by Bruce Feiler
I arrived at this day with some trepidation. On the one hand, the daily assault on my body that began last July has finally ended. On the other hand, we are no longer actively attacking the problem. We have given my body the best treatment it can receive, and we have either killed the cancer cells that were likely circulating in my blood, or we have not. And we have no way of knowing. (For this reason I will get multiple scans every four months for the foreseeable future.) In the final weeks I begged my doctors to give me more chemotherapy if they thought it would help. The kids, who more commonly get this disease, are given more. But my doctors felt the possible benefits did not outweigh the considerable downsides and declared me finished. Suddenly time, which since last summer had been completely dictated by the relentless schedule of treatment, would become my own again, both a welcome and an unnerving development.
With the few weeks that have passed, my appetite, my energy, and even my hair have begun to return. (I had an inkling of hair in January, but like those sucker February daffodils that are wiped out by late-season snow, my fuzz quickly got its comeuppance. I am disheartened to report that my hair seems to be returning with bald spots in place, a cruel Groundhog Day curse to relive the arrival of middle age.) And in perhaps the most vivid parallel with pregnancy, my mind has already begun to erase the unpleasant memories. So before my own brainwashing is complete, let me close this chapter of my Lost Year by saying what I said to Linda that final night of chemo: “May you live to a ripe old age, kiss good night the ones you love, and die peacefully in your sleep, rather than go through what I just went through.”
One unabashedly positive outcome of the end of chemo is that the full healing of my surgically repaired leg, which was impeded by the chemotherapy, can finally begin. As Dr. Healey said to me recently, “The clock starts now.” The reason is that until the bone fully fuses with the prosthesis, I must remain on crutches and limit the weight I put on my left leg. Nearly four months after my surgery, I am making considerable progress with my mobility. I now stand in the shower, bend over to put on my shoes and socks, and take short, crutch-aided walks in the neighborhood. Many times I look down at my leg and feel it’s a miracle it’s still there.
But there are other times when I am nearly overwhelmed by the deadweight I am dragging around and the long road I have to endure. The big picture is that one needs three muscles to walk—the calf, hamstring, and glutes—and all of mine are basically fine. I have three principal problems: limited flexibility in my ankle; restricted bending of my knee; and the loss of one-third of my quad. These alternately make sitting, walking, sleeping, driving, and making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches challenging. (My wife reports that I somehow have enough mobility to remove dishes from the cupboard but not enough to place them in the dishwasher.)
I have begun physical therapy, and my team is bullish on my recovery. Last week I was on an exercise bike; yesterday I was walking in a pool. But the process—call it phase four of our war—will extend for at least a year. I’ve been joking that physical therapy means taking it one grunt at a time. Or, as Dr. Healey vividly said of the chorus of aarghs and ughs that comprise a normal session, “In PT, we measure progress in decibels.”
But how about those birthday girls? How are they doing? Back in January I lay awake one night feeling that my protracted stay in the hospital following surgery and subsequent bed rest at home had left me somewhat estranged from the girls. Today, after three straight months around the house and over a month of crutching up and down the stairs, those memories seem happily remote. Tybee and Eden are barreling into their fourth birthday (or maybe I should say careening on their brand-new “big-girl bikes” with training wheels) as feisty, sensitive, cheery, talkative, and imaginative little preteens—oops, little girls. They have weathered an enormous amount of irregularity in recent months, and they have done so with grace and good humor.
I am pleased to report that their color palette has tiptoed beyond purple and pink—Eden has added blue and green; Tybee has added chocolate. Ballet has been augmented with swimming. The washing of hair and the brushing of teeth now often pass without U.N. intervention. But their minds most ignite and their giggles most endear when they are making up fantasy games with their imaginary friends, spontaneously inventing verses to a song, or chuckling through a rhyming game at dinner. I knew I had to recalibrate my view of them when I recently found myself talking about “Terrific Tuesdays” and “Wonderful Wednesdays.” “What kind of words are those?” Tybee asked. “They’re a kind of rhyme,” I said. “But rhymes sound the same,” Eden corrected me. I gulped, saw my future flash before my eyes, and proceeded to explain the meaning of “alliteration”…to three-year-olds! I, of course, had to look up how to spell it, but by the next day they no longer did. Eden and Tybee may not yet have to do homework, but we do, just to keep up with them!
And yes, there are differences between the two. Eden is the bolder dancer, the boundary tester, and the seeker of the spotlight. Tybee is the speedier reader, the more beauty conscious, and the melodramatic singer-songwriter. Tybee also appears to be the Internationalist of the two, snarfing up all the German and French books she can get her hands on and insisting that Linda teach her Hindi after a recent stint in India. Eden, by contrast, is the America Firster. Recently Tybee was quizzing me about why I say “I love you” so much. “It’s the special language of daddies,” I said. “Would you like to know how to count to ten in ‘Daddy’?” Then I began to say, “‘I love you. I love you. I love you…’” all the way up to ten. Not missing a beat, Tybee announced, “Do you know how to count to ten in ‘Tybee’?” Then off she went on her own string of “I love you’s.” Eden was having none of it. “Would you like to know how to count to ten in ‘Eden’?” she asked. “One. Two. Three. Four…”
Above all, if you had told me last summer we could get through the brunt of my treatment with only a handful of awkward moments with the girls, I would have wept at the chance. Today, I see that they may even have learned how to be a bit more sensitive, an ounce more caring, a dose more compassionate, as a result of their experience with me. They run to embrace the girl with an amputated leg on the playground. They spot the rabbit with the crutches tucked away in the back of the children’s book illustration. They promise to take care of each other the minute one manifests even the slightest sniffle and have invented a special cheer to make any medicine they must take go down.
A month or so ago I made my first outing with the girls since the surgery in late December. Linda’s mom and I took them for pizza a few blocks away. After dinner, the girls were holding Grandma DeeDee’s hands as we rounded the corner for home. I was bringing up the rear, a block behind, when Tybee suddenly broke away from her grandmother, came sprinting back to me, and offered to help with my crutches. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. A few days later Eden woke up in the middle of the night and came to my side of the bed and told me about some monster or nightmare or little girl fright. She came into my arms for a cuddle, and then I persuaded her to let me walk her back to her room. As I got out of bed, she reached to hand me my crutches. If I could cling to one memory from this last year, it would be me and my daughter, walking down a darkened hall a little after four in the morning, with five little fingers grasping the spongy handle underneath my hand. The crutch at that moment melted from my arm, as it was supporting her instead. I, of course, didn’t need it anymore. I was walking on air.
Us. I mentioned earlier that we tell time by the girlies’ birthday. What I meant was that for Linda and me, April 15 has always been not just about them, but about us, too. That first year it was about Linda making it through the shoals of a high-risk pregnancy, enduring the setbacks of bed rest, and prevailing through the ordeal of giving birth to two six-pound babies within thirty-two minutes of each other. Then it became about surviving our own ineptitude and maneuvering through the Herculean challenges of taking care of two babies when we didn’t know how to take care of one—and still managing to emer
ge speaking to each other. Then it became about the weaning, the potty training, the picky eating—the toddler two-step of terribles and tantrums that we had to traverse in tandem.
And then came this year.
And we made it through that, too.
When Linda was pregnant, every night before going to sleep we had a little poem we would recite to the girls. We both had lines; I’ll put Linda’s lines in italics.
Daddy loves you.
Daddy loves your Mommy.
Your Mommy loves your Daddy.
Your Mommy loves you.
You love each other.
But…
You’re still individuals.
You’re still individuals.
Then we added a kind of countdown clock—our way of encouraging them to stay in Mommy’s tummy for thirty-six weeks, full term for twins.
You’ve been in Mommy’s tummy twenty-four weeks…
Stay in Mommy’s tummy twelve more weeks!
This poem became so meaningful that it was the first thing I uttered to Tybee and Eden on the night they were born—my attempt to calm their tears and dim the din as they made their way into an unfamiliar world. For months afterward, when we put the girls to bed, we repeated our poem and reversed our ticking clock, beginning to log time upward. Nowadays, we recite this poem only once a year, on their birthday, and we will do so again tomorrow night before they go to sleep. They will probably ignore us, or beseech us to read another real poem, or begin the nightly delaying tactics: “Mommy, you forgot my water.” “Daddy, will you sit with us for a few minutes?” “Is tomorrow a skirt day or a dress day?” But we will persevere, put our arms around each other, and start crying before we reach the end.
Because this birthday marks another singular time. These days, when we catch each other’s eye as we dart between some ringing phone and some overboiling pot, when one of our daughters says the most absurd, charming thing, when we hear that lullaby that once drove us batty but now makes us nostalgic, or when one of our arms reaches across the bed in the middle of the night and strokes a shoulder or patch of skin, for the first time in what seems like a very long time, we don’t think only of losing each other. We allow ourselves the flicker of a thought that maybe we have endured the worst. Maybe we’ll get another year. Or maybe many more.
So on what is widely regarded as one of the most dreaded days in America—April 15—we hope you’ll take a moment and smile at this special milestone for us, be a crutch for someone you know who may be hurting, and reach out an arm to someone you love and mark the simple miracle of another year.
And sometime this spring, when a tree near you is blossoming, please, take a walk for me.
Love,
.20.
JOSHUA
Harvest Miracles
THE SKY OVER THE RIO Grande valley in northern New Mexico is wide and round. The striations of clouds that hover over the gorge reach so far to the left and right they seem to arc around the horizon like two arms about to embrace you. The fullness of color at dusk—peach, almond, pink—reminds me of the paintings my four-year-olds have just begun making in which the paint no longer puddles alone in the middle of the paper but spreads to the edge of the sheet. The view here bleeds off the page.
“The sunsets in New Mexico are like no place on earth,” says Joshua Ramo, who should know. A native of Albuquerque, the itinerant author, business consultant, and stunt pilot has seen the sun go down in Beijing, London, Kyoto, Rome, and Provence—and that’s just in the last month. “Twilight here is a spectator sport. People pull over in their cars to watch the sun go down.”
We are sitting in a field of wildflowers on the side of Lama Mountain, a spiritual retreat in the Carson National Forest, 8,600 feet above sea level. A wildfire raced through here a decade ago. A knee-high brush of sage, lavender, bluebells, columbine, and pink nodding onion has sprouted up to cover the ground, but the sky is still scarred by barkless Ponderosa pines. The spirit of renewal is manifest here, but you cannot take in the scenery without being reminded of the ever presence of grief.
Joshua is the newest of my friends and the last of my dads, and he has brought me here on a summer’s retreat to purge me of my chemo, mark the boundary of my treatment, and distill the essence of his advice to our girls.
But there was a catch: First we had to spend a day meditating, fasting, and not speaking.
“You mean you brought me halfway across the country to talk with you for two days only to then not talk to you for a day?” I asked.
“That’s the Ramo way!” he said.
That’s the Ramo paradox.
WHEN I FIRST THOUGHT of the Council of Dads, I envisioned a group of names on a list. The dads were individuals who would have their own private relationships with the girls. But as I started to share the idea with the men, the Council began to evolve. For starters, the dads took action. One sent a magazine subscription; another stopped by more frequently; a third asked for more photos of the girls. As one of them said, “I think it’s part of my responsibility as a Council member to know the girls as they grow up.”
Even more surprising, the men took a keen interest in one another—with equal parts curiosity, kinship, and rivalry. A fraternity developed. And suddenly my notion of a list no longer applied. It was more like a community, a circle, a Stonehenge assembly where the girls could seek relief.
In this circle I had certain figures: my childhood buddy, my camp counselor, my college roommate, my business partner, my closest confidant. But I had one last hole to fill.
“It’s your creative side,” Linda said. “The part of you that’s visual, that photographs, that brings back masks and Bedouin carpets from your travels. You see things in color, not black and white. When the girls ask me why we have a Japanese kimono on the wall, or why your favorite color was orange, I need someone to explain how you looked at the world.”
Joshua is that person.
He is the man who looks around the room and, while everyone else is sizing up one another, says, “Hey, isn’t this beautiful!?” He’s the little brother of the group, the one who lives by his own schedule, whose hair is a little unruly and who shows up for Thanksgiving with a beard just when Mom thinks he’s finally cleaned himself up. He’s the maverick, who stares into space instead of doing his homework and who quotes the obscure poet or rock lyric and believes they’re really true. He’s the one who still says “dude” without irony.
And he’s the one the girls all choose because they find him charming.
I first met Joshua six years earlier at a conference on a mountaintop in Utah. A onetime foreign editor at Time magazine, Joshua knew Linda through their shared interest in international affairs. At the time, he was living in Beijing, immersing himself in the study of Chinese. In the next few years, he would rise to become a top China analyst—writing papers, consulting for Fortune 500 CEOs, and eventually offering commentary alongside Bob Costas at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.
With his rock-star pout and rock-climber’s body, Joshua was known to make attendees at international confabs swoon. With his economist’s mind and poet’s soul, he was known to intrigue clients with his Zen-like pronouncements. He looked like a cross between James Dean and Steve Jobs.
He was also a confirmed—and even delighted—bachelor. That night in Utah we fell into a late-night conversation about God, his restless ambitions, and a certain girl from Tibet. When our conversation ended around 3:00 A.M., I went back to my room; he went to the hot tub. For years, Joshua stopped by occasionally when he passed through New York, but Linda and I were up to our ears in sippy cups and diapers.
Then I got sick, and overnight Joshua became a fixture in our lives, a monthly comet and comforting com-patriot. It was during those months that I discovered a new side of him—a side that reminded me of, well, me. He was the man in the bespoke suit who donned a bomber jacket and barnstormed around Namibia in a borrowed plane. He was the hard-driving jet-setter who also volunteer
ed at an AIDS hospice in South Africa. He was the man who loved beauty but was also drawn to pain.
In my year of gray, he helped restore my love of color.
Even as my body suffered, he reminded me to keep my eyes clear.
Linda was moved. “Few people this year were more attuned to your joy and suffering,” she said. “If the girls wanted to know how deeply you feel things and how vividly you view the world, I would send them to him.”
It was that sensitivity I wanted Joshua to convey to our girls. He is the one who would teach them how to appreciate the perfect panorama or the exquisite view. He’s the person who would explain that even when they hurt, they should still find time for wonder. He’s the man who would show the girls how to marvel at the everyday miracles around them.
Joshua would teach them how to see.
“WHY ARE WE HERE?” I asked.
The requisite silence and hunger had accumulated, and we were sitting the next day by a bubbling stream in a cluster of quaking aspens.
