From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(57)

AT THE TABLE




“You know, you don’t have to do this. People do leave,” Julie said as we sat at The Ivy on Robertson. It was three months after Saro had been diagnosed with a soft tissue cancer that had metastasized to his bone, and he was in the midst of undergoing indeterminate rounds of debilitating chemotherapy. Julie was my acting coach, friend, and mentor. Even more relevant was the fact that her husband had died when she was in her early thirties, leaving her to raise a son all alone. She knew about grit, adversity, and making the best of the hand you are dealt. She had also faced life-threatening illness herself. “It can be too much, not what you signed up for,” she continued, looking me dead in the eye.

Just two nights before, Saro and I had experienced the lowest point in our marriage. We were holding each other in bed after a particularly difficult week of chemotherapy. His immune system was reduced to so few white blood cells that we could practically have given each of them a name. The situation was dire. So I kissed him as we lay there and ran my hand along his chest.

He moved my hand away and said, “I think you should take a lover.”

“What?” He had never said anything like that. I felt the room spin. “No, absolutely not. No, Saro. I love you and only you. We’re in this together.”

We hadn’t had sex in months. He had been too sick, too weak, too nauseous. Neither of us had spoken about it directly. We just held each other each night and then rolled over, resigned to whatever sleep we could find.

“I will not take a lover. You are my lover. Period.”

“I just don’t want you to suffer so much. You have needs, and I can’t meet them.”

“If you say one more thing, I am gonna kill you. Stop it. Don’t do this. We’re fine.” I put my hand back onto his chest and gave him a kiss. “We will be fine.”

Then I turned from him with a private understanding that we were in new psychological territory. It wasn’t just about fighting for his life; part of this would require fighting for our marriage.

I had just shared that with Julie. I thought she’d cheer me up, say something to lighten the moment, lift my spirits. I had never expected her to suggest I leave him.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded, an odd feeling ghosting up my neck, but before I could discern it another rushed in, anger. I pushed back my plate and clocked a room full of the strident celebrity hangers-on for which The Ivy was known. The setting was absurd to discuss cancer and leaving Saro. I suddenly felt weary. This lunch was the opposite of the easy, breezy girls’ time she had suggested when she had convinced me I needed a moment of levity after months of intense caregiving.

“I’m serious. Leaving is an option,” she pressed on, undeterred. She even poured herself more tea.

“No, there’s no way. I would never leave Saro.” Did she not get it?

“Then,” she said slowly, “you have to choose this. And I mean really choose it.”

She took another bite, sipped her Earl Grey, and leaned back. She had elicited a response from me, exactly as she’d intended. Then she continued, “Do your best and keep your heart open. Show up in the face of the unknown. And he, no matter how bad it gets, has to do the same. If you’re in it, you’re in this together.”

I left The Ivy that day with the understanding that my marriage could go deeper than either of us had imagined. Or we could become strangers to each other as we fought a common enemy. That I would have to choose the path of caregiving. But even more important, I realized for the first time that what we were up against would require me to show up for Saro in a way I had not ever had to. That conversation with Julie gave me the awareness that it was my turn to be the kind of person who could stand in the rain for hours, steadfast and open, ready and available to this man, come what may.



* * *



Many rounds of chemo, three hospital stays, and a major surgery later, Saro still had not told his parents about his diagnosis.

“I want to see how the complete treatment goes first,” he had told me in the days immediately after his diagnosis. “I want to wait for results. I don’t want to worry them. It will kill my mother.”

He didn’t want to hear the worry in his mother’s voice half a world away at the same time that he was barely able to hold his own life together. I understood, but still it bothered me. I had told my parents right away, I leaned on them. They encouraged Saro, even offered to help financially since he was no longer working and his medical costs were staggering. I didn’t like having to withhold the incredible information from his family. We finally had open communication with his parents. Not telling them felt like a betrayal, a glaring lack of intimacy. But he had his reasons. Chief among them was that there was nothing they could do so far away and that the worry they would carry would be too much. He wanted to wait. So I made Saro a promise to say nothing, a promise that made me see the many forms of divisiveness cancer wrought. We were back to keeping things from the Sicilians.

However, as Christmas approached, Saro had completed more than four rounds of chemotherapy and had had his knee replaced with an implant prosthesis, rather than having his leg amputated at his femur as we had feared. He was still walking on crutches. We had been told that his femur and tibia would take months to heal around the prosthesis and months would go by before he could walk on his own again. In the meantime, I helped him to be mobile and he had in-home physical therapy as we waited for his immune system to recover before he could receive more chemo in the new year. He chose that as the time to finally tell his parents that he had been diagnosed with cancer.