Sixteen years ago, I coerced my husband into doing something crazy. I had just come back from a doctor’s appointment that hadn’t gone at all well.
When I arrived at our shack, I was crying like a baby. I mean this quite literally. I was crying so hard, I could not form a word.
We both found my speechless sobs distressing. My sweet husband’s dark eyes were widening with horror.
Just a few months earlier, his mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d already learned about the flipside of love.
My husband loved me. I now knew he was going to lose me, was losing me already, one little brain lesion, one little spinal cord lesion, at a time.
Until that day, I hadn’t heard of multiple sclerosis. I didn’t know for certain if an MS diagnosis was better than a terminal cancer diagnosis, or far, far worse.
I wanted it to be better. Far better. As much for my husband’s sake as for my own. I wanted to comfort the poor guy, who was standing there, unflinching, receptive, gathering his strength to endure the unendurable, in whatever form it would turn out to take. I wanted to tell him, the love of my life, “I’m not going to die.”
Which was, of course, both the immediate truth and a big fat lie. I wanted to say it anyway, but I was blubbering so hard, even I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
I knew MS wasn’t terminal. The doctors had been very clear on that point. I was going to die with MS, but not necessarily of MS. When I eventually die, it will most likely be due to some other cause.
But to deliver even this cold comfort, I would have to quit bawling. I would have to pull myself together. I would have to form some words.
We had the same idea at the same time.
My husband handed me a pen. The man can be counted on to carry a pen. And that’s when it occurred to me that I didn’t have to do the explaining. As he rooted through our rotting shack for a blank piece of paper, I rooted through my cluttered pocketbook for the wrinkled MS Society brochure.
Then we made our exchange—a sheet of blank paper for a printed pamphlet.
I wrote on the sheet of blank paper, “I’m not going to die.” When I looked up, he was scanning the pamphlet.
The look we exchanged said it all. We were in deep trouble.
Oddly enough, I didn’t sob harder.
Already, I started to feel better. The good news was, I wasn’t in it alone. And yeah, that was also the bad news. But as bad news went, it was at least bearable bad news. For me. I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly be bearable bad news for my husband.
Lucky for me, my husband exceeds the boundaries of my imagination.
The man was capable of deciphering the pamphlet. More so than I was. I have a head for nuance. I have no head for statistics. The nuance of the pamphlet was ominous. It conveyed this the-glass-is-an eighth-full kind of optimism that I found highly suspect.
My husband has a head for nuance, but he also has a head for statistics. He could at least calculate the specific inverse of an eighth full. He isn’t bullied by statistics. Conjecture outright bores him. The guy has a constitutional aversion to freaking out about the future. This quality has served us very well. Which is not to say the diagnosis did not scare the hell of him, out of us.
My husband and I had always intended to have a kid “later.” “Later” meant after we’d both finished grad school. “Later” meant after we’d upgraded our living quarters from a $375/month shack.
The MS Society pamphlet blew apart our concept of “later.” We were just kids. To us, “later” had always meant, kind of like now, but slightly better. But even according to the optimistic pamphlet, “later” meant, kind of like now, but an indeterminate fraction worse. And then worse still. And then worse still.
As I saw it, this meant only one thing. We couldn’t count on “later.” If we wanted a kid, we had to have one immediately. Like, while I could still push a carriage. Like, while I could at least lift a baby to my breast.
Gentle reader, “later” turned out to be a whole lot rosier than my mildest conjectures.
Our son is fifteen now. The child has never spent so much as a night in a shack. (Wait ‘til grad school, kiddo.)
We recently took our healthy son with us to Iowa City for the 75th Anniversary of The Iowa Writer’s Workshop. We gave him a tour of all the places we’d lived while I’d studied there, from the crazy apartment on North Dodge in the back of Hilltop Tavern, to the farmhouse in Swisher, to the metal house on G Street, to that sorry, ramshackle shack.
My husband took a picture. He said, “I can’t believe that place is still standing. I underestimated so many things about the world.”
So did I, my love. So did I.
