It Takes a Worried Man (3 page)

At some point during the initial weeks, Kirsten turns to me and says, “so are you going to have an affair?” I just have nothing to say except, “No. Why on earth would you say that?”

I am flabbergasted not because she’s read my mind but because having an affair is probably the farthest thing from my mind. I work next to a large university, and I walk through campus before and after work on the way to the subway. I always enjoy ogling the undergraduate cuties, but after Kirsten’s diagnosis I am sort of repulsed by the twenty year-olds in their skin tight crop tops. All I can think is, “Jesus, look at them lugging those cancer bags around.”

So Kirsten’s inquiry strikes me as really odd. She follows up with, “They say a lot of men do.” And I am once more embarrassed to be a man. What kind of jackass runs around on his wife at a time like this? This comes after the initial diagnosis period when every medical professional she came in contact with seemed mildly surprised to find that she had a “supportive husband.” She said they told her, “a lot of men aren’t.”

I can’t help but feel contempt for these guys. What the hell do you think your marriage is if you can’t support your wife when she’s fighting for her life? I just sort of imagine these guys being like, “Okay, good luck with the mastectomy, hon, I’ll be playing golf.”

Well, it only takes a few days before I understand the jackasses a little better. I am back to ogling the undergraduate cuties, and while I am not about to have an affair, I sort of understand why people do it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something in my life that was just easy and fun? Right now everything is really really hard, and even the fun stuff seems to have a cloud over it. (yes, I imagine knowing that you were cheating on your critically ill spouse might cast a pall over the adulterous proceedings, but I guess you never know.)

I also understand how people do it. I have always thought that I would be a horrible adulterer–basically she would know the second I got home because I am a terrible liar. But I am getting better. In fact, for the first time in my life, I am engaged in a large-scale pattern of deception, hiding huge chunks of my emotional life from Kirsten. I am usually unable to hide anything, to a degree that gets annoying, but now I am worried all the time, I am incredibly sad, I am terrified of losing her, but I can’t let any of this stuff show at home. I have to be positive, because she has to believe that she can beat this disease, and in order for her to believe this, I have to believe it. And I do. But there is a whole other side of my life that I now must conceal.

So should I ever decide to have an affair, I now posses one of the essential skills. I have learned how to lie to my wife.

Also, I sort of hate to go home at the end of the day. At work, I can just worry about work, and I am trying to mediate these ridiculous conflicts about who said what about whose boyfriend, and then I have to go home and face the reality of what’s happening. And the reality really really sucks. I don’t play golf, but if I did, I might go for a few rounds about now.

When we first get the news, I joke that I can’t decide between alcoholism and overeating as a coping strategy. I get a lot of mileage out of the joke, though most people don’t respond with the gales of laughter I would like. I guess they’re not sure if I’m joking. Neither am I.

I do ramp up my alcohol consumption, but just to basically one drink a night. Except on those nights when I buy a bottle of wine, which is about once a week, and I can never seem to have less than two glasses.  This is moderate drinking by almost anyone’s standards, and really not so different from my pre-diagnosis intake. Except now I need it more. On days when we are out of beer I will make sure that I have a beer in the house, even paying the exorbitant prices of the pizza shop/liquor store down the street if I have to. I am a little nervous about this, but it seems to be under control.

I am very wary of my alcohol intake. My maternal grandfather is an alcoholic, not to mention a mean, sociopathic sonofabitch. And, you know, my ethnic background is Irish. I know how much an alcoholic in the family screws up the family because most of my extended family is kind of screwed up in one way or another. This is not something I want to do to Kirsten and Rowen.

So if my drinking is under control, my eating is not. I have even more diabetes than alcoholism in my family, so I have been making an effort to lay off the sweets for quite some time. That all goes out the window. So does moderating my portion size and basically anything else involving not abusing food.

I am straining at the 34-inch waist of the pants I just bought a month ago. I have never worn more than a 33 before. I hope I don’t end up a whale, but it is hard to beat food as a source of comfort.  I have been walking 45 minutes to work every day, and that is helping, but I feel myself getting sluggish and tubby. And I am not sure how to stop.

As soon as this all begins, I start thinking about all of the things I can buy to make it better. “I’ll get a CD burner,” I say, “and then I can make you mix CD’s to listen to while you’re recovering from surgery and getting your chemo.”

“Do you think you might like a Game Boy? Then you can play Tetris while you get your chemo…”

“Maybe we should get a new computer so you can email everybody while you’re laid up at home.”

“I’m thinking I should get a cell phone, so you can reach me any time.” I am still smarting from the pager debacle on the day of the diagnosis.

Kirsten nixes most of this stuff, and I know deep down–no actually, I know just below the surface–that it’s pretty stupid. I just feel like if I could only buy something, I would have some kind of control. You know, you give them the money and they give you the stuff. On a fundamental level, it makes sense in a way that getting cancer when you are 32 does not. It just makes the universe seem a little less random.

Kirsten is wiser than me and doesn’t really want stuff. I keep trying, though. I scan the circulars in the Sunday paper, watching for the prices of the CD burners to go down, I scan the cell phone ads looking for a good deal, and I pretty much give up on the whole game boy idea. I just want to do something to make it better.

I decide that I will shave my head when she loses her hair. This feels like a tangible thing I can do. I am attracted by a 3-day, sixty-mile walk for breast cancer that will be taking place nearby. I look at the web site obsessively at work for about 2 days. I am put off by an article in one of my lefty magazines about how so much of the money goes to promotion, by the fact that all the pictures on the Web site are of women. This would be okay–I seem to get along with women easier than men, and walking in this thing seems like the kind of sensitive guy thing that women love, so I could probably have some nice flirtatious conversations, but all the women are in their fifties and sixties, and it just seems like spending 3 days with everybody’s mom might not be the most fun I could have. Also it costs fifty-five bucks to register.

Of course, I am already helping Kirsten, just by being there, listening to her, being positive, and getting up with Rowen when she has to pee in the middle of the night. But buying stuff is easy, and this business of being a positive support is very hard.

Early into this ordeal, I buy two CDs that prove incredibly helpful. One is
The Essential Johnny Cash
, three CD’s worth, and the other is some British import of 25 essential Carter Family songs. The Carter Family are not Jimmy, Rosalyn, Chip and Amy, but rather Sara, A.P., and Maybelle, and these recordings from the 20′s, 30′s, and 40′s, are, in most people’s opinion, pretty much the bedrock on which country music is built.

I know what you’re thinking–corny ass fat guys in stupid hats. But the thing is that this is not like that at all. It is simple, moving, and demented. The songs are about death, jilted lovers and death, and Jesus and death. It’s very close-to-the-bone kind of stuff, and it really speaks to me during this time. You would think that I would want to listen to something a little more cheery, but Johnny Cash really ripping through the live version of “Folsom Prison Blues” is about as cheery as I can stand right now. Mostly I rely on the Carter Family singing about love, death, and Jesus. I guess this stuff just feels closer to where I am right now than anything else. I try with some of my old favorites, but the punk rock I loved as a teen doesn’t really help with this angst the way it helped me deal with my angst over why a chubby sarcastic kid with braces couldn’t get a date. (Funny, but it really was a mystery to me at the time.)

So it’s the Carter Family, asking to be buried beneath the weeping willow, or saying that it takes a worried man to sing a worried song. Nobody sings “I will survive” at the end of a love affair in this world. They kill themselves, mostly, though sometimes they kill the other person too. The whole thing is just sort of suffused with death. I guess this comes from living close to the edge. I get a book out of the library and find that A.P. and Sara literally lived in a place called Poor Valley. I guess when you are shit poor and Appalachian, you make music that doesn’t mess around with niceties. Right now I like that.

What I also like is that there is a rock-solid certainty about God’s goodness and ultimate power to make everything okay that is in marked contrast to the murderous and suicidal proceedings of the other songs and that I wish I shared. If I can’t quite bring myself to believe that everything is going to be okay, I can at least have Maybelle Carter saying, “let us trust in our savior always/who keepeth everyone in his care.”

This music is so wonderful that I wonder how its descendants, country music and folk music, came to suck so bad. How did we get from the power and weirdness of the Carter Family to Faith Hill’s lite-rock ballads and the Indigo Girls complaining about how difficult it is to be a college student?

Maybe you have to be shit poor and appalachian to make this kind of music. And maybe you have to be walking through the valley of the shadow of death to really like it.  

The Tuesday after our romantic weekend, Kirsten is scheduled for an MRI to determine what the spot on her spine is. It is at six o’clock at night, which seems kind of strange to me, but it’s also nice because the whole family gets to go. The hospital is not far from where I work. In fact, I will come to know this route really well. Three trolley stops and a five-minute walk, and I am there.

We are meeting at the hospital at 5:30, so I go to the overpriced natural foods supermarket near where I work beforehand to get an array of prepared foods. There are potato pancakes involved. Maybe it’s my ethnic heritage, but pretty much nothing says comfort to me like potatoes and oil.

Anyway, I put all of this food into my backpack and head over to the hospital. It’s cold and rainy. When I get there, I see Kirsten and Rowen in the waiting room, smiling and talking. We eat our food quickly. I eat too much. Still, it is kind of fun–it’s like a little adventure, eating dinner in this basically empty hospital foyer. We are in good spirits. I, for one, am convinced that the MRI will give us good news about the spot on her spine.

As it gets close to six, we go down to the basement, which is where the “MRI suite” is. It is a dingy little room at the end of a dingy little hallway. There are a bunch of lockers there, and there are also some toys. The only magazine they have is
Modern Radiologist 
or some other crappy trade journal. I have no idea if this is part of a pattern of cost-cutting, or what, but there is just such a shitty magazine selection in all of these places. And it seems like the deeper you get into this process, the shittier the magazine selection gets. Kirsten’s primary care doctor’s waiting room is lavishly appointed with recent magazines. The oncology suite has like three two-year old copies of
Sports Illustrated
. The MRI suite has one copy of a magazine nobody wants to read. I pick it up anyway–it is a year old.

But there are the toys, and there is also a TV, so maybe I shouldn’t complain about the magazine selection. I turn on
Arthur
, and Rowen and I start playing some game that involves her hiding toys in lockers and me pretending to be mystified about their whereabouts. It is kind of fun.

Some lady in hospital employee clothes comes and plops down there in the waiting room. Without so much as asking, she flips the TV over to World News Tonight. I don’t really mind, because Rowen and I were not really watching the TV, but still, it seems kind of crappy that she didn’t even ask.

It soon becomes clear that this is an employee lounge, not a patient waiting room. The first woman stays for about fifteen minutes, then leaves. She never so much as looks at us or acknowledges our presence. Right after she leaves, I turn the tv back to
Arthur
, and then another employee comes in. He sits down, takes out the paper, and starts to read. Once
Arthur
ends, I ask Rowen if she wants to check out the newborn channel, but for some reason the TV keeps turning off before I get to the hospital nursery-cam channel. Finally the guy says, “Oh, what are you trying to watch?” I tell him I was trying to have a look at the babies so my daughter could see, but I’m not having any luck. “Oh, ” he says, “do you mind if I turn on the news?”

Well, it clearly is the employee break room. After all, he’s probably here every night, and with luck, we’ll never be here again. I tell him it’s ok, and it is. As I said, we weren’t watching it, and I did very much appreciate the fact that he asked.

I feel like a cup of coffee, so I convince Rowen that we should go to the cafeteria. We wend our way through several basement corridors. Hospital basements are creepy under the best of circumstances, but deserted at night–even at 7pm–they give me a serious case of the willies. Luckily Rowen is not fazed at all, and she notices a lot more than I do. “Look at the guy on the door! He has a smiley face!” Someone has graffitied a smiley face on the male icon on the men’s room door. “Look at the pretty pipes! They’re so colorful!” Some exposed pipes above our head have been painted a rainbow of bright colors.

We get to the cafeteria, which at least has windows, and it is deserted. This makes no sense to me at all. It’s only seven o’clock, and the hospital is always open. Where is everybody? I don’t know, but I get my coffee and Rowen gets some cheesy popcorn, and we sit next to the window having our snacks and watching the cars go by in the rain outside. It is always nice to be inside drinking a hot beverage on a cold rainy night, but, more than that, at the risk of getting pukey, even in a dismal hospital basement, even with the most important woman in both our lives down some hallway lying in a cold machine, it is calming, comforting, and wonderful for me to just sit here in Rowen’s company.