30 Years (minus one)

June is a tough month on every level this year.

Many of the birthdays in both the Rose and Chase families are concentrated in December and January. None of us are particularly thrilled by this, as our birthdays often get lost in the shuffle of the holidays and finances tend to be too tight for extravagant gifts or celebrations. When he asked me to marry him, I told Michael we needed to pick a date as far away from my Christmas Eve birthday as possible so we could be assured of more time and money to play with.

June 22nd was perfect… until four years later when we became parents. Suddenly Father’s Day was right there rubbing up against our anniversary, something we hadn’t considered at all when we got married. We realized anniversary weekends away and fancy dinners would have to be split with celebrating Michael as a dad. Then we really blew it when we had our second son… in June. So much for our genius plans of having our anniversary as a little island of celebration by itself!

Today marks 30 years since we walked down the aisle and pledged to love each other all the rest of our lives. I know most people think of 25 and 50 as big milestone years, but 30 was the one Michael and I have looked forward to since he proposed. And of course there is a story!

In the early days of getting to know each other before he popped the question, Michael had asked me a different question with lower stakes: If I could own any movie, what would I choose?

I know it’s hard to imagine here in the present where we can stream a movie on a plane from a device we carry in our pockets, but back in the olden days of the early nineties, renting a VHS cassette tape was how we consumed media apart from going to the cinema or watching whatever happened to be on television. Owning a VHS cassette tape could run you up to $100 USD if it was a popular new release. For reference, the rent on my minuscule apartment at the time was $300 USD a month, and I was working full time while going to school to be able to afford that. Owning a VHS tape was just a silly talking point, not a reality.

My answer to Michael’s question was easy though, 1993’s So I Married an Axe Murderer staring a pre-Austin Powers Mike Myers was the one I’d pick to be able to watch any time I wanted. It was (and is) my favorite movie of all time. Quirky, hilarious, filmed in San Francisco with amazing costumes, a main character with ridiculous parents who makes his living as a poet, plus a leading lady who is a tough, world-traveling small business owner who links her own sausage? Yes please. I love to laugh and that movie pulls it out of me no matter how many times I see it.

Michael proposed to me at the Cheesecake Factory in Redondo Beach two days before he left on a six month, cross-country tour to promote Disney’s Pocahontas (here’s a link with tour footage!). We’d only known each other four months, but Michael was convinced I would be unlikely to wait six months for him to return. In the days of no email, text messages, or video calls, just very brief, expensive long distance phone calls and snail mail… he was probably correct in that assumption. He wanted to demonstrate his commitment to our relationship before he left. Yes, the ring he picked out was quite nice, but Michael proved he was the man for me two days later on his way to the airport when he ran into where I was working (a retail store at the mall), thrust a bag from Suncoast Motion Picture Company containing my favorite movie into my hands, blew me a kiss, and raced back out of my store. I was smitten!

In So I Married an Axe Murderer, the main character’s parents are celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary, a milestone which felt like a million years away from us. We were young and broke, but declared we would 100% be spending our 30th anniversary in Scotland (the film characters are Scottish like my ancestors, and the Rose Clan has a castle there), and if by that far off date we found ourselves old and broke, then we’d just throw a Scottish-themed anniversary party, probably in San Francisco. Living abroad wasn’t even a brief mist of a thought at that time!

In the meantime, we watched that film every single year on my birthday as a break from all the Christmas movies. The original VHS cassette tape wore out, replaced by a few DVD’s, a Blu-Ray, and two versions of digital copies over the years. I’ve already shared how Michael threw a big Axe Murderer-themed birthday party for me right before he was diagnosed, renting a cinema space to watch the film, hiring a bag piper, and inviting a bunch of friends to celebrate what would ultimately be my final birthday with him. I gotta say, it was truly magic! And in the scene where the dad in the film says, “I hope you have the same great thirty years we’ve had,” at his own Scottish-themed anniversary party, Michael leaned over and whispered that’s us in eighteen months. I swooned of course.

From the moment Michael was diagnosed up until the last few weeks of his life, we were completely solid in our firm belief that Michael was going to make it.

Hope, faith, stubbornness, magical thinking, whatever you want to call it we had it in abundance. That is not to say we weren’t frequently terrified. The odds were never good but even when the odds were bad, we knew it was never a zero chance of survival. There is always someone who makes it. Why shouldn’t it be Michael?

Last year we celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary in the Transplant Isolation Ward at Queen Mary Hospital. Our son Benjamin was going through painful twice-daily growth stimulating injections in preparation for his donation of bone marrow stem cells. Because it was a Sunday, all the public clinics in Hong Kong closed early and we were instructed to go directly to the transplant ward for Ben’s injection that night. It was important to me for Michael and Ben to spend that evening’s visiting hour together. There was so much risk involved in the transplant and I knew this would be their last time to just chill together in this very un-chill week before the main event.

I got a quick hug and a shot of our hands together (one of the last where Michael was able to wear his wedding ring before the Graft vs Host Disease made his skin erupt in a fierce rash) before spending our final anniversary outside the glass door in the negative airflow vestibule while Benjamin and Michael chatted. The most stunning sunset appeared through the window and I took a mental photo of the whole view before me (plus the one below on my phone) as a reminder that beauty and awfulness can exist in the same space.

Of course, we did not know it was our final anniversary. Remember that hope, faith, stubbornness, or magical thinking I mentioned? It kept us upright and moving forward every single day.

At what would end up being Michael’s final visit to Queen Mary Hospital’s transplant ward in early November, his doctor said she was feeling somewhat optimistic that Michael would likely be able to return to his office and a less restrictive life in spring, after Chinese New Year. It filled us with wonder and awe, the idea that this season of extreme caution could potentially have an end.

That day, sitting in the pharmacy waiting for Michael’s medication, we dared to dream of the future and discussed our 30th wedding anniversary. There would obviously be no trip to Scotland, but thank goodness we’d already had a bag piper at my birthday party! We would find a way to make it special even if subdued. He asked what special item I’d like to mark the occasion. Michael was an exceptional anniversary gift giver. For our 20th anniversary, he’d built me a Cheesecake Factory (the place he’d proposed) in the Downtown Disney area of Shanghai Disneyland, arranging a private dinner for us during trial operations. For our 25th anniversary, he’d been super sneaky, spent a year saving, and purchased an absolute stunner of a diamond band at Tiffany & Co which makes me feel seen and loved every time I look at it. For our 30th, I told him I was thinking about an exquisite Akoya pearl pendant from Japan with three little diamonds, one for each decade of our married life together.

Pearls are made when an irritant (a harmful, painful thing) gets into the shell of a mollusk. As a protective measure, the mollusk begins to form layer after microscopic layer of iridescent nacre around the painful thing, resulting in a pearl. I told Michael a pearl would represent what we went through in our 29th year (all those harmful, painful things) and the beauty which wrapped around us in so many layers in the form of love and support and care and prayers (the glowing, shiny nacre).

Do you have a link to what you’re thinking of? Make it easy and send it to me, he said. Because I’d been thinking about it for some time I definitely had a link. I typed out a message to go with it, about why a pearl would be especially meaningful, but at the last second I paused. Our financial situation was precarious and I didn’t want Michael, who denied me nothing, to put it on the credit card without knowing if we could ever pay it off, especially while we were economizing everywhere and actively raising funds for his life-saving medication. Instead of sending it to him, I copied and pasted the entire text into my notes app, where it still sits with the date of that final visit to Queen Mary Hospital. Later I would look up the traditional gift for the 30th wedding anniversary, just for fun. Can you guess what it is? Pearls of course!

When Michael proposed four months after meeting me, right before he left on tour, I said yes with a small caveat.

I was only 19 when I met him, and he was nearly four years older than me. I told him I wanted to be engaged for a full year after he returned from tour, giving us an engagement of nearly eighteen months. I knew that for me, marriage was going to be for life. But I wanted time (in the same city) for us to learn more about each other, especially how to deal with things like conflict and how our careers in the same general field could play nice together without it becoming a hurtful competition. I would never end a marriage, but I wanted the option of ending an engagement if it seemed like we would not be a good fit for one another. I look back at young Heather and applaud her for her wisdom. But I also look back with the benefit of knowing everything I know now and wish we’d jumped into marriage the moment the tour ended. If all I was ever going to get was thirty-one years of being together with Michael, I wish I could have fit one more year in there of being married to him.

Last week on an especially emotional day I was walking through an upscale mall to catch the ferry home and passed a jewelry shop window filled with pearls. For the first time it hit me that there really will be no pearl pendant from Michael, or any further thoughtful, meaningful gifts of any kind. The morning after we discussed our 30th anniversary plans in the pharmacy, we took him to the emergency room at Princess Margaret Hospital for shortness of breath and mild fever. He would spend one night in the Hematology Ward before being transferred to the Infectious Diseases Intensive Care Unit.

Initially, we were both quite confident that this was going to be exactly like every other hospitalization Michael had gone through — necessary but mostly something to be endured before coming home again. A challenge, an inconvenience. Certainly not the beginning of the end. My first glimpse of the smallest possibility that something was different this time was in his room number: 29.

I am a person who loves to find meaning in every small thing, which usually brings beauty and order to the chaos of my life. This time it only brought dread and fear. Was the seemingly random assignment of Room 29 a gentle sign that we would not get to our 30th anniversary? Was this it, all we would ever have? The ICU was half empty, why did they put him in that specific room? It wormed its way into my brain where I struggled to let it go. I voiced my fear out loud to my friend Karla when she joined me for a visit to Michael. We prayed it wouldn’t be any type of prophetic message.

I pushed it out of my mind until two days before he died. A brusque doctor I’d not previously met rotated in for the weekend and bluntly told me what I’d been asking about for days with increasing desperation: Michael would not survive this. They had done every possible thing to save his life, but the damage to his lungs was simply too extreme. She had begun to tell me this at his bedside where he was intubated but not sedated, and would have understood everything she said. Realizing intuitively what the conversation was about to cover, I quickly asked her to step outside the room so I could receive this news alone, without Michael hearing it from this curt doctor he didn’t know. When she was done shredding all my hope, faith, stubbornness, and magical thinking with her comprehensive analysis of all the test results showing the ruined, obliterated state of Michael’s lungs, I looked up at the big number 29 over the doorway and internally crumbled into a thousand pieces.

Externally, I took a deep breath, stood up tall, asked all the terror and fear coursing through my mind and body to please wait outside the room where Michael could not see it, and walked back to my Beloved’s side where I looked him right in the eyes and told him it was the absolute greatest privilege and honor of my life to love him and to be loved by him, and that we would face whatever happened next the same way we faced everything else: together.

Forty-eight hours later, when my grieving sons and I walked out of Room 29 for the final time, our first moments as a family of three instead of four, I turned around and snapped a photo of the giant room number, as if it won’t be seared into my memory for all time.

I keep spinning it around in my head, thinking that 30 is so much better than 29. Why did we not get to 30? And then I think but surely 35 is better than 30, why wasn’t that us? And then I say but if we have 35 then why not 40 or 50 or even 60?

29 is such a strange number, one in which I can find no meaning because the loss of Michael, even six months later, is still so absurd and surreal. Yet I am strangely not alone in losing my spouse just shy of an even year. My Mama died just a few months before my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. And Michael’s Mom, who passed two weeks after Michael, would have celebrated her 60th wedding anniversary with my father-in-law last month.

I’ll end this with what I have always said about my husband. From the moment we were married, everyone around us including family, friends, our church and even the media we consumed had one message about marriage: it is so hard and it takes so much work. But that was never my experience with Michael, which made me question if we were somehow doing it all wrong! But no, we were somehow doing everything exactly right, for the two of us anyway. Of course we fought on the rare occasion (that year of figuring out how we approach conflict during our engagement was so helpful in the long run) and had our struggles, but it was always clear that when we stayed on the same side and worked together, everything else fell into place with ease. I am so grateful that we never listened to the sermons on how hard it is to be married and just decided to be a team in all we did. Our social media posts were never an exaggeration, we really did love each other that much.

In my personal almost-thirty years of experience, it wasn’t marriage that was hard, it was this world we live in which requires so much work to make it through each day. Being married to Michael Chase made this life, this world, this work so much easier to bear — a joy even. We were better together and always more than the sum of our individual parts in a way that is hard to describe.

Being without my Beloved right now, looking ahead at what might be a terribly long life without him, is so awful, so dreadful, so devoid of joy and color, that I can only really face the full magnitude of it in tiny doses so as not to fall into complete despair. Thank God for weekly therapy, friends who continue to faithfully connect with me week after week, our church family, the grief support group I’ve been attending here in Hong Kong, and Michael’s family, who got a title change to my family because of their steadfast support through all I’ve been going through that won’t make it into a Plucky Day post but is quite awful all the same.

Michael is the great love of my life, and it is a strange sorrow to still be here, healthy and alive, while he is not.

And how darkly ironic that after all that planning to pick the perfect wedding date, and then foiling those plans ourselves, to find two of the three things which made June a hub of celebratory activity in our house snatched away. Father’s Day and our anniversary are suddenly a minefield of pain, none of us exactly sure where it’s safe to tread because it seems to be the obscure, unexpected things setting us off. Please dear God, protect our precious third June thing, our son Benjamin, who is about to have his first birthday without his Dad at such a heartbreakingly young and tender age for a son to lose his father.

Let this new year Benjamin is entering be a good, gentle one for him. And if it’s not too much to ask, let it be the same for his brother and mother. Despite the small ache of there being no pearl pendant from my sweetheart to open today, and the much sharper, deeper pain of there being no Michael here with me right now, I can try to imagine us, his little family, currently sitting in this dark place of pain. We continue to be wrapped in layer after layer of goodness and love and prayers and care, where perhaps even now something beautiful, but unseen for years to come, might still be slowly forming.

More soon.