Today would have been our 35th wedding anniversary.
We celebrated our 34th anniversary with dinner at a restaurant on Friday night and duck pin bowling with our kids the next day. Penny was nearing the end of her palliative radiation treatment, and we were working to schedule the placement of a GJ tube that could relieve the pressure, pain, and nausea associated with blockages, and provide an additional means of nutrition.
When we celebrated last January, we were pretty sure it was going to be our last anniversary together. In December we had begun serious conversations about when to transition to hospice care. There was still a glimmer of hope that Penny might be able to regain enough strength to try another clinical trial, and Penny seemed up for one more go, even though she had already been through what seemed to be the most promising clinical trial option with no benefit, was struggling to maintain her weight, and had been experiencing varying degrees of pain and nausea since the previous July.
When we married, we decided to write (and memorize) our vows. For the most part they were pretty traditional. We left out the “obey” part, but kept in “cherish”. And we used the more optimistic-sounding “as long as we both shall live” rather than “til death do us part.” Turns out “til death do us part” is a more accurate description.
From time to time, Penny would mention that she had always imagined things differently. She had looked forward to getting old together, and had always assumed eventually she would be the caregiver for me. But we don’t get to choose these things. As Gandalf (from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) said, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Penny’s decision was to do as much as she could, and be as creative as she could, whenever she could, for as long as she could. And to spend as much time as she could with and for the people she cared about: family, students, colleagues, friends.
Over the holiday break, I began going through the files on Penny’s laptop. It’s an “interesting” project. The folder structure and naming “conventions” add to the challenge. It took me several hours to locate one of the files I knew must exist in there somewhere (because I have a hard copy). And another hour or two to figure out which of several files was the “most final” version… I think. There must have been at least one more version than I’ve been able to locate because the formatting of the hard copy doesn’t exactly match the version I’ve found.
One of the documents I found along the way contains a series of essays Penny wrote early in her cancer journey (roughly 2017, I think). It’s entitled Cancerland: For my fellow residents and the people who love them. I’ve decided to share them as blog posts here. You can decide whether they are the sort of thing you want to read or not.
Before the first essay there is the following description of Cancerland.
About Cancerland
You don’t want to go there. Short-term visitors and life-long residents never choose to immigrate. We are forced here by circumstances, by life, by the results of the CT-scan and the doctors’ diagnosis. Living here brings you into contact with characters we otherwise avoid: suffering, hopelessness, death. You can get trapped pretty easily in the Kingdom of Grief which borders on the Mire of Me. But this isn’t a Pilgrims Progress for cancer patients. Cancerland is a collection of stories or snapshots of how I got permanent resident status in this place where no one wants to go, of how my ideas about life and death are changing, plus some tips for residents of Cancerland and their friends. I hope that somehow these reflections on my crash landing in the world of cancer can help some others, struggling to make sense of it all, and offer a glimpse of the complex mix of questions and emotions that are part of living with cancer. Together with millions of others, I’m muddling through as best I can. Welcome to my small corner of Cancerland.
She shared these essays with me and few of her friends, including her writer’s group, back when she was writing them. But as far as I know, she didn’t circulate them very widely, despite her hope that they might help others.
But it’s not too late, so I’ll post the essays here periodically, maybe roughly weekly. Feel free to read, or share, or ignore.