Pulled Together and Apart

Kim’s cancer diagnosis, like many different kinds of health challenges, instigated two opposite experiences at the same time. On the one hand it brought us closer together as a married couple, but on the other hand it drove a wedge between our shared experience of life together.
 
There is something about an existential crisis that can drive people together. This began already early on in our marriage with my own health struggles. We spent countless evenings together in my small hospital room just sitting, waiting for my transplant. I became totally reliant on her for everything in life, and she in turn leaned into that intimacy. We were each other’s team, the ones who knew and experienced the truth of every moment we suffered through. And the same then happened during Kim’s cancer journey, although the roles were reversed. I became her champion, her voice, her support. I sought to watch out for her, support her and serve her in all the ways she needed, just as she had done for me (although I’ll admit she did it much better than I did. We always joked, I made the better patient, she the better caregiver). But the challenge brought us closer together. So many times, in the thick of the challenge, we just wanted to be alone, together.
 
At the same time, her diagnosis drove a wedge of experience between us. As much as we had now both played the respective rolls of caregiver and patient, we also became aware of the way that the patient and the caregiver experience the challenges differently. Each has their own journey, their own challenges.
 As caregiver, though you are an intimate witness to everything happening, you are also not able to fully enter the cancer experience itself. I have my own story of the horror of Kim’s chemo treatments, her surgery and recoveries, but I was not the one in the chair receiving the poison, not the one on the table being cut. For me, the diagnosis did not end in death. I never had to imagine my own death or what life would be like for my loved ones afterwards. This was her cross to bear, and hers alone. I had my own struggles and cross to bear, but they were different.
 
And so, though in some ways the sickness brought us closer, it also drove up apart in that it set us on separate journeys, cut us off from each other in some very real and intimate ways. I tried as best I could to help carry the weight of her diagnosis and to be there in any way I could. I tried to help lift by listening, and providing presence by simply sitting next to her. The weight of burden she was under was crushing. But while she suffered, I was becoming more and more aware of my relatively  good health, strength and ability. In a strange way, the sicker she got, the stronger I felt. We were going in opposite directions. Kim’s cancer in some ways shut us off from each other, we lost something of each other through the different experiences we had of it. And as she got mortally sick, in the end, the cancer pulled us fully apart, with the gulf of death between us. When she breathed her last, I continued breathing. As her heart stopped, mine beat on, with each beat now moving me further and further away from her, from our life together.
 
On the one hand, her journey brought an intimacy deeper than we had ever experienced, an intimacy deeper than friendship or love. It was an intimacy of being, forged in suffering and sickness. On the other hand, it set us on opposing paths, one of death, one of continued life.

We had incredible moments of joy and fun over the five years that Kim lived with cancer, and often times it was not in the forefront of our mind and we could live “normally.” But also, we could never fully forget. It was accounted for in most major decisions during those years, even when she was in remission; it set the tone for long seasons of life, and it gave us roles and journeys neither of us wanted to have.