After You Read

You have just read Living Our Dream, Almost.

At the end of the last chapter, Darrell and I believed we were ready. We had survived the collapse of much of the life we had built. We had found each other again. Our marriage was strong. Our work had changed because we had changed. We were living with greater peace, less ego, and a clearer sense of what we wanted to give to the world.

Then came the gala. Darrell stood before the room in his three-piece suit, smiling as he spoke about our history and William Penn. He was magnificent. He was also doing something I hadn't expected. He told the audience that the work was no longer about him. He said it was about me and what I was accomplishing. He was stepping back and pushing me forward. I didn't particularly like it. I still needed him.

But everything seemed to be opening. The gala was a success. We had projects ready to go. I had my history degree and screenwriting education behind me. I was energized and inspired. We were ready. And then life spoke again.

I Needed the Punchline First

The day after the gala, I flew to Los Angeles for the American Film Market. My sister was dying of breast cancer, so I needed to see her too. Two weeks later, while I was still in California, Darrell collapsed in pain. He thought it was food poisoning. I made him promise to go to the emergency room if it happened again.

By November, I was back at our place in the Shenandoah Mountains, writing and working on a television series. I was having so much fun. Then my brother called. My sister had died.

I had barely begun to take in that news when Darrell called. He started telling me about being in pain again—how he couldn't move, what position he'd been lying in, when he finally got up. I interrupted him.

“So?” I needed the punchline first. He told me he had gotten up and made the bed. Of course he had. Then he told me he'd driven to Wawa for a mocha. “Darrell, WHAT?” There was silence. “Hon, they say I have kidney cancer.”

I stood looking out my writing window at the brilliant fall scene. A moment earlier, it had been beautiful. Now it seemed to betray my world. I ran next door to tell my friends I was leaving. I threw random clothes into a bag along with my books, scripts, research, and computer. Then I started down a mountain road I had driven dozens of times. I missed my exit and drove fifty miles in the wrong direction before a highway sign finally told me where I was. I didn't recognize the road because, in some important way, I was no longer entirely inside the world around me.

Perfectly Us

When I finally reached Darrell's hospital room, I heard laughter. Darrell, our children, and our friends Bill and Nancy seemed to be having a party. There were snacks, stories, jokes. I stood in the doorway trying to reconcile that room with what had happened inside me on the drive.

Darrell called me to him and wrapped me in the comfort only he could give. He was optimistic. The growth was large, but everyone seemed reassured that kidney cancer was slow-growing. The conversation moved on. They laughed about the doctor's quirks. My mind didn't move on. I took out my phone and began searching. How did they know how fast this cancer was growing? What kind was it? What happened next?

Darrell noticed. “Hon, it's gonna be fine.” I looked around the room. These people I loved were courageous and funny and hopeful. I had spent the drive imagining terrible things. I needed what they were giving me, so I let myself come back into the room. In that moment, we were perfectly us.

The Kildeer Mother Bird

Waiting for surgery gave my fear somewhere to go. I researched clinical trials. I learned standards of treatment. I met with nutritionists. I changed Darrell's diet and made concoctions in my blender that the poor man dutifully swallowed because I asked him to. I became what I called the kildeer mother bird, flapping my wings and screaming, trying to draw the monster away from the one I loved.

Darrell met the same threat differently. On the morning of surgery, he sang hymns in the car. In the dreary pre-op overflow area, surrounded by moans and monitors, he started singing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” as though he were auditioning for Pavarotti. When the surgeon arrived, Darrell turned the pre-op meeting into a photo shoot. The doctor and I exchanged a look. Darrell simply refused to let the gravity of the moment have the whole room. I gathered whatever faith and optimism I could from his.

Then they wheeled him away. We waited eight hours.

This Cannot Be What Happens Next

While Darrell was in surgery, I tried to work. I couldn't quite believe any of it was real. My mind began assembling reasons this cancer could not take him.

Darrell had too much left to do. In the years since our collapse, his thinking had deepened. He wanted to correct things in our earlier work that he now believed could contribute to the very divisions we wanted to heal. He had become less interested in defending William Penn and more interested in what Penn's successes and failures might reveal about us. He wanted to talk about love, power, peace, faith, and what happens when human beings become convinced that their noble purposes justify harm.

He had finally become the person he needed to be to do this work. We both had. Surely all we had lived through had brought us here for a reason. Surely the gala had been the beginning. Surely this could not be the end. I needed that to be true.

Maybe you recognize that kind of needing. Sometimes the mind searches for information. Sometimes it searches for meaning. Sometimes it builds a case from everything we know and everything we love because the alternative is more than we can hold.

I wasn't trying to understand uncertainty. I was trying to keep Darrell alive.

What the Doctor Couldn't Get

The surgery lasted eight and a half hours. The surgeons removed Darrell's kidney and a tumor the size of a football. They also removed his spleen and part of his stomach. The tumor had attached itself to his intestines.

Still, Darrell woke up Darrell. Within days, his hospital room was again filled with people. Friends came to comfort him and often left comforted themselves. He showed off his enormous scar like a boy displaying proof of some great adventure. Then we went home and waited for the pathology report.

When we returned to the urologist's office, I noticed the staff behind the counter. They were watching us. All of them. We walked past them toward the exam room, and something in my body knew before I did. They knew something we didn't.

The doctor came in. She smiled. She let Darrell joke for a moment. Then she began reading the pathology report. I wanted her to get to the end. Finally, she did: “We couldn't get clear margins.” I knew what that meant. The cancer was still there.

Not Our Only Reality

We walked back through the staff area without speaking. I could still feel their eyes on us. But I had done my research. I knew about someone with stage-four sarcomatoid renal cancer who had become cancer-free. That was going to be Darrell. I would do everything I could to make sure of it. And yet those eyes frightened me.

Darrell could see it on my face. “This is not our only reality or truth, hon.” He smiled at me from the passenger seat. I looked at him until I could return the smile.

Then I drove us away from the pathology appointment and into the unknown.

What Else Is True?

There are moments when one reality becomes so enormous that it seems to consume every other one. A diagnosis can do that. So can death. Fear can do it too.

Darrell did not tell me the cancer wasn't real. He did not tell me I had misunderstood the pathology report. He didn't know what would happen any more than I did. He simply reminded me that the terrible thing we had just learned was not the only thing that was true.

I loved him. He was sitting beside me. We were frightened, and we could still smile at each other. The cancer was real. So were we.

If one reality is filling the whole room for you today, you might simply ask: What else is true? Not what will fix it. Not what will make the frightening thing disappear. Just what else is true.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

If one reality is filling the whole room today, what else is true?