Personal Narrative: Is There A Family History?

The fear shrouded in confusion. Knowing that something is wrong, horribly wrong, but not knowing what. The terrifying premonition in your gut that your entire world is fading and that life will never be happy again.

The white walls and floors, color unable to hold onto anything. Footsteps of nurses and doctors echoing down the hall that was closing in and cavernous all at the same time. The hard pleather covering of the most uncomfortable chair, or maybe it’s just that my nerves ache from the worry, fear, and confusion. The doom that I’m unable to shake prodding them like a soldering iron.

A seizure. Tests.

The chairs in the doctor’s office weren’t much better. Although plush and fabric instead of flat and plastic, they offered no surrogate comfort. He sat behind his large desk, the practiced lines scarring his young complexion.

Scarring.

A mass. Cancer.

Is there a family history?

I shook my head, mumbled that I didn’t know. Even if there was, I doubt she knows. All the things we don’t know – won’t know – trampled through my mind.

Treatment available. Surgery. More tests.

Success isn’t guaranteed.

Success. He means life. Life isn’t guaranteed. I twisted my wedding ring. Our life was never guaranteed. I’d lost her before. Twice. Saying “I love you,” making her my wife, creating a family and a home and giving her all the beauties of life she deserved… That wasn’t a good enough guarantee. All our wasted time, all the petty fights, the nights she laid curled in my arms. Safety. Love. At last.

I wanted more. I wanted to give her more. She deserved more.

Need to decide.

Anything. All of it.

Save

her.

The thin, black line shot off the seconds and pinged them off the walls of the waiting room. I watched it, cursing time.
It had been two weeks since the first seizure, since the tumor silently mutilating her brain had finally pressed against the right point, causing her speech to slur and her eyes to roll back, her body convulsing. Since then, she’d woken up, briefly. Sometimes herself, other times a wild, frightened deer that pulled at the bandages and tubes and lashed out in violent words. She’d had two more seizures since then. Her pale body flailed under her wild dark hair, the beautiful blue eyes silent under lids shut tight.
Aggressive.
That’s what they called her tumor. I held in my laugh. Her entire life had been aggressive.
Did she have headaches? Vision problems? Changes in behavior or mood?
They made me feel like I didn’t know her, didn’t pay attention. Like it was my fault, a thought that already constantly loitered at the back of my mind. No. She was happy. We were happy.
Rare. Young. Healthy.
Yes, she was. Rare. Beautiful. Strong. Resilient.
During more tests, they discovered another tumor on her pancreas. This is where, they think, it started.
For how long?
Don’t know. Pancreatic cancer is hard to detect, doesn’t show any symptoms.
How did it get into her brain?
Not sure. Possibly through the bloodstream or lymph system.
Is there more cancer somewhere else?
Probably. It would be hard to tell for sure.
They couldn’t answer my questions and I couldn’t answer theirs. We were at a standstill.
The ring of the phone was an even more obnoxious sound than the tick of the clock. The voice on the other end let us know she was out of surgery and doing well. A nurse would be in later to take us to the doctor for a discussion.
The tumor was larger than we anticipated… already began spreading to other parts of the brain… unable to remove all of it…. future surgeries too risky… areas that are inaccessible.
The young doctor said this as he sat back in his chair, his hands clasped together in front of him. He wouldn’t meet my gaze, the deep grooves between his eyebrows giving away the worst part of his job.
Treatment will buy time… chemotherapy… radiation… no more surgeries… too much cancer… could live another year… could be longer… most likely shorter… decisions to make.

I opened the heavy door, the smell of her shampoo still drifting through the sterile hospital odor. Her bandaged head turned toward me, a smile lighting her paper white skin.
“They had to shave part of my head. Worst trip to the salon ever,” she teased.
It was odd not seeing her dark hair spread across the pillow. I thought of it hanging around her face, the ends dancing on my bare chest, her bright blue eyes laughing above me.
I grabbed her hand and lowered myself onto the bed. She squeezed it and I shut my eyes, trying to seal in the sadness.
“I know,” she whispered.
I inhaled a shaky breath and finally looked at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “This isn’t fair to you.”
I laughed.
“To me. Not fair to me,” I repeated and shook my head. “Baby, I wish there was something I could do,” I pleaded and lifted her fingers to my lips for a kiss.
“You already did. You loved me when I thought it wasn’t possible; when I was told I wasn’t worth it. You loved me anyway. You saved me.”
She said this with a calm smile on her thin, papery lips.
“I don’t know what to do,” I whispered, my skin trembling under the weight of those words.
“Love me with what we have left.”

So I did. I took her home and for the next month we were as normal as could be. We laughed. We loved. We cherished every moment. Some days were good, some weren’t. The tumor impacted her behavior. Some days she wasn’t my Julie. That was the hardest. I watched her slip away and come back only to slip away again. I continually lost her.
Mikayla, for being so little, understood. Mommy was sick. Mommy had an ouchie on her brain. Sometimes mommy needed to rest. Most of the time, I found Mikayla curled up next to Julie, my two girls peacefully sleeping the dread away.
Then she had another seizure. I had taken Mikayla to my parents and when I got home, Julie was splayed out on the dining room floor. She was still breathing, but she’d been too long without enough oxygen. I called the ambulance and they took her away, pumping air into her body.
A few weeks later, pneumonia silently slipped into her lungs. Her body was weak. The cancer was spreading. She wasn’t waking up.
At three in the morning, without anyone around, without any sign or warning, she took her last breath.
When I got the call and they told me there wasn’t anything they could have done, I knew it was true. She died how she wanted to, without causing any fuss or problems. She died in the middle of the night because she didn’t want anyone there. She didn’t want that to be the last memory. She didn’t want our cries to be the last thing she heard.
When Mikayla woke up the next morning and found me asleep on the couch, my face red and puffy, she didn’t ask. She didn’t cry. She curled up next to me, kissed my cheek, and told me that mommy loved us.
Two months and five days. It wasn’t enough. All the tests, prognosis, plans. All the love we had. It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t ready.

The funeral was small, my family – our family – a few of her coworkers and members of the dance club huddled around her urn in a small room in the funeral home. She didn’t want a church or a traditional funeral with a service and hymns and talk of God. So there we were, listening to her favorite songs and sharing stories. As people talked, I could hear Julie’s voice recounting the hilarious points of her day while we cuddled in the chair at night.
I stared at the memorial card in my hand, the details of her life summed up on a postcard. Dates, places, names of those that knew her, a brief detailing of her life. I counted the words. 133. That’s how many words it took to tell the world about Julie. Not enough. Like so many things in the last few months, it just wasn’t enough.
The other side had her picture, a portrait of her from our wedding day. The golden fields and green trees were blurry behind her, the focus on her smiling face. It was one of my favorite pictures of her.
“You are more beautiful each time I see you,” I’d whispered in her ear after the ceremony, once we finally got a moment alone.
“You’re my husband. You’re supposed to say thing like that,” she giggled.
I leaned back, taking in all her delicate features, running my thumb across her plump ivory cheek.
“Every time I look at you, see you smile like this, I fall in love with you all over again, just like I did the first time I saw you,” I said.
Tears collected at the bottom of her eyes and she pinched her lips closed to keep them from falling.
“That was a long time ago, and I don’t believe you loved me when I collided with you before running away from embarrassment,” she replied.
“You’re right. That was a long time ago, but that wasn’t the first time I saw you. That was the first time I had the guts to talk to you. The first time I saw you, I was leaving football practice, and you were sitting in the hall on the floor, your nose in a book, your long hair tucked behind your ear,” I smiled, tucking a glossy strand away and making her smile. “You didn’t notice, but when I walked by, I felt my world shift. I knew, even then. That was it.”
The beginning notes of one of her favorite songs floated into the memory, charring the edges until it eventually burned away. My mom gave a slight tug on my elbow, signaling it was time to stand and walk down the aisle. I kept my head down, staring at the worn light brown carpet, avoiding all the pity-filled and tear-stained faces that were watching me. Mikayla squeezed my hand and I squeezed back, her little muscles mustering up more strength than mine. She was made of strength, like her mother, and she’d somehow held us all together.
I managed to slip out the back doors, inhaling crisp air as deep as my lung allowed. My world had shifted again, tilted. Part of my light was gone.
What had Julie told me once? There’s always a tomorrow? We were sitting on the kitchen floor, eating the entire large pizza I had dropped. The memory was so real I could feel the too hot sauce burn my tongue. I’d asked her how she did it, how she’d overcome everything. Her mother, her father, whatever happened to her all those years I wasn’t there. She’d been on her own. How did she do it? She’d simply said that the sun always rises, no matter what, even if we can’t see it or feel it. It’s there. It just doesn’t give a damn what we’re going through. It will rise every morning, set every night, and rise again to chase away the dark.
I took a deep breath and looked up at the sun, feeling it’s warmth for a moment. I turned and walked back in, my absence noticed but accepted. I smiled, still feeling the flicker of warmth, knowing it was her. Mikayla’s little hand slipped into mine again. I looked down at her face, the face of Julie but with large green eyes.
“This was the reason,” Julie had said as we stood outside Mikayla’s door later that night. We’d finished our pizza and were checking on her before we went to bed. “She’s why I never gave up. She was my reason even before I knew she was.”
It’s almost as if Julie knew her fate. She’d never been afraid of death. She didn’t fear the dark or the demons that lived there. She fought, but in her own way. She was an angel that put down her sword and danced with the demons instead. She didn’t mind the dark because she knew the sun would rise again.
I squeezed Mikayla’s hand and gave her a smile. Julie danced with the demons because she had a reason to.
Julie is like the sun. Every day, no matter what, she’ll be here with us. She left pieces of herself wherever she went. It certainly wasn’t her intention. She never wanted to be noticed or remembered, but she did and now she is everywhere. I see her and hear her and feel her all the time and it’s comforting. It helps with the pain to know that she will always be here.
The sun rises every day. It just doesn’t give a damn.
Julie’s story had a tragic beginning and too many endings. Despite this, she made sure the middle counted for everything.
And she was always my beginning.