A Maze of Grace

Luckily, the grace kept being amazing. I reached out for help in a way that I never had before in my life (and frankly hope never to need to again). Some friends said they were willing to help but they honestly didn't know how and I had no clue how to direct them. There were some little things like some friends just letting you vent, there was my friends Barbara and Meetesh who showed me some of the things they had done to let their house be more kid friendly for their child as they got to Kiana's age, they also inspired me to put in a pull up bar and told me to pull myself up when feeling bad (in a very short time I really increased how many I could do simply from following their advice). My friend Chad talked me into committing to going to Duke, something I honestly considered walking away from and not knowing what my long term prognosis is was because depressingly I kept wondering why it mattered anymore. Friends from the running group knowing that I worked well with deadlines and commitments would get me to commit to making the running group knowing that my word to them would get me there even if I had no desire to run. A friend of mine Russell from the Ship of Fools sponsored my first 5k, which I would win. Friends from ultimate, high school kids on a team called HIP talked me into playing a tourney with them (which we won), a friend from Vancouver flew me up there to spend the weekend with him. He was also a single father and we traded some stories and ideas. Lonely times were there but it was good to not do them alone.

I was confused about how life had nearly been ripped out of my head and hands in a literal sense and then how much more of it had been ripped out of my head and heart in a far worse sense. But slowly I kept re prioritizing and started doing things that made me be grateful that I was still alive. I made a list of people I had wronged in any significant way and called them to apologize, taking a therapeutic tip from the alcoholics anonymous approach. As the divorce negotiations continued, I let go things that were financially as much as I thought was reasonable and argued for things like having the first Thanksgiving apart with my daughter, the first Christmas apart, her first Easter apart, her first Spring Break. I had tried so hard to get back to my family but my wife has still had left. Still, I tried to grasp firmly that value that family is what gave survival meaning. I got actually all of those without much arguement and gave up some financial stuff figuring money was by far a much smaller thing to argue about. It's odd how growing up poor made being willing to be less financially prepared so stressful after the diagnosis and so easy after the surgery in the divorce conversations.

I got the tattoo that I had decided to get, a lion family redesigned to where now it was only the lion and the lion cub. Several friends would make a similar joke that I eventually would echo, that's how it had to be because the Lioness had gone hunting. The original tattoo artist had moved out of town and the new one that I talked to upon seeing what I wanted redesigned said "Oh it'll be better with just the two anyway." I think she meant that in the design and artistically but it was tough to not absorb it in other ways. I did this on our 10th anniversary and it was heart breaking because every other anniversary we had both taken the day off and spent it together and now I was symbolically and literally getting meaningful things in my life designed where she wasn't there.

But in the symbolic way that I lived I went through that day and dropped off thank you cards for the worker at the Livestrong Foundation and other key individuals around town because they had not only been meaningful to help me survive but stayed there and kept checking after.

Reprioritizing perception

Emotionally, it was mildly put difficult to just continue to deal with betrayals of huge parts of your identity. There was the person who I considered the closest family member wanting a divorce, the friend who had met more of my family than any other friend and who had also been the friend that named the teams at my hat tourney after some of my family members. This was in addition to me being the nerdy kid whose brain had turned against him. As I let this weigh in on my head my therapist said something as I tried to deal with the emotions about Dre and his girlfriend, "as you know perception is reality and you have to find a way to perceive them where they aren't extra baggage in your head." While I'm sure this may well have been a standard line, the choice of words was ominously magnificent. I'd had a recent surgery in my head to get rid of extra baggage in my head that had a real chance of killing me so I didn't want to put in new baggage that might kill me in its own way.

I don't know whether or not the cancer or the struggles of it had stayed real toKiana's mom. The simple truth is that I didn't simply wear the Livestrong bracelet because the organization was against cancer but because they had helped me individually and so specifically. She would only wear it occasionally saying she'd forgotten that day because it didn't match with her outfit. When she finally moved the stuff she was taking out of our house (painfully to Dre's house), it might have been telling the things that she left at the house: a shirt back I'd brought her back from Duke, the music box I'd gotten her during my tour to California shortly before the surgery (a penguin couple playing side by side since she had always said that we were like penguins mated for life) and the Livestrong Bracelet. Kiana's therapist had also noted that she seemed very disconnected from the fact that we had just gone through a battle with cancer and that we were going through divorce. Friends who had been to our house through this and who had called her reached out to her but very few were able to connect with her. One of the ones who did said she acknowledged that there were mistakes in our relationship and that she wanted to fix some of them but in her new relationship.

To grieve appropriately over both losses of good people, I went through and read the 14 years of correspondence between us. To my huge discredit, I realized that the first few emails she'd sent me after the diagnosis she was pretty panicked and in my trying to keep it together phase I'd not responded appropriately but perhaps in denial of my emotions had simply answered things like that it would be fine. I went through and read the few I'd kept between Dre and I, which interestingly enough the most interaction we'd had was when he was going through his divorce and during the brain cancer stages. I can't say the anger turned off completely or the depression but I wanted to refocus that the present wasn't the only part of my life and that there was a point where they had been very good for me. I thanked them to the air and realized that I'd have to keep working on letting it go because if they worked out we were all stuck with each other as we'd all be a part in Kiana's life.

Then I put that stuff away and I started to do somethings to change my perceptions and get back to my life. I had already constantly worn the Livestrong Bracelet but I kept looking at it more frequently. My badge at work hung on a Duke Lanyard and everyday when I had to waive it in, I'd try to take a second to remember. I put the disc that people had signed at the hat tournament over my office door, I put the plastic brain that my friend Hugh Daschbach had given me at that tournament up on top of my monitor. I hung the gigantic check that people had given me at the Houston tournament up in my house. There was a graphic that had made the Livestrong Logo into an 8 that I contacted the graphic artist and printed it poster size for both my house and my office. The astrocyte stuffed animal that the Imerman Angel connection had sent me hung up in my kitchen. By coincidence or the grace of God, Kiana asked for a Livestrong bracelet of her own but it didn't fit her wrist so she started wearing it on her ankle. I am not sure who taught her to say this but to this day she says that she wears it "because I am happy daddy's alive." A Duke Sticker and a Livestrong Magnet went up in my car. I had a huge success story of life which was that I had stayed alive and I put reminders in so many areas of my life to go "HEY YOU'RE ALIVE!" I put up more decorations of my little girl around the house and around the office. We repainted her room in a color and decorations that she had picked out. I started hanging out with the friends and family who were kind enough to still be cheering even through the awkwardness of divorce. The only decoration I chose that went into Kiana's room was an angel that had engraved on it: friends are angels on earth. And I finally changed the picture in my wallet from one of the three of us to one of Kiana and I holding hands when she was 1 year old. I was alive and I had a lot to live for. That had to be my new perception, my new focus to carve it into my new reality.

Narrating the Senseless

The old human approach has long said that everything happens for a reason. We've had religions, philosophies, psychology, cults, governments and many many things trying to figure out/dictate that reason. Oddly enough I've always said things happen and we find reasons for them. I'd taken a diagnosis of a cancer that has no known genetic, environmental, dietary or lifestyle components well. A divorce immediately after was hitting me much harder. As I went through my wife's list of complaints, some typical of marriage like the way communication, finances and parenting are approached were typical. Others were fairly unique to our own relationship but at the end of the day, the only major change in the last year was the cancer (and Dre?). I was going to counseling, a divorce support group, church, on the phone and in person conversing far more than I ever had. I had also put Kiana in therapy where sheand I alternated who took Kiana. Kiana's therapists commented to me that Kiana's mother appeared to have compartmentalized the cancer and divorce thing and neither of them seemed like a big deal to her. She also asked me if her mother had abandonment issues. I wasn't aware of any but her father had been in the military and when we were dating in high school she said if I joined the military she would break up with me. I asked her why she had said this after hearing this from Kiana's therapist and she answered flatly that she didn't want to be with someone who could leave her at anytime.

There's various theories to dreams in psychology but the one I subscribe to is that it's the way the mind incorporates that day's narrative into the life one. This became how I tried to narrate the view of my wife leaving. I called the Livestrong Foundation and Imerman Angels and came to find out that divorce immediately after cancer was far more common than I would have imagined. One of the Imerman Counselors said that it drives some couples closer together and others very far apart. I'll never quite make sense of why it had such opposite effects on her and I because it was clear one of us was very interested in making our family a whole lot better and the other one of us was committed to the idea of being true to yourself to pursue your own happiness, two values that while best served together sometimes have to make some compromises to coexist. As I tried to find a narrative to help all this make sense, this was the one I went with, a sentiment made louder when I found out that Dre's previous wife had been raised in foster care and that perhaps this was how Dre approached life, fulfilling his own needs as the rescuer of girls who were emotionally in crisis mode.

As divorce negotiations went on, the cancer kept being a factor. There was a point where her attorney threatened to pursue full custody where I would only have supervised visits due to my medical conditions. She wanted less than half of the medical debt and no liability for any future incidents (this apparently is sometimes ordered by a judge since it would be considered an existing condition that the person knew about when they left). She appeared to be more interested in finances than anything else. This may well have been an echo of the poor way that I had handled the initial diagnosis. After all a huge concern about me dying was how it would affect my daughter and wife financially (call this a fear from growing up poor) and I had too easily dismissed her desire to take Kiana to wonders and worries, a counseling session for children whose parents are going through cancer. In retrospect, I wish she'd pushed harder or just taken her herself. As I tried to make sense of it all, I reached out to two organizations that helped out a lot Livestrong and Imerman. One let me talk to a counselor and the other to a survivor who'd had a similar experience. It was intriguing that that was much much easier to find than someone who had the same astrocystoma diagnosis.

Waking up from surgery had reminded/taught/encouraged the values I now realize I'd rather have. I initially was more flexible about which one of us would have primary custody but was never open to the idea of the 50/50 arrangements not wanting my child to live out of a suitcase. It's funny I was so afraid my family was supposed to have this huge upheaval if I didn't come out as mostly myself from brain surgery and it did shortly after brain surgery but according to her it was because I'd come out exactly the same. The support you get going through divorce is a joke compared to that when going through cancer because in cancer, no one wants you to die but in a divorce plan where one person clearly wants out and one person wants to save a family people a) don't want to be in the middle b) believe in marriage and family and think you should at least try or c) that you do what makes you happy even if makes someone else miserable and you are willing to sacrifice time with your children for it.

People were sad, surprised, encouraged, disappointed, confused as to the fact that I kept holding on for her. But the last thing I'd given her before brain surgery was a card which in hope said, "come grow old along with me, the best in life is yet to be" and the last song I'd listened to was "I want to spend my life with you." Less efficiently, far more excruciatingly I accepted the death of our marriage than I had my death sentence.

I'd gotten my job back (Though as a side note I was making some typing errors like words ending in ign and and being spelled as adn due to those being left right left signals and my left signal still being weaker. I did some typing games to help me get back to at least par on this), I was cleared back to the sports and activities I thought might be gone, I was cleared back to drive and there was a real possibility that I was going to be part of that minority that beats brain cancer (12% nationwide, 18% at Duke) but somehow I was losing the most important part of my life perhaps because I'd never perceived it was in danger till it was too little too late and thus hadn't looked for the best professional to take out the cancerous parts.

As I waited for that significant follow up at Duke, for a while, I kept hoping Shanon would return but realized that wasn't going to happen and just waited for her attorney's draft of the divorce. There had been gallows humor that hadn't gotten me through the cancer and brain surgery waiting stage with positiveness but also with inappropriate jokes. Some of those were told through the divorce stage as well but this forum I'll only repeat those that were connected to all of this
1) Brain cancer messed with your wife's brain more than yours
2) You had brain surgery, qualified for the Boston marathon and it's still not the biggest story of your year.
3) After a night where I kept waiting up from dreams in which things went horrible at Duke and where she had come back to the household, a friend commented well you had really bad nightmares all night long.

Flat Lining

Being on anti anxiety medication was very frustrating but also helpful. While I would only last 3.5 weeks on it before I decided to get off it, it helped me get back on scale. Before that, friends has mentioned that I needed to go to church, go do yoga, get laid, get back to running, get back to ultimate, get drunk, try a new drug, start a new hobby and all types of advice to distract the brain from the problems of the heart. Friends had been worried because I was so far off rhythm that I was suicidal; I wasn't but none of them had ever seen me this down. I had been having nightmares about my wife being gone and waking up after pretty much every sleep cycle. I'd started missing a good chunk of the anti-seizure medication halfway out of lack of motivation and halfway from simply just forgetting. On the nights she had Kiana, me a guy, who had never really drank would take a shot or two of tequila to try to get back to sleep. I all but stopped eating and lost almost 10 pounds where I literally was weighing in at less than the day of the marathon. Let's just say my doctors started to worry about the guy who had come out so fast and well from brain surgery might not have his healing go as well if he wasn't doing the basic stuff much less things like train for a marathon.

It's not that I'd totally given up, I hear that's common and the body goes along with the mind. In fact, there was a single night in which I tried a few of those suggestions: went to my running group, then to my old team Riverside's practice, then over to a friends house where due to the dehydration three or four glasses of wine made me feel tipsy, and then tried a cigarette (it was absolutely disgusting; I can't understand why people do that). One of the girls at this dinner party offered me a 5th option but to my credit (or perhaps lack of confidence who knows), I drove home at that point and realized maybe it was time to get to bed and do so alone. That weekend I also went to church with my neighbors Rick and Laurie where a message talked about how sometimes the blessing in our lives that we expect from parents, spouses end up coming from other places if we would just be open to it for both us and our children if necessary. Friends who echoed that type of message and the medical appointment a few days later for the anti anxiety medication started helping me get back on track.

My affect felt flat, my emotions of various types started missing but for the first time in months I started sleeping halfway through the night. Still, I started running semi regularly, even got a jogging stroller on craigslist. Perhaps by chance or good luck, it was around that time that she filed for divorce, 2 months to the date exactly after the brain surgery, a point where she was why I was trying to survive. I think the time around the surgery we had both realized there were things we needed to address and I came back from survival wanting to change them and she came back wanting to be away from them.

A few days later I would find out she was dating my friend Dre. Her timing and methodology of leaving may have met with the disapproval of some of my friends and family but she had sympathy from all of them and me. This was a high stress time and we're all human at the end of the day and sometimes do things in a poor manner then. As people found out about the Dre factor, people, myself of course included thought he was the biggest jerk ever. This was a guy who had been a friend of mine for years. We both had strong personalities and that had come with some conflict but we'd been in each other's homes. There had been times before the diagnosis where he had been invited to events in my life where no one else but him wasn't family. And after the diagnosis, he was the guy who had named the teams at the hat tourney, the guy who when I had broken down and cried during the thank you was the first one to get up to give me a hug. He was the person whose house I'd ran to when I was discouraged with IT band during the marathon training I had tried twice to run to his house. He'd been at the all in poker game, was one of a handful of people I went out with the night before the marathon. Perhaps, most significantly, he was the guy who had offered up his parents house as a place for my wife and I to stay while I was at Duke since they lived nearby. His parents and mine had both met each other, made meals for each other and each of us less than 2 months before. To this day I still have a picture of our two sets of parents together. He'd come out no North Carolina and met my brothers immediately after brain surgery. He had also called on New Year's eve where my fears of 2011 had made me not celebrate and had tried to get me to come to his New Year's party. Her call would come later and be very comforting and now they were going to be the worst and most painful part of it, far far heavier than the cancer. It would have been one thing if he thought her and I should not be together and was being supportive as a friend but to be dating her crossed so many lines in my both moral compass and social awareness compass. The gut instincts of what I wanted to do were way less than appropriate but going by gut instincts is probably what had gotten them there and so I went to the house of the other friend who had flown from Austin to North Carolina that night.

Well I was already on the anti anxiety medication that night and took a drink or two but let's just say I didn't sleep at all. How could two of the people who had been so tightly tied to helping me get through the diagnosis to the surgery have no concern about the recovery or just about the old codes which we don't violate for a number of reasons? I kept continuing to turn to friends who challenged me to not be pathetic and get up and do it on my own two feet. I never have done that alone but I realized that two of the people who had been very critical through this were no longer available to turn to for help.

Breaking Down

The next few weeks were the scariest of my life. There were plenty of friends, family and medical staff who weren’t happy with my wifeor shocked or disappointed or confused, all echoes of my own emotions. She apparently had started making a list of problems in our marriage dating back to high school and college which she was sharing with people, which frankly were all legitimate but no one could quite understand why she was walking away in this manner or at this timing.

Eventually, a couple of weeks after she left, I would tell her daycare because I wanted them to notice if Kiana was having any weird “side effects” from it. Kiana had apparently told them that mom had left but they had assumed from having interacted with both her and I separately and together with our family unit at school functions that divorce had nothing to do with it. One of the staff thought that the two were staying elsewhere just to give me space to heal and not be overwhelmed by a small child. They were just as confused as I was as the last thing I did on those tours where I visited everyone was give out a picture of our family, my life’s most meaningful thing and the happy hour had been about our dream book, the list of things that two kids had made of what to chase down during life.

Well, the giving space to heal wasn’t true butd I was overwhelmed by the small child and once it started hitting on me that this was a far more dramatic problem than I had initially internalized, I also started panicking. A few friends who thought I’d been putting on a front of bravery about brain cancer were reminded that I don’t have much of a poker face. I started turning to a variety of friends for help with Kiana both because 1) there were lots of things that I had done rarely or not at all that her mom had always done 2) my energy level was still much below my threshold and 4 year olds aren’t just easy to guard.

A few months before, I’d had a seizure and snuck out a hospital to run 8 miles and ran 14 a few days after a brain biopsy. I had gone back to running with less than 2 weeks after a massive brain surgery. It would be over a month after she left before I ran again. While I had problems because of them moving me due to the driving episode, I’d done well at work overall. But with and because I was working so hard to keep it together in front of Kiana, the director of my work department and his supervisor, both sat me down and told me that it was clear that my personal life was affecting my work performance and that if I needed to take some time off that I should immediately or I may well be putting my job in jeopardy. The doctor who had once been tickled to death about my results was now getting concerned about my health. Appropriately enough, I was having tension and heart problems and while the assumption that this was stress related, made some people nervous as I was nowhere near recovered from the surgery itself and the hole in my brain was refilling. My heart being in a different rhytm meant that two critical organs weren’t at their “normal” level. My brain was literally rewiring and both friends and medical staff were concerned that it would rewire around stress and grief. Most of our brains don’t wire as an adult but this is why they tell pregnant women to avoid those things because it could then become part of the hardware of their children.

My wife, in a mode I’d never seen her in, seemed incredibly indifferent about how any of this was affecting me. She made remarks that I can’t imagine saying to anyone I’ve always hated much less someone who I’d shared half my life with like “I don’t give a damn about your medical problems or your medical bills.” My friend Todd, as mild mannered as guys come, sent her a kind email to which she replied, “You don’t know me and you don’t know shit.” In an argument on another day, she stated coldly and flatly “Well I didn’t get brain cancer.” She would add that she’d talked to people who told her how the fact she left was affecting me wasn’t her fault and while I suppose we’re all responsible for our own emotions, I know no human who is an island and has them completely in control. I’d been with this girl for 14 years and I couldn’t recognize her.

I told my neurologist about all that was going on and he suggested that I let Kiana go with her mother or to get a roommate. As much as I hated the thought I tried to make this happen. I tried to call her but she wouldn’t take the call and texted me to turn to my friends and family for whatever I needed. Luckily, life had blessed me with some very good friends and family: people became aware and helped and came over for playdates, to listen and let me vent, to feed me, they came in pairs where one would babysit and the other would go run with me to try to help me reestablish a rhythm, to restore health. But my anxiety and stress levels got so high that I did something by medical recommendation that I never thought I would do, take a prescription without hesitation. I had not taken pain pills for my brain biopsy but now trying to not let my brain rewire incorrectly I accepted a prescription for an anti anxiety medication. I had accepted a death sentence a few months before that now looked that it may be avoided but for the first time in my life, I had to accept that circumstances had overwhelmed my capacity to completely control my emotions. For the first two weeks I was on it, my mother took time off to come and stay with me for two weeks and be a presence in Kiana’s life and mine. My heart breaking had echoed and expanded the cracks into my pride.

Psycho...logical

Sadly it was the second workday after my wife left that I had to have my follow up neuropsychological evaluation. Originally we had done one 8 hour tests but because my brain was still “swollen” and my energy levels were lower we split this up into two 4 hour ones. Both because I was shaken up and because I was scared it would skew the results, I announced that my wife had left right at the beginning of the tests, something that’s now noted permanently in a psychological evaluation.

I tried to focus on these two four hour sessions as best as I could both because I wanted to have the results be “valid” and because the first test had been fascinating and I hoped to still be able to find them that interesting. I worked hard at it and they are all mostly short but I’ll never know completely how valid some of the results were as there was no way to turn off my mind from drifting to this new enigma. Both the first psychological and the second one stated that I was distracted. Now you can diagnose me with ADD or you can accept my excuse that the first time I was distracted by trying to figure out the test and the second time I was distracted by life itself.

It was bizarre how the possibility of losing my wife was scaring me more than death and cancer had. I’d always approached life as if I knew I was dying but I had spent every second of the last several years and definitely the last few weeks thinking that when it came, something that I thought had moved up, it would be next to her, holding her hand, fulfilling the old vow of till death do us part, keeping the in sickness in health part. We took a break during the psychological and I sat there and wrote down all the things I’d done wrong during the marriage small or big and tried to find a solution to address them with her. She actually called during the test and I hoped to talk her into just come back home but at the end of the day rationality and logic aren’t the drivers of companionship and emotions. I had thought that 2010 was one of the best year of our marriages until the diagnosis but mainly it was a solitary opinion but where was the better or worse part? And wasn’t it just simply true that our marriage would succeed if we realized that sometimes the better comes through if you stick through the worse part? (Yes I know if you’re reading this you’re starting to wonder if this cancer blog is about to become about my relationship and it’s not but I am trying to process how those two are tied together. I’ve started writing those thoughts separately in a couple of different places addressed to Kiana and her mom, like these writings, make a narrative that helps me deal with it.)

The psychological results would come back about a week later. It had gone very well but there were some shifts and changes both physically and psychologically. The right side of my body was testing weaker, with my right grip being weaker (this may have been true all around as people in my running group could tell that my left leg was carrying me through runs). The shifts in personality were that I was slightly calmer, slightly more impulsive and had slightly higher executive functions. How those three combine I just don’t know and down the lane no one has really noticed any of them except for the calmer one. There had been some memory changes, my reading memory had gone up but my auditory memory had gone down. Everything came out fairly close to where it had previously been but I was told that I would have a harder time both making memories and therefore recalling memories from the time of the surgery forward. I came out mildly retarded in the part of the brain that comes up with unique words that we all know (the ones that have happened to me in real life are abacus, syllabus and totem pole). The tests showed me at an elevated level of depression. I made mistakes that we all see people but that came over night to me with association. When talking about Kiana or her mom I often called them the other’s name. When referring to the surgery I often called it the marathon. How this all works in the brain I don’t know but it has been interesting to have these changes continue and be fairly permanent. My fine finger coordination was down but apparently “unless you’re a crocheter, you’re going to not notice it.”

There was an upside that was very good. My IQ in the first psychological had been in the 93rd percentile. While mostly people who had read the first one thought this was great I had done this earlier in life and they’d always been in the 98 and 99th percentile. This one took me back to the 99th percentile so it was glad to be thinking better now??? The neuropsychologist believed that the tumor’s hyper activity may well have been blocking a variety of things and that removing the tumor was going to help various areas of life. When he said that, it was definitely hard to believe.

The neuropsychologist suggested some therapists and said to go with them because he said therapy and neuropsychological tests are less effective on “highly functioning” people without a very intelligent therapist. I had not gone to any therapy during cancer suspense but I called all those guys the next day.

Backing Out

The next day we shopped for some more things to get around the house and continued to install them. My friend Linda Kudo flew in to give us a hand while I still wasn’t cleared to drive. She thought that I was recovering so well that maybe she didn’t need to come after all and that was nice to hear when I was starting to feel so confused about what I’d fought to stay alive for.

She was there two days and the friends kept coming to help and then the second day after she arrived, My wife and I continued the argument and I didn’t have the energy left so this interaction instead of the long fights where I had hoped that I could talk her into having a matching tattoo or having another child or something where I felt validated about having wanted so bad to be with her, I called it a night and took my daughter to bed. The argument was about to start again and in an adolescent move, I locked the door just trying to get some space. Ironically, my wife had been insisting on space for a few days and in my desire to have some reassurance that coming home to her had been worthwhile, I had failed to do so asking for an hour or two late at night for some validation. It’s sad and ironic how sometimes what a relationship needs ends up being exactly the opposite of what we do.

I woke up a few hours later and she was gone. I thought about calling her right then but more intelligently emailed her asking where she was at 2:00 am or whatever it was. That email was never responded to. I didn’t know what to do.

The next day, Linda helped me do some painting and we hung out with Kiana and it would be till early afternoon before I would mention anything. I kept hoping it was just an emotional outburst and she would calm down and come home since we had some commitments on Sunday with friends but the longer the day dragged out without any response to texts or emails, I couldn’t figure out what to do so I told Linda. It would turn out that she had heard from my friend Dre that they thought we were making house repairs because we were planning on splitting up and selling the house. I’ve never figured out where that perspective came from.

Linda would leave almost a week earlier than she had planned because she thought that our marriage had been on the rocks for a while and she didn’t want to be in the middle of the drama. This wasn’t my perception of it but apparently it was very different than hers who within a few days would state she wanted a divorce. Friends who had seen her a few days before and after Duke and myself were blown away. Susan sat she had talked with her about how she was doing and how we were doing and felt reassured. Dre’s parents had complimented our relationship and the nurses had talked about how it was clear I had affection for her. But obviously whatever language I had tried to communicate it and my own deficiencies in how I handled marriage were more damaging than I had realized. Back to back emergencies were arising.

Losing Control

I still wasn’t cleared to run or pick up Kiana so I was missing some of my own stress relief but I kept doing rehab on the Ipad. Everyday I kept getting better at these games but with almost none of them was I at a presurgery level. Perhaps the right attitude would have just been to be glad about the likely prognosis or to be alive without any major complications but I wasn’t fighting just to be alive but to get my life back so I kept doing this because I had been told that the first several weeks were the most critical to reconnecting the synapses. Like any other injury, initial rehab was more important than anything else.

However, I was still worried about my wife so I did things that I hoped would impress her. We had always kept refrigerator magnets because she was a creative writing major and it helped her express herself. For the first time ever, I put them all in order alphabetically so they would be easier for her and others to find. In retrospect, it’s odd how some of these things look. She had for the first time ever in our marriage, after the diagnosis, reorganized every room in the house. I was now trying to organize tiny little things. Perhaps she had been afraid of me dying and now I was afraid of what I had fought to stay alive for, living with her. It’s intriguing and silly the things we try to do when we realize we have absolutely no control of some of the most meaningful things in life.

The friends kept coming, the house kept improving in looks and we continued to make it “ours.” People like Kevin Fritz, an electrician friend was helping me put in new light fixtures. Dre, whose parents house I’d stayed at in Duke, was helping us pick out some tile to put on the fireplace. Since I was not going to have to follow up I just sank every cent of our tax refund into the house.

Susan and I had gone by to see the tattoo artist and were excited about the lion family he would be tattooing in a few weeks. Susan left one day and it was the one night that she and I would have by ourselves and somehow, for reasons I may never understand, the tension had been rising after the surgery had been cleared. That night my wife again brought up how she wanted to leave. I yelled about how I was getting a tattoo of her on my arm, how she was the center of my life. She argued back that I was getting the tattoo for me, not for her. I tried to argue I’d spend the recovery week of Duke with pleasant dreams of her, trying to figure out what to do for our 10th anniversary. She said that I had no idea what I was talking about. The tension kept rising, she walked away from me and I walked after her and then she slammed a bedroom door in my phase. And then, in the moment I’m most ashamed of in my life, I was less than physically appropriate with her. I immediately apologized and handed her my cell phone and told her if she wanted to call the police or call anyone I was ready to accept consequences. She cried but didn’t call anyone. We talked, cried, were awkward for a couple of hours and then went to bed together and I had tons of shame. I could sit here and try to tell you that I’d been on steroids for 10 days or that I hadn’t slept for a solid night in almost 3 weeks but explanation is no excuse. I was just wrong and if I could take any moment back in my life, I would. And if you’re reading this, please consider it a public apology. We went to bed that morning and the next morning had breakfast where she said I love you but we were both clearly shaken up.