as tight
as a spring until that moment passed. After that, all I wanted to do was kiss
her. I waited as long as I could and then laid one on her.

At our forty-minute reception in a tent on the field, the
temperature soared to almost one hundred degrees. Anna and I smushed red velvet
cake into each other’s faces. It was delicious, and the cream cheese frosting
sent sugar buzzing to my brain. I can’t remember why the cake came first.
Probably because no one was in charge. We chugged huge goblets of cheap
champagne, and my odds of puking spiked again. Then we ate real food—some kind
of chicken—tossed the bouquet, jumped into the limousine, and escaped to our
honeymoon.

The clearest detail of the day is burned
in my memory as the first of many cryptic conversations I was to have with my
new wife during our life together. We were on our way to the airport.

“Eddie, do you remember what everyone said
when you kissed me?” she asked.

“People said something?” I hadn’t heard a
thing.

“Yeah,” she insisted. “They all said the
same thing.”

“Sorry, babe, I didn’t get it,” I
admitted.

“They said ‘Aw.’” She was beaming.

“Oh. That’s great.” I was lost.

But Anna wasn’t
finished. “If you think about it, little boys say something
different
when they see people kiss, like in movies, you know?
While I was smushing cake into your face and you were chowing it off my
arm—that’s when they all said it.”

Still lost. Being married to Anna was
looking like it might be intellectually challenging.

She filled in the gap. “They said ‘Ew!’”
Her eyes were big, and she started to laugh. My diagnosis: too much champagne,
too little sleep and food.

I just smiled a little and tried to get
her to come closer to me. If I couldn’t understand her thought process yet, it was
okay. I knew I was nuts about the rest of her. She pushed me away and said,
“You don’t get it, do you?”

I shook my head in mock despair. “But can
I get something else instead?” I begged.

Anna shook her head and laughed again.
“You have to get this first. What are your initials?”

“E. W.”

“And that spells?”

“Ew.”

“Right, like what they said when I smushed
the cake into your face. Got that?”

“Yep.”

She continued down her personal brain
path, dragging me along by the hair. “And what are my new initials?”

“A. W.”

“And what does that spell?”

“Aw.” Finally got it. “Like what they said
when we kissed.”

“Isn’t that cool, Eddie? You are Ew and I
am Aw, now. We sort of go together.” My wife was so happy in her own
strange-thinking world.

“We definitely go together,” I said, and
pulled her to me and silenced her lips.

When we came up for air, I said, “Aw.”

And my new wife said, “Ew.”

32

On
the day Bethany was born
, my job was to run interference. It didn’t matter
that I worked at the hospital as an intern in pediatrics. That day, I was just
the husband, the frantic first-time dad. I was enraged that my wife was in pain
and frustrated that I couldn’t bear it for her. She was going to try to have a
natural delivery—her choice. It was the “
in”
thing to do.
No drugs for Anna—just controlled breathing to ride out each wave. I became her
slave. I did whatever she said. I pushed on her back. I wiped her forehead with
a cold cloth. I brought ice chips. I supported her when she insisted on
walking. I saw why they call this labor.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.” Under her breath,
Anna reported the pain. She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She breathed and said
“ow” all afternoon.

“You’re doing great, honey,” I crooned.

“Don’t
honey
, me. I’m not your
honey.” Anna lay on her side, the only position she’d tolerated for the last
hour. Her hands gripped the stuffing of a rough hospital pillow. The paper-thin
gown was pulled up above her giant belly. “Untie this damn thing, will you? I’m
boiling.”

I pulled the strings apart behind her and
yanked off the gown. She was splendid. Huge and full of life. Red-faced.
Mascara smudged under her eyes. Hair in a flopping ponytail on top of her head.

She gripped my forearm for the next
contraction, and I remembered our beginning, our wedding day when she clawed my
arm the same way. She needed me, and she centered me. While I watched
helplessly for hours as she writhed in pain, somehow it helped her to have me
there.

“Dammit, Eddie, get me some ice. I’m on fire. If this kid
doesn’t get out of my body soon,
I’m
getting out!”

As I scampered out to refill her ice cup
the nurse smirked at me and said, “Transition’s starting. It won’t be long
now.”

“Hallelujah.”

Anna didn’t remember the details of that
day. Not the way I did. We never remembered things the same way. I remembered
what she said and did, and she remembered what I said and did. We each saw
ourselves reflected off the other. I laughed to myself as I ran to gather up a
cup of solid, crystalline water that normal folks call ice.

I thought about our baby, the one that
Anna insisted was a boy. She’d resisted the medical tests that would verify the
sex of the baby because she’d read that the test could hurt the fetus. So I was
surprised when she insisted that she felt like the baby was a boy, because I
was so certain it was a girl. From medical school, I knew that no statistical
studies supported the fuzzy claims of women’s intuition. Likewise, there were
no words to explain why I was expecting a daughter, so I humored my wife. We
joked about it.

“Good thing this baby is a boy,” I said,
just a week before Bethany was born, “because I don’t think I could survive in
a hormonal house of two women.”

Anna whacked me with a pillow and said,
“I’m not hormonal, you jerk. Can I have some ice cream?”

“There’s only vanilla left.”

“Aw, Eddie, I want chocolate. Your boy
wants chocolate, too.”

I went to the store late in the night for
more chocolate ice cream. Just the way I ran for ice on Bethany’s birthday. I’d
do anything to make my Anna happy.

In the early evening, as the sun was
setting through the tinted hospital window, they told Anna she could push. My
relief was physical. My heart rate slowed. It would end soon. It would start
soon. The pains would end. A life would begin.

In the first moments after Bethany’s birth,
I
was acutely aware of the low frequency hum in the room. A
soft, almost imperceptible magnetic field pulsed the molecules of the air into
frantic motion. I had that hair-standing-up-at-the-back-of-my-neck feeling
while I watched, in awe, the raw beauty of new life. My wife, my world, held
our daughter as her brand new antimatter hovered above them. I stroked her
downy cheek. I touched her tiny fingers. Her antimatter latched on while we
mere mortals stood in awe. There is no other word. We can marvel in awe. That’s
all we can do when the power that is life blows us down and holds us up.

Unaware
that she was crying, Anna leaked a steady stream of tears while she smiled, as
happy as we’d ever be in our lives together in this bubble of a moment, at the
edge of the crevice from which the energy of our daughter’s life emerged and
converged. I could understand it all, in theory, more than a typical dad. But
at the edge of the abyss, at the beginning or end of a life, the passage of the
antimatter through the space-time gap will always leave me breathless and awed.

33

I know way too much
. Much more than I could compassionately tell my
patients, or their parents, about the rapidly replicating murderous cells that
crowd out the good ones in their young bodies. I know even more about the
boundary, the elusive and delicate perimeter, the membrane that divides death
from life. The deathday. The heaviest burden I’ve borne during my medical
career has been struggling for acceptance that, as a doctor, I can only do so
much. I offer support and medicine to the children in my care and to their
families, yet their final choice, the ultimate decision, is utterly beyond the
scope of my power.

Despite my frustration, I would not change
my choice to spend my days with the children in my care, especially the time
I’ve spent with them on the edges, the borders of their lives. Obstetricians
bring children into the world and I, sadly, often help them leave. Quite an
emotional career for an outwardly stoic geek of a man, yet I cherished my work
enough to share it with my own, healthy daughter.

When Bethany was little, I brought her to
the hospital with me some days after school. She played with the kids who were
my patients in the pediatric oncology ward, particularly a little boy named
Ben. During our ride in one day Bethany asked, “Dad, how do little kids get
sick?”

“Same way as adults: bacteria and viruses
and cancers and things like that.”

“Do you think Ben will be awake today?”
she asked hopefully. Sometimes when she visited, Ben slept the whole time.

“We’ll see.”

“I hope so. I want to beat him at War.”
She smiled in anticipation. Ben was my patient, part of my work, a child I
worried about. To Bethany, he was a normal kid and a friend.

Bethany was a miniature
replica of my Anna. Just like her mother, she carried my heart in her small,
innocent hands. I willfully avoided finding out her deathday. I decided, in
Bethany’s case, to behave as a normal parent. It was a much healthier, more
human way to live. It allowed me to worry about her
every
day and sort of spread the angst out into
three-hundred-sixty-five bearable doses instead of the annual nuclear bomb I
experienced in the third quarter of each year from knowing Anna’s deathday.

Professionally, I was aware of the
deathdays of many children because I was with them and fighting to keep them
alive when they died. Forever died. These kids’ bodies were usually so weakened
by their illnesses that they most likely had no choices when they passed
through to the dead side. Even the most resilient antimatter cannot sustain the
energy of life when its corresponding matter is too weak. Sometimes, I
witnessed a child’s return by being present when his heart stopped and
restarted. I had a keen awareness of their journey to the dead side and back. I
enjoyed spending time with these kids who traveled round-trip through their
space-time gap. They saw the world through shining eyes and were brimming with
life.

I never directly questioned them on their
experiences, but sometimes the children remembered little bits of the journey,
which they would unconsciously share with their family, brothers, nurses, and
even me. Most often, they just thought they’d had a dream—a long and convoluted
dream.

Bethany’s friend, Ben, had an obvious
deathday on February ninth. His small-cell lymphoma cancer had succumbed to
medicine and his own strong will multiple times—once with radiation and
chemotherapy when he was three and once with a bone marrow transplant from his
older brother. The third time, he came back to us from the dead side on his
own. There were no alternative treatments, and he was too weak for more chemo.
I had no faith that his body could sustain a reentry, but he’d made it back
somehow.