My husband and I were out at dinner with our friends KC and Pete when KC said, “I told Pete the type of woman he should marry if something happens to me.”
We laughed. These kinds of conversations have become increasingly relatable in our mid 50s, — not exactly old but getting there.
I said that if something happened to Danny, I would simply close shop on the romantic front and embrace my single lifestyle, planning trips with fellow widows and taking up pottery.
Who will die first? As each morning brings a sore knee or a stiff neck, and as the obituary section includes names of people who might have once thrown a dodge ball at my head in gym class, the question of who will depart first becomes both tangible and terrible.
We first crossed paths with KC and Pete when I began dating Danny seven years ago. I was in the middle of selling my home of 22 years following a divorce, and they were the buyers. For me and my teenage daughters, it was a time of profound loss and change.
KC and Pete were also a couple who had met post-divorce, and we understood each other immediately. Once, during a snag in the process, Pete called and said, “You’re good people. We’re good people. Can we work this out?”
We did, instantly. It was healing to have them buy the beloved home where my daughters grew up, their tiny fairy forms still haunting the rock patch in the front yard in some parallel universe.
Between bites of average meatloaf and a good pork chop, I told our friends about the time I was told I had cancer and immediately tried to break up with Danny, about a year and a half after we had started dating.
I had a long history of cystic breasts, so when a radiologist saw a lump and referred me to a breast surgeon, I felt no particular apprehension. I had Danny drive me to the breast biopsy appointment with the promise of a good burger afterward.
He waited patiently in the lobby, flipping through his phone, while I went to meet with the physician.
The breast surgeon, an older man with receding hair and three decades of experience, entered the room and sat in a chair beside me. His face showed concern even though he had not yet performed the biopsy.
“My dear,” he said, “I am afraid this is probably cancer. I don’t want you to worry because it is an early stage. We will treat it aggressively, and you have nothing to worry about.”
I was in shock. People in my family have heart attacks, not cancer. Big heart attacks at 65, smaller ones at 80, and then we hang in there, eating dinner at 4:30 p.m. and wearing tracksuits until close to 90. This man was obviously in the wrong room, talking sympathetically to the wrong woman.
Then I remembered Danny out in the lobby.
“Danny’s wife died of cancer,” I said to the doctor. “She was just over 40, and they had two young children. He had to watch her get sicker and then pass away. He can’t go through this again. He doesn’t deserve that.”
“Oh my God,” the surgeon said. We sat for a moment, and then he added quietly, “I just told you that you have cancer, and you’re worried about him?”
I was worried about him. Who will die first? Who will be left behind, blind with grief and loss, navigating the empty side of the bed?
The biopsy was a blur, as was the conversation between Danny and the surgeon. The long ride home, though, I remember.
“We need to break up,” I said. There was no way anyone should suffer that cancer caregiver role twice in one lifetime. “I love you, but this is over. You need to leave me.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
“We definitely need to break up,” I said, imagining him hearing all those cancer terms again, watching the treatments and dealing with the hair loss, taking in the smells of hospitals and sickness. “This is over,” I said again, “and you should leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
As we pulled into my driveway and sat in the car outside of my house, I said, “This is the last time you’ll see me. I can’t ask this of you. I love you and will miss you, but this is for the best. I’m setting you free.”
“We’re not breaking up,” he said. “I love you. We’ll get through this.” Then he looked at me and said, “I’m hungry, and the only thing that’s going to happen right now is that I’m going to go inside and make us sandwiches.”
And that’s what he did.
We ate together quietly, side by side. I did not talk again about breaking up. He wanted to stay, for better or worse, and I badly wanted him to want to stay.
I spent the next week thinking about what this diagnosis would mean for my life. Large or small cancer was still cancer. Once a cell has gone haywire in your body and learned how to replicate itself in a campaign against you, can you ever feel safe? I thought about the large mass in my breast and pictured the cells marching like fire ants on a raging tour of my interior.
Five days later, while I was driving, the surgeon called to tell me I did not have cancer. I had a fibroid-like mass with a jagged surface resembling cancer’s starburst shape. He had two radiologists confirm this.
“I am so very sorry,” he said. “This was a lesson for me. Always wait for the test results.”
That moment at the wheel is still perfectly preserved in my mind, the flood of relief, the blinding joy. I will die someday of something, but it probably won’t be from this. The lesson for me was that Danny was a partner for the long haul, however long or short this life might be.
By the dessert course with our friends, KC and I bemoaned the weight gain of menopause while devouring caramel whoopie pies. KC shared details of a close friend’s comeback from a serious stroke. We talked about strokes, heart attacks, aneurysms and other things that go bump in the night to upend a life.
We asked each other what condition we’d want to keep living in. Would you want resuscitation or nothing if you were no longer the person who, days before, had enjoyed eating whoopie pies and grumbling about menopause?
Who will die first? Will you be by my bedside, holding my hand, or will I be by yours?
In our first year of dating, a complicated but beautiful time, I sent Danny a poem by the English poet Robert Browning that included the lines: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.”
We were in that gossamer period, peaking in our lives in some indefinable way before the start of a decline. The growth of new love feels like a return to youth. That pulse-quickening, deliciously anticipatory feeling before a date is not far removed from the excitement of the first time a boy came to pick me up for a homecoming dance. Those endless conversations and deep connections are a youth serum.
Like all elixirs, the effect is temporary. That state of suspended animation cannot last or hold back the tide of aging. Poets understand that as youth recedes, self-knowledge peaks before the final curtain call. “The first” is the lush beauty of a young body mixed with uncertainty, self-doubt, folly, pride and mistakes.
“The last” is paper-thin skin over weary bones combined with clarity, humility, reflection, gratitude and forgiveness.
The best that is yet to come is this. When Danny and I are old, I’ll want what I have now. Sharing warm mugs of steaming coffee on a cold morning. The pleasure of his still-handsome face, our old jokes, the rolling of the dog with his bone, the breath in our healthy lungs and the warmth of the sun’s rays through our kitchen window. Everything else is gravy.
When dinner is done, we and our friends embrace in the parking lot. It may be months before we reconnect with them between the needs of grown children, the long-ignored colonoscopy and the last vestiges of work as retirement dances in the distance. We say “Goodbye” and “I love you,” because if age has taught us anything, it’s never to miss the chance to share the tenderness of our still-beating hearts.
Beth Apone Salamon, who lives in Bethlehem, Pa., is the director of communications and public affairs at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
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