Following a departure from an audio-visual company reeling from its inability to finish a new product for which they never completed the software, I engaged in full-time caregiving for my wife as she sank into another recurrence of the ovarian cancer that spread through her body since its first inception in 2005. We’d made it all the way to 2010, passing one of the “life expectancy” hallmarks of five years listed on nearly every ovarian cancer description on the Internet.

And yes, it is a bad strategy to self-diagnose or take anything on the Internet as stock truth. Yet that stuff still trickles back to you one way or another. By 2010 we’d been through multiple surgeries and more chemotherapy treatments than we cared to count. I attended nearly every one of those sessions. She’d park herself in a chair and nurses would tap on her arms to find workable veins. Then came the fluids followed by different sorts of poison chemicals designed to kill the fastest-growing cells in the body. Those were typically cancer cells, identifiable on PET or CAT scans by hot spots or growths. Sometimes an actual tumor would show up. Then our gynecological oncologist would dive into her abdomen or slice a bit off her liver to fight the most obvious and aggressive regions of cancer in her body.

She was perpetually tired and sick during treatments, often experiencing medical side effects as well. Rashes and peeling skin. Chemical burns and reddened ports. The vexations never ended. When treatments ended her hands and feet were still numb from neuropathy. Her hair fell out and grew back, fell out and grew back again. Then it stopped growing back altogether. Toward the end of her journey, she wore wigs that were often itchy and hot. But while she could, she made the best of the hair she had.

One summer when she felt half decent during a remission period, we took off on a trip with our daughter to visit Niagara Falls and tour wine country in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. That first evening, hotels were all booked in Seneca Falls where we’d planned to stay. We didn’t book ahead as our trip itinerary was flexible and we debated how long we should stay in Niagara after doing some touristy things on both sides of the falls. Linda wanted to stay longer but my daughter and were somehow eager to move for reasons I cannot recall. That afternoon, we drove west to Seneca Falls where the hotels were all filled by Upstate New York vacationers. That meant we had to move on to Auburn, where the only available room at a budget chain hotel had a single Queen-sized bed, and the room stank of cigarette smoke. I slept on the floor.

The next day we down Cayuga Lake toward Cornell and Ithaca, we booked a hotel room early and traveled out to wineries. The sun was high in the sky and the air was bright, but the summer air was thick with humidity, and hiding in the shade felt no cooler. At one of those wineries in the hills, I took a photo of my wife and daughter standing together in a field of sunflowers. It was one of those moments when mother and daughter felt bonded. That’s sometimes hard to find when young women are marching through their teenage years and mothers often don’t want to admit where they’d been and what they’d done at that same age. The fear of truth often keeps us apart, yet it’s the one thing most relationships crave. But it’s hard. For all of us.

On that first day in the Finger Lakes, we discovered that the wine from that region was generally sweet. In the heat of summer, it was somewhat hard to swallow. My wife and I both liked dry wines, and there were none to be found. In her post-chemo state, those sweet wines tasted like bad candy, but she drank them anyway. We were making the best of it.

That felt about right because life itself wasn’t that sweet at the time. Gripped with a conflicted sense of conscience about my work struggles and more, I struggled with impatience during the early phases of that trip. We’d had a great visit with my younger brother and his family along the way in Ohio, sharing dinners and playing in their pool with his two girls. But after that, my sense of accumulated anxiety set in, a state compounded by the vagaries of ADHD. That angst was the result of long-term caregiving and financial struggles back home. I was also the prime caregiver for a father deeply compromised with apraxia and aphasia, both effects of his stroke. We could not talk directly about his needs, but I still called home daily to make sure his live-in helpers had everything he needed. I often felt pulled in many directions. Living in the moment was tough.

That first morning in Ithaca, I awoke early and was aching to get outside on a hike or something with my wife and daughter. Instead, my daughter just wanted to sleep in a little. Who could blame her? She was never an early riser and we’d bounced along for days. Plus, my wife was anchored next to the bed with her morning coffee and grapefruit. I stood in the doorway of our hotel room fussing about what to do, and snapped in anger, gathered up my gear, and went running in the damp morning air. I spent five miles regretting going on that trip at all. When I was done, and the anger subsided, I returned to the hotel room and apologized to my wife and daughter for my being an asshole. The hurt was still palpable. That’s one of the tarsnakes of life. It’s hard to take back the ache of words spoken harshly.

Heading south

Fortunately, that run cured the worst of my depressive mood and we agreed that the New York part of the trip should be over. “Let’s go down to visit my brother in Lancaster now,” I suggested. Off we went. Along the way, we stopped to visit one of my favorite aunts, one of my father’s sisters, in Binghamton. She was a writer by trade and we always had tons to talk about. My wife and daughter liked her manner and we shared a minty lemon tea on a shady porch for part of an afternoon.

My uncle sat down and shared a hilarious story about how he’d been carting away chipmunks from their yard that summer. He’d catch them in traps and dump them in a nearby forest. The ethics of that plan were not part of the discussion, as he’d been at it a long time and there were still too many chipmunks in the yard. One incident left me laughing the rest of that afternoon. “I caught one in a trap and was driving over to the woods when I felt something on my shoulder,” he chuckled. “I looked to the side and there was a chipmunk sitting right there,” he said, pointing to his right shoulder. “It somehow got out of the trap and I never caught it in the car. All I could do was park the car, open the door, and let it run out when we got there.” Something about that story released the humor hiding away in my soul. My spirits lifted further.

The decision to head south after the New York sojourn was therapeutic. We relaxed during the trip through the eastern mountains and arrived in the little town of Willow Street where I’d grown up going to elementary school through junior high. I had fond memories of our house at 1725 Willow Street Pike and pointed it out as we drove past on our way to my brother’s house south of town. To some degree, it felt like coming home.

My brother’s house sat next to farmland on the east side of Willow Street. We grilled dinner and listened to crickets sing as we sat on the back lawn after dinner. His wife has a calm, intellectual manner about her and my brother wrapped my wife and daughter in studied conversation, his specialty. For years he invested in postage and cards and time, writing and sending her encouragement cards through all her treatments. He’d often find ugly cards on purpose to make her laugh, even sending particularly bad designs as “repeats” while branding them “classics.” He’d write wise or witty messages on the back of each card composed in the signatory angular handwriting that I’d always loved. To him, I’m forever grateful for the support and long-distance care that he provided to her. They’d sometimes share extended phone calls, catching up while drinking margaritas.

In many ways that trip east restored some hope for all of us. It made her survival seem possible during the middle stages of her cancer survivorship journey. That’s the right thing to do when facing life-threatening challenges. Immerse yourself in the moment and accept that nothing’s perfect in this world.