An Accident of Magical Thinking

In 1989, I made a mistake. I accepted a marriage proposal. In my defense, it was a really good proposal, and those things are hard to turn down. In 1990, I doubled down and married the guy. In my defense, he was a wonderful man; kind, smart, cute and funny, and our mothers had set us up so he was easy to marry. I'm easy going that way. For 4 years, life was effortless. I quit my job to become a writer. He had a great job and a family full of money so I could do what I wanted. Mostly, I watched soaps, made dinner and planned our very nice vacations. I wrote a few lackluster short stories and the first half of a script for a fun romcom. I did some volunteer work. I accomplished very little. I'm undisciplined that way.

In September of 1994, he brought up the idea of having children for the first time since we'd gotten engaged. On that occasion, I reminded him that I doubted I would ever want children. Evidently what he heard me say was that I might someday want children.

I still didn't want children. I did not want to be pregnant. I did not want to give birth. I did not want to do any of the maintenance required to keep a tiny human alive. I mean I completely did not want children.

He suggested surrogacy and a full-time nanny. I did what any easy going, undisciplined person would do. By January, we had visited the 2 best IVF facilities in the country, and I was panicking. I wished desperately for all of it to just go away.

We got comprehensive physicals as part of the adoption process and unfortunately, we were both perfectly healthy. I guess my panic attacks were not a deal-breaker for anyone but me.

He had to travel for work a great deal in February and March so nothing really got done on the baby front. I sat at home, ate donuts, and tried to come up with reasons to postpone the whole process. Couldn't think of a single one that didn't mean an angry and decisive confrontation I didn't want to have.

In early April, he came from work early one day, and went to bed because he thought he was coming down with the flu. The next day he felt even worse so I drove him to the doctor. The doctor took one look at him and sent us to the hospital. Seven hours later, another doctor told us he had acute myeloid leukemia. He was 35 years old.

I had wanted the whole child thing to go away, and now it had. I was relieved, and I was a monster.

Our loving families swooped in. They hugged me a lot and told me how brave I was. I didn't mention that it was my fault he was sick because I had wished for something to make the children conversation go away. We decorated his hospital room and celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary with cake and balloons. On tv, we watched Christopher Reeve break his neck in a riding accident, and my wonderfully wise husband said, "I'm better off than he is. If I live, I'll be fine, but his life is over."

The doctors had pumped him full of red blood cells first thing so he started to feel better immediately. They started him on chemo, but he didn't look ill, and he didn't feel weak so it was easy to ignore the life-threatening elephant in the room, sometimes for 20 minutes at a time. We watched TV, we talked to friends on the phone, and our parents told sweet stories of their childhoods. We actually laughed a lot.

Laughing and crying are the same physical act, but with different amounts of tears. I was still a monster.

I slept in his room on a reclining chair. He still had his appetite so every night I would get the hospital's menu for the next day and we would smile while I filled it out for both of us. Whatever we wanted, nurses bring it. Five orange juices and seven buttermilk biscuits? No problem. Four puddings and three cheeseburgers? Absolutely. Snacks at 3am? Yup.

Other than the beeping of the IV, and the smell of industrial cleaners, we could have been on a mediocre vacation. Our room even had a lovely garden view. It was springtime and the cherry trees were in bloom all over the upper middle-class neighborhood surrounding the hospital. We took a walk most days, and I came to loathe cherry trees. So bright and cheerful. So big and fluffy. Smug bastards.

Between our parents and the medical staff, everything in our life was handled. All I had to do was keep myself showered and clothed. I got to share his warm, shiny place at the center of a great deal of love, sympathy and attention. I was incapable of preparing myself for his death. It was bad enough I had conjured the cancer.

So it all felt like a scary roller coaster. The fear felt real, but at the same time it couldn't penetrate beyond the outermost layers of my soul.

Sure enough, he went into remission after that first round of chemo. Just as we expected. The doctors were pleasantly surprised. They had NOT expected it.

They emphatically prescribed 2 more rounds of chemo, total body radiation and a stem cell transplant. Almost as if he had a rare and dangerous form of leukemia and being in remission after one round of chemo guaranteed nothing. That truth was mostly a buzzing noise at the edges of our awareness.

He needed a few weeks to recover before the next go around so we said goodbye to our new best friends at the hospital and drove 10 minutes back to our home. Our families went home, too. They needed to rest up for the next round also.

We lived normally for a little while. He looked great, seemed relaxed and played tennis. I cracked jokes about his bald head and went to the supermarket where I burst into tears at the prospect of choosing vegetables for dinner. We played miniature golf and slept in separate bedrooms because the ever-present fear of looming death can make one a light sleeper. Life was more than ordinary but less than dramatic.

We made arrangements to spend ithe coming 6 months in Manhattan because that's where the best cancer treatment hospital in the country was. His family rented me an apartment a block away from the hospital. My parents drove into the city every few days from my childhood home in NJ.

When we had a few weeks off between the 2nd and 3rd rounds of chemo, that's where we lived. Me in my childhood bedroom and him in my older brother's. He had trouble sleeping so it made sense for him to have his own bed. We had a rigorously peaceful few weeks-- my parents, my brother/ husband and me.

One New York day, while my husband's s radiation treatment was burning his digestive system to a crisp, across town my 35 year old cousin-in-law's cab ran a red light, and he was flung into 6th Avenue traffic. He was killed instantly.

Two 35 year olds had awakened that morning with vastly different odds of surviving the year. Anyone placing bets would have lost their money.

I took one day away from the hospital to go to the funeral. It was deeply painful to say goodbye to a lovely man, but it was also the easiest funeral I'd ever been to.

It's the nature of funerals that they create a chasm with the cursed bereaved on one side and everyone else on the other. Survivor's guilt chokes them, making pity the awkward subtext of every gesture and comment. But I stood astride the chasm, the ghost of bereavement future.

As much as everyone was pitying my poor cousin, they were also looking at me like I was "on deck" for the next one. And since I still knew he would be just fine, the sympathy washed over me finding no deep despair to ease.

He survived the cancer. From the successful first round of chemo, he never relapsed. A year passed and we celebrated a year in remission with a huge party. The doctors were cautiously optimistic that the cancer was gone for good.

As each month passed with a clean bill of health, he started talking about our future with more confidence...a future with kids. Of course, he still wanted a child, but I now understood that life is too short and precarious to spend doing something you really don't want to do.

After the party, we took a long vacation in the Hawaiian Islands. For the first time in 6 congenial years together, we bickered. It was all me. I was... cranky. Irritable about everything. Our 5 star resort in Maui made us pay for our tennis balls, and I threw a fit to make YouTube weep that it didn't yet exist. If you can't be happy in an actual paradise, you're not doing it right. We weren't doing it right.

I was coming to realize that I only had 3 choices. Commit to a lifetime with children I didn't want, make my husband give up his dream of raising children or break up with a wonderful man who was now also a cancer survivor.

I did what any coward would do. I agreed to adopt a child and privately wondered if they even allowed cancer survivors to adopt. There I was again looking for fate to save me. Gutless and disgusted with myself, I still asked for a year to get my writing career up and running. Then I immediately went and got a full-time job doing grunt work at a local nonprofit. Six months later, he was understandably annoyed by my not writing a word. In a moment of exasperation, he said, "Maybe I should just go find someone who DOES want children," and I blurted out that YES, he should do that.

Of course, he immediately took it back, but I knew an absolute truth when I heard it. I knew we were done. He asked that we try some marriage counseling, and I agreed. I’m really just awful that way.

In the midst of this new phase of our relationship, friends moved to town and came to live with us while they searched for an apartment. We had a great few months hosting our unwitting buffers, but when they moved out so did I.

One year later, we were divorced.

Everyone was surprised except my mother, who told me she had always suspected it wouldn't last. At my wedding, as I stood waiting to be escorted down the aisle, she smiled and whispered to me, "Don't worry. If it doesn't work out, you can always get a divorce." She wanted to be wrong but wasn't shocked to be right.

Things couldn't have happened in any way other than they did. Whenever I wonder if we'd have been better off not getting married in the first place, I think of all the ways the other possible choices could have led me to worse places, like inside a twin tower on September 11. That's the thing about coulda, shoulda, woulda-- much worse outcomes are just as possible as much better ones.

The weekend after we returned from our honeymoon, I took part in a self-actualization class called The Forum. He had taken it years before and told me it changed his life. He was the kindest, most patient person I knew so I agreed to give it a go. The class begins with an opportunity for participants to ask questions. I was the first to raise my hand. I didn't have a question. I wanted a new name tag because my last name had changed. A simple administrative fix. Let's move on. But the discussion my request provoked lasted 20 minutes and showed me unequivocally that I had married a wonderful person, but who was wrong for me. I went home in a panic that evening and told my brand-new hubby we'd made a mistake. He chuckled and said The Forum was "doing its thing."

Perhaps we both saw the flaw. Perhaps we both decided to worry about it later. Perhaps we had 6 solid years together because cancer was coming for him, and our partnership was crucial to his survival.

It’s been 21 years, 4 months and a handful of days since the doctor came into that exam room and said to us, “What we’re looking at is leukemia.” To which the voice in my head replied, “You gave your husband cancer to postpone a difficult conversation.”

Postpone.

Not eliminate the need for.

I wanted him alive and married to someone who wanted children, and ultimately that’s what happened. I’m still occasionally appalled that I gave my husband cancer and then left him once he was cured, but most of the time I know the real story is less dramatic and far more forgivable. I’m older that way.