In Sickness and in Health
Life is hard. Marriage is easy. At least when you’re married to Michael.
Twenty-nine years ago today I walked down the aisle to begin a new life with Michael. I was wearing the gown my Mama created from my design, and the Austrian lace veil she’d purchased in Salzburg to wear when she walked down the aisle herself and married my Dad. We stood in front of loved ones and with smiles on our faces gleefully promised to hold fast to one another in all sorts of scenarios, for the rest of our lives.
Last year at this time, we were staying in a luxury pool villa at the beach in Sanya on Hainan Island. We spent hour after hour lazily floating in the private pool outside our bedroom, listening to waves gently crashing, planning for decades into a future with just the two of us, now that our kids were grown and mostly doing their own thing. It was glorious. This year, Michael is in an isolation hospital room, high on a hill on Hong Kong Island overlooking the South China Sea. He spends hour after hour sitting alone, with just the occasional sound of a beeping IV to break the soundproof silence, while I transit back and forth to see him for two precious hours a day. We aren’t able to plan any further into the future than a day or two, and every move is in consultation with our kids, who have been thrust into managing more of the home and the dog, plus medical testing and procedures of their own in an effort to save and prolong Michael’s life. What a contrast in scenarios!
So often in life when something goes badly wrong, we say I did not sign up for this! Or I know I said for better or for worse, but I didn’t know it would be this bad! When you’re 21 with perfect skin, a strong body, and an invincible spirit, it’s easy to commit to sticking with your partner through thick and thin, especially when your only real experience with sickness is that one bad bout of influenza or a migraine which ended with a trip to the emergency room when you couldn’t stop throwing up. You can’t imagine a time when you might be profoundly disabled, experiencing chronic pain, or living in a foreign country while discovering you have a rare, terrifying form of blood cancer.
I hear all the time how hard marriage is. And sometimes I can imagine it is. But I don’t know that from deep personal experience. This world we are living in is hard. Our existence in this modern era often feels like it consists solely of one hard thing after another. Work and extended family and finances are all hard. But my marriage to Michael is what makes moving through this world and its difficulties a whole lot easier. To have someone by my side who I never have to hide any part of myself from because he loves and adores all of me is a relief, a respite, the greatest gift I’ve ever received.
We love each other a ridiculous, almost embarrassing amount, but we like each other too. We are the actual best of friends. The longer we’re together, the more we realize how rare it is to be able to say that and mean it. There’s no one I’d rather spend my time with, even when it is only for two hours, in a tightly controlled, negative pressure isolation room far away from our home. I have known and loved and deeply cared for Michael since I was nineteen years old. No one makes me laugh like he does, even while he’s hooked up to a bag of chemotherapy drugs with a purple skull and crossbones blazoned across the side. And no one holds me closer, especially when our world has been turned upside down.
Taking all twenty-nine years of marriage into consideration, we seem to have had more than our fair share of calamity and woe. Some of our own making, but quite a lot of it has been completely outside our control. And yet everything which might have pulled us apart has only served to draw us closer, strengthening our relationship so we’re ready for the next big thing. And this thing we’re in the middle of right now is pretty big.
Even with my wild imagination I never pictured we’d be exactly where we are, standing at the edge of a dangerous and deadly precipice, holding on for our very lives in a literal sense. But I’m forever grateful that if we must go through this, we get to go through it together. Boldly, courageously, crying more than just a little bit, but laughing a whole bunch too, still a powerhouse couple even when in a temporarily weakened state.
Michael asked me what I wanted for our anniversary this year.
I just want you for all the rest of my life, I told him. Things are just getting good. Even with all the amazing things we’ve seen and done, our best days are yet to come. Stick around for them.
Happy 29th Anniversary, my Beloved. Life with you is a dream come true, even when the circumstances we find ourselves in are a bit of a nightmare. You have my heart for always.
A quick transplant update: Benjamin had his first injection this morning to begin stimulating excess production of stem cells in his bone marrow. This evening we’ll go in to visit Michael where Ben will get his second injection. He’ll have two more injections tomorrow (Monday) and two more on Tuesday, and then he’ll spend all day Wednesday and Thursday on an apheresis machine which will take his blood, separate out the stem cells, and return the rest of the blood back into Benjamin. Michael finished his third day of pre-transplant chemo today, and he’ll begin full body radiation tomorrow, with a morning and evening session for three days. We’ll explain more about the transplant, happening June 25, soon! Thank you for following along and supporting us. It means the world!
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