"My Marriage Didn't End When I Became a Widow"
Moving piece in The New York Times by Lucy Kalanithi, whose husband died of cancer in March at age 37. An excerpt from the first part:
I had loved Paul since we met in 2003 as first-year medical students. He was the kind of person who makes truly funny people laugh (as an undergraduate, he visited London in a full gorilla suit -- posing by the gates at Buckingham Palace, riding the tube). But he was also deeply intellectual. He considered following his master's degree in English literature with a Ph.D., but entered medical school instead, yearning, as he later wrote, "to find answers that are not in books ... to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay."We married on the shores of the Long Island Sound before driving across the country to start our residencies. In the hospital, we worked 80-hour weeks; outside of it, we hiked the winding trails near our California home, holding hands and planning our future.
Then, 10 years after we met, while we were finishing our final years of training at Stanford, Paul's health began to falter. After a battery of tests, we learned that his back pain and weight loss were not symptoms of exhaustion, but metastatic lung cancer. It was now our turn to face mortality and, more than ever, to follow the question of what makes human life meaningful.
...And Paul began to write. First, an essay -- about training as a neurosurgeon and then learning that he had only a year or two to live -- which led to a book proposal. When chemotherapy ravaged his skin, even typing became painful. I found silver-threaded, conductive gloves that protected his cracked fingertips while still allowing him to use his laptop's trackpad as he lay in bed.
By the time he had become too sick to continue working in the operating room, he was writing furiously about his struggles -- as a physician, a lover of literature and a terminally ill patient -- to continuously seek and live his values. Returning to writing kept him serving others and helped him to live well. I believe he died fulfilled -- not feeling he was leaving everything he wanted, but having everything he wanted.
This was lovely, thank you for posting it. I have a good friend whose husband of 33 years died on Christmas Day. I will send this to her in a couple of weeks.
Sheep Mom at January 10, 2016 8:01 AM
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