by Leslie Brody
One was politically conservative, the other argumentatively liberal. One respected financial achievement, the other—who edited endless stories about insider trading and white-collar crime—was suspicious of what it could take to get rich. One valued refinement, the other remained resolutely casual.
“I work like a dog all day and can barely buckle my belt sometimes from stomach cramps, for Chrissake,” Elliot would grumble about dressing up for a night at the club. “Can’t they give me a break about the damn jacket?”
“When in Rome, Sweetie,” I’d say quietly. “If you want to stay here…”
The two most important men in my life never recognized how much they had in common. Both had modest roots in New York City. Both respected their Jewish heritage but didn’t believe in God. I loved them both, both loved me, and each thought the other tried to control me too much.
My father, Gene Brody, took pride in this club, especially its library, the largest private book collection in the world. He had earned his way in. Growing up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn in the depths of the Depression, he was smart, ambitious and determined to carve his way in a wider, wealthier world. After graduating from Wharton and serving in the U. S. Navy, he went to night school at New York University to get an MBA. He had a keen talent for math and a fiercely independent mind, and the innovations in his graduate thesis on options won him a job on Wall Street. He worked hard and became quite a player in the 1960s. The boy who had watched his own father flounder through one unsuccessful business venture after another was proud to be wearing silk ties, playing squash at lunch and taking his young family skiing in France.
My tall, handsome father was widely respected for his integrity, warmth and humor. But this club he cherished smacked to me of a different sensibility. It felt judgmental and cold.
In time, however, Elliot and I became more comfortable there. We had to. The club’s location simply made our lives so much easier.
I would drive into the city after work on Wednesdays with our suitcase and meet Elliot for our sacred date night. Often we’d indulge in the club’s lavish seafood buffet. There was something surreal about what became a ritual: lobster the night before chemo, then pancakes for breakfast at Burger Heaven. After this priceless romantic interlude, it was time for a draining Thursday at the clinic, a few days of Elliot’s groggy recuperation on the couch and then gearing back up for work on Monday.
For all his balking at the club’s formality, Elliot appreciated the luxury and the privilege of spending time alone together. Our favorite room was 310. Its big, clean windows looked down on the glittering storefronts of Fifth Avenue.
As I walked through the club’s lobby time after time, I looked for a way to make peace with my sense of self. One night I watched a well-coiffed woman with shiny patent pumps get irritated waiting for the elevator. So little patience. She may have been used to running the show in the club’s universe, but I wondered how well she would manage what I was doing—unhooking IVs, washing sheets drenched with night sweats and taking care of children who were putting up with an awful lot of drama. Maybe she wouldn’t succeed in my world.
WAITING
April 2007
It was spring, time for another CT scan. Elliot had one about every two months to see whether the drugs were working. There was an emotional pattern that went along with these tests: a buildup of anxiety beforehand, impatience while waiting a few days for results, then a rush of relief or crushing disappointment.
As Elliot was undergoing the scan, I sat on a nubby beige couch in a waiting room, yet again, for hours, and scribbled down my thoughts. If I put them on paper they would stop swirling around in my brain, harassing me. I didn’t have anything to write on but a printout of a recipe for pork ribs that a friend had sent in an email. That had to suffice.
“E is in CT scan,” I wrote. “I’m reading The New Yorker review of Joan Didion’s play The Year of Magical Thinking. I’m morbidly drawn to these reviews, like she could give me a hint of what’s to come, as though if I suffer now in anticipation I’ll be inoculated, better prepared when it really happens.
“The reviewer quotes Didion: ‘We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead…I knew that as the second year began and the days passed…my sense of John and Quintana alive would become more remote, softened, transmuted into whatever best served my life without them.’
“It would be so sad to feel my life with E had become remote. I remember when I was a teenager and our dog Daisy died, how quickly it felt like normal to be without her and how far away our time with her seemed to be. To let his presence fade so fast would be an insult to our marriage. It’s morose to be contemplating what it will feel like when he dies.
“On the way down here I thought about how I define myself so much now as a wife and nurse, and don’t feel as accomplished as a reporter. So it will feel so empty to be just a reporter again. Yes, I’m a mother too, and I love that, and think I’m good at it, but that feels like a necessary minimum requirement. I guess I’ll have to invest more in being a friend. Maybe I’ll try writing a book, even if it doesn’t get read or published, even if Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion—far better writers, of course—have written all this before, and surely with more precision and insight. It doesn’t hurt to try.”
I felt stuck in such a strange limbo. Growing up I had always been in a rush—to get good grades, a job, a family of my own. But this was a time when I could not do what it would take to prepare for the next stage, a future when I would probably need a new job to make more money to support my kids. I would have to recreate a whole new life someday, but it was impossible to start lining up the building blocks, redoing the resume, sending out applications, taking the early-bird steps that made a goodie-goodie feel like she was being responsible, doing her homework in advance. I didn’t know when this new future would start, and didn’t want to look to Elliot like I was clearing the path for a life without him. Yet I was not used to procrastinating. Putting everything on hold was an uncomfortable discipline to master.
He’s here now, I told myself. Just be with him.
A chatterbox sitting nearby interrupted my scribbling. She said she’d been going through treatment for sixteen years.
“When my mom and dad made me they put in some cement,” she said with a laugh.
Sixteen years of this limbo? I couldn’t imagine it. But the alternative was so much worse.
Don’t think so much about the future, I told myself.
Don’t be afraid to grow closer.
Don’t mourn his death before it happens.
You’ll have plenty of time for that later. Plenty.
Elliot wasn’t giving up on the possibility of many good days ahead. He had just seen me trying out Crest Whitestrips to bleach my teeth and decided to try it too. A funny joint project. Intimate, I guess. I was glad he was doing something for the future, not presuming it wouldn’t matter anymore. Maybe the anti-anxiety drugs mellowed him out and lulled him into denial. Maybe I could have used some of those pacifiers myself, but there was too much pressure on me to be alert, make decisions, react to symptoms, plan for contingencies. I was the one who had to drive. I couldn’t afford to be woozy from Ativan.
“It bothers me that I’m not spending my time sitting here wishing for a good result on this CT scan,” I wrote. “I assume all this will end badly at some point. Maybe a tiny part of me just wants the whole ordeal over with. But then what will I be?
“Just wishing to be back here, waiting.”
Exhaustion makes everything more depressing. It was a beautiful spring morning, but I didn’t feel the sense of renewal that comes when the air gets warmer and the purple crocuses pop up. Each day that passed brought us closer to that vague deadline, so haunting and mysterious. “Lucky to live a year or two,” the doctors had said. Is it better to be given a time frame like that, or is it better to have no clue?
Time is a precious commodity
. I didn’t want to waste it in wallowing. But I couldn’t escape the sense we were losing it fast, that we were nearing the halfway mark of this journey, that soon we would have less time ahead of us than we had already spent since Elliot’s diagnosis. I felt utterly powerless.
Sometimes I saw myself like a car in a car wash, stuck on a conveyor belt, being moved inexorably forward without any control. The car gets smacked in the face by hoses, then soap, then scrubbers and brushes, then more hoses. The windshield takes one hit after another. The car has to just put up with whatever comes, and in the end rolls out looking shiny and fresh. But I was feeling more and more bedraggled.
My favorite cancer patient wasn’t losing his hair, but I was, from the sheer stress of it all.
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?
April 2007
When we schlepped to the city yet again for Elliot’s umpteenth round of chemo and the results of his latest CT scan, we got good news for a change. The second set of drugs seemed to have gotten the tumors under control. This was something to celebrate. We had a fight instead.
Our bickering started after I checked the clinic’s public computer in the fourth floor waiting room. There was an email from Alex’s baseball coach announcing an 8:00 a.m. practice the next day when school would be closed for Good Friday.
“That’s ridiculous,” Elliot snapped when I told him. “Practice on a holiday? That’s so intrusive. If you have to take Alex to baseball how can we have breakfast together?”
“It’s not such a big deal,” I said. “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll just drop him off and come back.”
“These Montclair parents have no boundaries,” he said as we walked down the hallway toward the infusion unit. “They compete to do more and more and more for their kids’ relentless activities and never leave any free time to relax or go to a museum, or God forbid spend any time as grownups.”
My jaw clenched. The unit smelled like an odd mix of an old lady’s perfume, someone’s leftover tuna fish sandwich and the ammonia used to sterilize the floors. A receptionist ushered us into a small room with two big olive green BarcaLoungers for patients. Elliot groaned when he saw this room had no windows. He always insisted that a chair with a view was essential to his sanity. A heavy-set, weary-looking guy in there already was hooked up to an IV, trying to doze.
My stomach was knotted with tension, as if a spool of wire in my gut were getting pulled tighter and tighter. What days I worked, what we ate, when we ate, when we went to bed, where we could go on vacation, everything was defined by Elliot’s medical needs. I couldn’t stand to hear him complain about one of the few things that revolved around my son. An energetic ten-year-old, Alex was on two baseball teams. He adored the sport, wanted to get better, and had to play on the second spring team if he wanted a spot in the summer league.
“Being on two teams is too much,” Elliot insisted as he rolled up a sleeve to get ready for the nurse. “It’s taking over our life. Devon’s got her riding on Sundays so the whole weekend’s booked before it even starts. I drag my sorry ass into the city every day for work or doctors’ appointments. After all that I deserve some freedom on the weekends.”
“We hardly see all of Alex’s games,” I said.
The poor guy in the chair next to us was pretending to be asleep. These quarters were way too close for such a personal dispute, but I was tired of always being the accommodator, smoothing over every bump.
I wished we had a laptop. At home we argued by email, even when we were in the same room, because I never wanted the kids to hear us fight. A verbal fire hose, Elliot would start pouring out his legal brief and I couldn’t get in a word, so I’d sit at the computer and pound out a response. Then he’d say “my turn,” push his way into the computer chair and bang out a reply. We’d carry on like this, taking turns at the keyboard, until we petered out. Sometimes we simmered overnight, but by lunch the next day, it would be over.
“Truce,” one of us would email.
“Okay,” the other would answer.
Inside the clinic we did not have the benefit of such high-tech mediation.
“You write all these stories about overscheduled kids and then you go and overschedule yours,” Elliot argued.
“Chemo can’t be the main thing on the calendar!” I spat back.
Elliot was the one who taught Alex the joy of baseball. It had become their deepest bond. So now, after Elliot created this little baseball nut, he was trying to limit his ability to participate? I didn’t relish the idea of driving Alex back and forth to an 8:00 a.m. practice either, but it wasn’t that big a deal. What I really wanted to do was skip our usual long lazy vacation day breakfast and go to the gym. Between work, chemo, all the household chores and the kids, I never got any exercise anymore. My big indulgence was a once-a-month book club meeting, and sometimes Elliot gave me a sad puppy face when I gathered up my keys for that. As much as I loved feeling so important to him, his dependency could be imprisoning. He had always been clingy, but this illness had intensified his neediness and even made it legitimate.
My mother bear claws were getting ready to strike, just as they did whenever I felt my kids’ best interests under attack. Devon and Alex deserved to have passions outside the house and needed their healthy distractions, especially with all this cancer business going on. They would be little only once. I couldn’t put their lives on hold until Elliot’s situation “got resolved.” That was my euphemism, at least in public or with the kids. Got resolved.
This whole conflict hurt so much because I longed for my kids to love Elliot. I didn’t want them to think of him as the killjoy who came into our lives and said no to the fun things they cared about. What if they secretly wished him gone so they could do as they pleased and have me all to themselves? Then they would be consumed by guilt when he died, as if their wishes had made it happen. I could understand the desire for such freedom. There were times when I thought about how much easier my life would be when all this was over. So much sadder, but easier.
I was fuming silently about all this when a trim, pretty blond nurse with a peppy ponytail pulled aside the cubicle’s sliding door and started to go through Elliot’s chart.
“How are we today?” she chirped.
You don’t want to know, I thought to myself. Elliot was trying to relax in his big soft BarcaLounger. I was balancing on the little hardwood chair squeezed in there for the patient’s hand-holder. The cubicle was so cramped I had our jackets and his knapsack in my lap. I stewed about this too. The clinic’s brochures all talked about how the caregiver needs support, but my chair was too rigid, upright and angular to be comfortable. While Elliot could nap for the hour or two of this infusion, I had to keep shifting positions. I couldn’t help resenting the fact that nobody cared if I got any rest. I was the one who would drive us back through rush hour, who would have to make dinner while Elliot was sleeping, who had to make sure the kids got their tests signed and dentist appointments booked and presents ready for the next bar mitzvahs. These chemo trips ate up the whole day, what with waiting for the blood test results, the doctor, the drugs to be mixed and an infusion room to open up. And it was like that every two weeks. Of course it could be much worse. Elliot could be even sicker. Or he could be a child. But for the moment I wanted to flip the finger at such perspective and rage.
“So Mr. Pinsley, do you have any nausea or diarrhea?” the petite nurse asked as she filled out the routine questionnaire on symptoms. “Any tingling? Numbness? Mouth sores?”
“What about irritability,” I burst out. “Why don’t you ever ask about that?”
The nurse was taken aback. I didn’t care.
“And why don’t you ever ask how I am? Why is everything always about the patient? What about the exhausted family who has to take care of him?”
Somebody else’s IV monitor beeped with urgency.
“I’ll be right back,” the nurse said as she scurried away, surely glad for a reason to flee. Elliot and I sat in
tight-lipped silence.
The nurse returned a few minutes later to jab a needle into the port in his chest and get his IV started. She must have thought me such a shrew, giving my husband a hard time while poison pumped into his veins. My cheeks burned with anger and shame and disgust at my lost temper, but it’s impossible to go through so much stress, for so long, without ever fighting. Still I was haunted by the possibility of infinite regrets if something horrible should happen that very night. Would I want these to be our final hours together? That question, always present, put an awful lot of pressure on every single encounter.
What I was discovering, alas, was the strain of living each day as if it could be Elliot’s last. It puts a mountain of stress on a marriage, and a family, when one person’s needs are so intense and undeniable. There’s no balance to the negotiations that are an integral part of resolving the competing demands of normal, everyday life.
Elliot needed me. He needed me to drive him home, to make his food, to get his medicine from the drug store. He would need me in two days to unhook his IV. We would have to make up soon enough. This was too hard a road to travel without getting mad at each other sometimes, but it was even harder to go it alone.
And so, as I drove my drowsy husband back over the George Washington Bridge, I gave in, took the fall, apologized. I just couldn’t bear to let the quarrel drag out.
“I’m sorry, we’re both just too tired,” I said. He nodded, put his hand on my knee and closed his eyes to doze.
And the next morning I took Alex to baseball.
It wasn’t the last time this issue flared up. Any conflicts between us usually centered on who came first, my husband or my kids. I was stuck in the middle, torn between them, and I got tired of being the diplomat. Maybe if we’d been together longer we would have worked all this out already. We’d been married only six years when Elliot got sick. I read once it takes seven years for a stepfamily to feel like a unit. In some ways, his illness became a crucible. It amplified his needs and forced me to stand up for my kids when they deserved my time and attention. Maybe that’s the key to a good marriage—emerging from negotiations with respect instead of resentment. Maybe a marriage is like a muscle that you have to strain and flex and stretch to strengthen. If you just let it lie there, comfortable, it becomes lax and weak.
