For 11 years, my husband, Tom, and I grappled with these dilemmas first because of his lymphoma and for the last five or six years because of his prostate cancer. We knew, of course, that there were millions of other couples in similar situations, but that didn't help much. We had to juggle each other's needs -- and each make sense of our own -- with every up and down of the cancer roller coaster.
He had a need, which was sometimes tough for me, to minimize things and to remain fiercely independent. I was more emotional.
He wanted to go through his first chemotherapy infusions alone, reading his physics journals and his newspapers. I wanted to be there. That's what "good" wives did. But this particular man felt my particular presence would overly dramatize things. He could do better, he felt, pretending that he was just sitting there reading, as usual, even while powerful drugs dripped into his arm.
So I let him. I developed a kind of rule: W e worked as a team, but he was the patient, so on big decisions, he got two votes and I got one. Once, though, because he had seemed more anxious than usual before an infusion, I showed up at the hospital uninvited. That time, we were both glad I did.
Like Elizabeth Edwards, Tom, who died last year, was amazingly generous in encouraging me to keep up my own life, almost to the very end, when I did drop everything. So, for year after uncertain year, he would tell me to keep working, keep swimming, keep singing with my singing group, keep going to my book group, keep going to see my grandkids. All of which I did, with some guilt, but also, to be honest, with considerable relief. Unlike Tom, I had the luxury of getting away from cancer once in a while, and I like to think it helped us both that I did.
Still, I asked him over and over how, given his situation, he could be so generous. I didn't think I would be. Tom didn't seem to see it as generosity. He saw it as protecting his best asset -- me -- from despair and burnout.
