Do you want to get married?\u00a0 I would marry you today.\u00a0 This was one of the stupid things we would say to each other on occasion, the stuff you develop over time in a life together.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure we would have developed more but we were only together for 6 years. My wife, Leah, died from cancer on 12\/25\/2019 at 8:12 am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes you don\u2019t realize just how much you love someone until they aren\u2019t in the house, you are doing something day to day and you find out they are finally over the edge.\u00a0 My heart just feels empty when she\u2019s not in the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know there are different levels of torture and worse ways to die, it could always be worse but this is not low on the list. It\u2019s not just physical but mental torture. Slowly having your life drift from you while your responsibilities that give you a sense of fulfillment drift away to your loved ones, leaving you feel as if you had no meaning or place to begin with.\u00a0 There is no universal meaning, but there is meaning contextually and that\u2019s what fuels us as much as our physical needs. You become a living ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After she had gotten to the point that she could no longer concentrate for long, Leah and I discussed the idea of my writing her final blog post and she teared up, telling me I should do it if I can.\u00a0 I\u2019m in no way as much of a raw eloquent and moving writer as her but I need to lay my thoughts out for our collective closure. I\u2019ve been taking these notes lying next to her while she sleeps, after discovering additional brain tumors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s interesting how a toddler handles these sorts of things.\u00a0 At first, when I cried while playing with our son, he would think it was hilarious.\u00a0 After that he would come to me, give me a hug then poop. As the grief intensified though he began to become fussy and on edge in these moments as he learned to pick up on and react to the emotions.\u00a0 He obviously doesn\u2019t understand what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think she\u2019d be proud of my quasi M. Night Shyamalan post, I can hear her say \u201coooh that\u2019s good\u201d.\u00a0 I can still hear her in my head, guiding me, or just making comments. As I finish this post in my office, it still feels like she\u2019s in the bedroom, ready for me to come in for bed or about to come in annoyed for taking too long because she wants to watch a show together. She gives me strength even when I\u2019m stupid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s why when she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in her lungs, and that night in bed I mustered up the courage to look up the prognosis, I cried with my head in her lap and shook telling her I don\u2019t want her to die while she stroked my hair and comforted me.\u00a0 We took turns like this, when she was diagnosed with brain mets she cried with her head in my chest and shook saying she doesn\u2019t want to leave me and A while I stroked her hair and comforted her. Whenever one of us really needed it the other would snap to attention, setting aside the day to day to be right there in the moment for what is needed.\u00a0 I would curl up and say no no no, and she would cry and say I don\u2019t want to leave you, each in our turn providing strength and love for the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is also why it was an other worldly question when our hospice doctor first asked what we turn to for strength.\u00a0 We just looked immediately at each other and, after some telepathy that you develop from being with someone every day for 5 years, she turned to him and said we aren\u2019t religious, but there is one person we would talk with.\u00a0 We talked later and clarified our telepathy, the thing we turn to for strength is love and each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember the timeline since her final post, normally she would do chemo then recover for a day and bounce back as herself again, nag me about something and complain that nothing around the house was done right while she bustled around and corrected it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When she got the results showing she had 2 tumors in her brain, she slept for 4 days.\u00a0 She bounced back but I remember being scared, I told her I\u2019m worried one of these times you\u2019re not going to bounce back.\u00a0 She told me she\u2019s sorry for scaring me, her body just needed it, I told her it\u2019s not her fault. She started needing ritalin to just sit and keep an eye on A and call me down to lift him for changing and food.\u00a0 I worked from home since she could no longer fully care for him. My mom stayed and watched A any days she was fully out of commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2 weeks later, as her nausea and fatigue worsened, her brother came to help with A and take her to gamma knife radiation, this was the next step in her treatment after finding brain cancer.\u00a0 Before treatment they did a scan and found 14 new tumors. It broke us. They canceled the gamma knife since her back pain was too severe to lie down and scheduled whole brain radiation for the following week. I stopped working, we were spread too thin, and they thankfully allowed me to take care of my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I took her to treatment every day for 4 days, she vomited leaving the car both ways every day, she was catatonic the entire week and she barely ate.\u00a0 This time they gave her morphine to lie on her back and be treated. It was hell. We got the call about her chest scan, the 2 months of immunotherapy had done nothing.\u00a0 On Friday, she said she was done, we can\u2019t do this it\u2019s hell, I told her I know. She said she was sorry, I told her it\u2019s not her fault, you just don\u2019t come back from this type of cancer.\u00a0 It\u2019s not ethical to continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As her brother said, we all have energy to fix Leah but all the energy in the world isn\u2019t enough, so we invested it in her comfort.\u00a0 On the fifth day of the week of hell, hospice came to our home, all of her immediate family came that weekend. By Sunday she was on a regimen of drugs and surrounded by family and love.\u00a0 Everyone pitched in while she rested and I learned and monitored her drug schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end she was surrounded by love in our home, and in as much comfort as we could provide.\u00a0 After a desperate and rough start, hospice care was good. One brother came every weekend, the other came all week every other week and his wife R stayed with us to help care for A, her father and step mother stayed in a hotel nearby.\u00a0 My mother and sister came several times each week and eventually took shifts spending the night when R had to return home. Many of her best friends were able to see her and she got to say goodbye. She told me she was at peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We found a rhythm or as much of one as is possible.\u00a0 As the cancer filled her brain and body and the brain radiation took effect, some of her short term memory started to wane, the medications and progression made her sleepy, she slept most of the time.\u00a0 But her constant nausea was gone, she was no longer in constant pain, her appetite grew strong and the few hours she was awake she was able to interact and even make her way downstairs once a day to see A.\u00a0 He finally forgave her for deserting him for 3 weeks and accepted her with love as not his primary but as a loving secondary, I can tell because he stopped pushing her away when she was near him and started laughing and playing with her again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then she got bored.\u00a0 Neither of us expected waiting to die to be boring.\u00a0 She grew conditioned to the drug regimen, the initial negative symptoms of whole brain radiation passed and the palliative effect kicked in.\u00a0 She went from sleeping all day to being up at 9 and active until 4, her energy was still low, but she felt ancy and started doing small things around the house, just to feel useful again.\u00a0 She desperately grasped for a sense of fulfillment and purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leah was an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful person.\u00a0 So being in a degraded mental state, when she\u2019s used to being highly productive and stimulating her mind, without the physical or mental capacity to do the things she enjoyed without quickly growing fatigued, was incredibly frustrating.\u00a0 She told us she wants to either shit or get off the pot, this limbo is no way to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We tried to make the most out of each day we got. We took a short walk, we played with A, we played a game of Dominion (at which she beat me), we even went on some errands to get out and moving although she threw up on the drive.\u00a0 Having friends and relatives lined up to visit is what kept her going the most, it gave her something to look forward to each day. My deepest thanks and love go out to everyone who was able to talk with and see her, this provided her great comfort, it always amazes me how much love and friendship she surrounded herself with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We even went and visited her endo doctor, since she couldn\u2019t speak with her when she started hospice. Leah got closure that hospice was the right decision. It still doesn\u2019t feel like hospice was a \u201cdecision\u201d it was just the end of the logic flow for treatment, there were no other options given her state.\u00a0 It feels like we never really made any decisions about her cancer or treatment, it was just this morbid logic flow and at the end you die. Cancer fucking blows. Our friend would later tell me we did make decisions, they were just obvious, and she\u2019s right, it just doesn\u2019t feel that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s fucked up this roller coaster she was on, a short time later we all caught a cold.\u00a0 Leah and A never had a cold the entire time she was in treatment but with all the visitors something snuck in.\u00a0 This really messed her up and she had a major mental decline, the doctors said probably not due to the cold but the brain cancer, but having a tortuous whole body wrenching cough that won\u2019t end for 5 days while you decline further mentally is another special kind of cruelty.
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For my part I gave her comfort and meds through the day and night, woke with A each day and gave him breakfast and played, then whoever was helping that day would watch him while I was with Leah. I put him down for a nap at noon, got him up from his nap and handed him off while I went back to Leah, then took back over from dinner until bed.
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Leah and I considered 6-11 to be the best part of the day. We would give A dinner at 6, bath, books and bottle at 7 then bed by 8. After dinner is his witching hour where he runs in circles and laughs and plays hide and seek. After bath she would dry him and he\u2019d run around his bedroom naked handing out books to us. Until he peed on the books then we added a diaper in immediately after drying.
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After bed was our time. We pretended we were still pre A and had dinner, watched TV and had ice cream. We talked about the day, complained about annoying shit and listened to each other. At the end, we still tried to hold onto a semblance of the ritual. After A was in bed I would lie next to her while she slept then get her up for her bedtime meds at 11 and give her some food and we\u2019d watch a show, I had ice cream and we talked a bit. She told me she was scared when she woke up and I wasn\u2019t next to her, and I told her I don\u2019t leave the house anymore I\u2019m just a text away. I tried to lay next to her as much as possible.
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It\u2019s funny how both of us need alone time to recharge our batteries. But being together felt like being alone in this sense. I think this was a good indication that we are pretty compatible. I don\u2019t mean to over romanticize our relationship, we argue, etc. Neither of us believe in soul mates we ascribe to The Good Place school of thought that two people have a good feeling about each other then get to work building something and dancing together through life. It\u2019s just fucking bull shit that our dance got cut short.
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I will spare you the darker details of the week following her cold.\u00a0 As Leah would say, dying from cancer fucking sucks guys. I manically ran around getting her meds and trying to keep her comfortable, her pain escalated, her body and brain declined, and it became a 24 hour job. We wanted her to die comfortably at home in bed next to me but it was just not meant to be. We took her to the hospital where she was among her extended family, the people she had gone through the fires of residency with. Her best friend was working the floor above her and spent the first night with her.\u00a0 She wanted me to be with A so I spent the days with her and nights with him. It only took 2 nights, she died on Christmas morning. We\u2019re pretty sure it was just to make sure I don\u2019t forget the day, plus she\u2019s Jewish anyway so it doesn\u2019t matter too much to her.
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Her funeral service was simple and elegant in the Jewish tradition, with just immediate family and a close inner circle of friends who have become family. I wrote her eulogy, which follows, lying by her side as she slept in her final week of life.
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As the youngest by 5 years and the only girl, Leah was the perpetual little sister. Ever her protectors, she would tell me, J and JM would snap to attention whenever she needed something. She could be standing next to the sink and ask for a drink of water and they\u2019d come over without question and get her one. She loved her brothers, deeply, and it’s clear to me that she inspired equal love from them and those around her.<\/em> At the age of 11, her mother passed away from cancer. She would tell me how thereafter she was raised by wolves. I think this inspired her to want elegance and cleanliness in the household and she always made our home a place of comfort and tidiness. She has a beautiful classical style with a modern simplicity, when we sold our condo, the realtor told us not to change a thing as the place was already staged.<\/em> Her mother\u2019s death also inspired her desire to help others. Early on she knew she wanted to be a doctor. She was gifted through her double edged genetics with incredible intelligence and grit. She earned her masters in chemistry because it seemed challenging. She completed med school and residency then passed her boards 8 months pregnant just after being diagnosed with breast cancer. I have no idea how she did it.<\/em> I joined her story while she was in med school doing a rotation in Cleveland. She lived what her father termed a spartan existence, just a small one bedroom apartment a laptop, a bed with a heating pad that she loved, a kitchen and a furniture less living room. We fell in love there.<\/em> I remember after our first date at Panera, which we would later call our Paneraversary, she was going on a trip with her father to Puerto Rico. She always looked forward to his work trips as she loved to travel. I\u2019m not entirely certain it was the travel she loved though as much as spending the one on one time with her father. He joked as a girl that she would need 3 husbands to keep up to her standards. But it turned out that, ever her father’s daughter, she was both frugal and became a doctor so she could earn her own way.<\/em> I had a condo in North Canton which she slowly moved into over the first 6 months of our relationship, so I\u2019m confident the spartan thing wasn\u2019t her heart\u2019s desire. She transformed it from a bland bachelor pad into a home, she loved thrift shopping at home goods. I\u2019ll never be able to match her beautiful style, but I\u2019ll try to honor it.<\/em> Leah was an incredibly supportive person. She would frequently spend time on the phone with her friends discussing their lives and issues and trying to work with them to sort them out. She loved trying to fix things and she was always cooking up some scheme in her head to improve people’s lives or try to figure out how they could make things better. We frequently discussed these theories, she just wanted to make the world better. We both agreed that she would be a benevolent dictator of the world.<\/em> Leah had the perfect blend of humor, dark humor, kindness, honesty and bluntness. When I made a stupid joke, and I make a lot of them, she would either dryly say “Oh, I got it it just wasn’t funny” or she’d honestly laugh with me. She never laughed at me, I don’t think once in our time together did she laugh at me, it just wasn’t in her nature. Leah used this blunt dark humor and honesty as an instrument to make people laugh and join her in facing the universe, but she was never mean spirited in it. Unless, of course, she was talking smack about someone in confidence, then the gloves are off, which was incredibly fun and cathartic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Leah had a beautifully complex and intelligent mind, but also the ability to make things simple. I tend to overthink things and can sometimes work myself into an existential crisis, Leah’s response to this was always “It’s just love, that’s it, it’s love all the way down.” And this simplicity and love would always soothe my mind. She really was an eternal optimist, although reluctant because she was also a realist.<\/em> Leah found joy, fulfillment and happiness in her lifetime. Many can’t say that they achieve this in lives three times the length. She had a vision of what she wanted in life and she took it. Leah and I frequently confessed to each other that our years together were the happiest of our lives as a whole. She was able to enact her vision of a home, become a doctor and bear a beautiful son. We spent everyday together, she said we were a bit co-dependent, listening to each others stories, working through our problems being open, loving, supportive and honest. I’m eternally grateful to her for everything she’s given me in our dance together.<\/em> Leah was an incredibly loving mother. Leah had cancer for the entirety of A\u2019s life. I’m not sure many people in her position would have had the foresight to know that she needed to begin to put together a support system for him of protectors should the worst occur. In her honesty, she both lamented that his attachment to her often had to be rebuilt due to treatments and surgeries, but also confidently explained that his attachment to me and our family was by design. She mended familial bridges and brought and attempted to bring unity where there was division, this was partially her desire to make the world better and the perspective of facing death, but also her drive to build a support system for our son. Leah, we will honor you and A will continue to know and be loved by all of his family.<\/em> In the windows of time that she was able, her and A were absolutely beautiful together. When we found out he needed physical therapy for his shoulder, she worked with him every day to train him early to crawl and go up stairs. His mobility is no issue now. When he had torticollis she religiously stretched his neck every diaper change. He has no neck issue now. She trained him to say “dada” even though she wanted him to say “mama” first so that I would experience the joy of hearing him say dada every time I come home from work, when I didn’t get to see them and missed them during the day. Even on her worst treatment nights, she would insist his bassinet be on her side so she could soothe him when he woke through the night.<\/em> She had a beautiful singing voice. The two of us would constantly sing along to Raffi with A. It was very important to Leah that we listen to Raffi, specifically, since she listened to him as well. At bathtime we sang “you can be a triangle you can be a square” and for tooth brushing we’d sing “brush your teeth ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch”. I would sometimes walk in on her singing lullabies to A and just watch and listen, I even snuck a video.<\/em> I’m joyful that he got to experience her love and that he’ll forever be imprinted with her kindness and love. I’m also deeply saddened that his mind and personality will not be as directly shaped by her as they otherwise could have been. Her imprint on me, her memories and pictures that we’ll share and our families will bring her to him though. Her father always said “there are pluses and minuses” and Leah always said “it could be worse”, and they’re both right.<\/em> Leah, I will love you forever. You will always be a part of our lives and you will never be forgotten as long as we draw breath. Thank you for bringing me happiness and love. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to spend our entire shared blink of an eye together, but I’m thankful that we drifted together for a heartbeat.\u00a0 It may have been nothing to the universe, but it was everything to me<\/em>. I truly hope that Leah is by God and her mother\u2019s side correcting them both and keeping them in line.<\/em> Every day that we could during our last summer and fall together me Leah and A went on walks when I got home from work. I\u2019d push the stroller while she held my arm and A made noises. The sun was just beneath the edge of the 2 story houses and she\u2019d say we really do have an idyllic existence, except for you know the whole cancer thing, it\u2019s like the universe said we have it too good so it has to fuck us. We\u2019d talk about our day and I\u2019d say do you want to talk shit about something and she\u2019d say ooohh you know how I like to talk shit, so we\u2019d complain about random shit that annoyed us. Halfway through A would fall asleep, we started taking the longer loop, it has more trees and we love trees. Once we got in eye shot of home A would get up and fuss so she\u2019d carry him the rest of the way. At the end of the night I\u2019d roll over to her in bed and say in her ear \u201cthat was a good day\u201d and she\u2019d say \u201chmm, yeah, that was a good day\u201d. I hope this can serve as a piece to the puzzle for us to find closure dear readers.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve made it this far then you know she loved and is loved, she provides strength, she had good days, she found peace and as much comfort as we could provide in the end.\u00a0 Love and light to you all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you want to get married?\u00a0 I would marry you today.\u00a0 This was one of the stupid things we would say to each other on occasion, the stuff you develop over time in a life together.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure we would have developed more but we were only together for 6 years. My wife, Leah, died … Continue reading Do You Want To Get Married?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164157466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/164157466"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereluctanteternaloptimist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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