I went through a period of denial. We both did. We consulted multiple doctors, assuring each other it was a simple mistake, a bad radiologist, an off day. How could something like this come out of nowhere?
“I guess I really do have shite luck,” Allie said to me after the third doctor confirmed her prognosis.
Just like the first day we met, I took her hand and promised her I’d fix it.
“You know how to mend cancer?”
“Yes,” I lied.
Allie was 24. She was tall and slender. She liked to wear bright dresses that wrapped tight around her middle and cut off high on her thighs. She always knew the right thing to say and she was an ace in group settings. She loved bringing people together and she had a real knack for it. She put me at ease, she was comforting and kindhearted. She was my wife and she had cancer and I couldn’t do anything to fix it.
Seemingly overnight, our vernacular turned clinical: osteosarcoma, metastases, clinical trials, treatment plans, survival rates. Allie’s life hung in the balance of cold statistics, and we clung to that limbo. When her oncologist told us to not lose hope, explaining that there are better survival rates for young women, I had to bite my tongue.
What about survival rates for someone’s wife?
What about survival rates for the future mother of my children?
What about survival rates for the person I can’t live without?
What are those survival rates?
They scheduled surgery to remove the tumor on her knee, but further scans showed metastases in her lungs, stage III. They started Allie on aggressive chemotherapy while she was still recovering from the tumor removal. Those weeks were utter crap. Her hair fell out. The radiation did a number on her body. If she wasn’t sleeping, she was throwing up. If she wasn’t throwing up, she was crying and asking me why this was happening to her.
Toward the end of chemotherapy, things started to look better. Allie was handling treatments well. She was up and walking around, going through physio for her knee.
We started to talk about our life post cancer. P.C. How we would live, where we would visit, how big our family should be.
“P.C. I’m going to hike every single day,” she said over lunch in the hospital one day.
“P.C. we are going to make love every single day.”
“Luca,” she hissed, blushing.
I couldn’t recall the last time we’d slept together. It’d been months. She’d grown shy in the bedroom, less confident now that radiation had added pounds onto her once slender body. She hardly ever let me see her without a scarf on, and when I insisted that the baldness, the pounds, the patchy radiated skin didn’t matter to me, that I’d love her forever, she’d smile and press a kiss to my cheek, promising intimacy soon.
I reached across the table and gripped her hand. “I love you, you know that?”
Her thumb brushed across my knuckles. “I know.”
Two months later, during a follow-up CT scan, they found the worst case scenario: the tumors had spread to Allie’s hips, and just like that, we added another term to our vernacular: life expectancy.
One year.
Allie could expect to wake up 365 more times.
There was never any question of where Allie would spend her final days. Growing up, I’d spent my summers in Vernazza, visiting my grandmother and my cousin, Massimo. Allie had never been, but I’d told her about it. My grandmother’s crumbling villa had been passed down to me after her death and that afternoon, after the final CT scan, Allie dragged a suitcase out of our guest room, declaring that she was foregoing further treatment and would like to spend the last year of her life in Vernazza. She wanted every last sunset to be in the golden light.
GIANLUCA WAS A widower. Katerina and Massimo had walked me through a short version of his story after dinner. I’d sat in silence and listened, but really, I was being selfish. Incredibly selfish. Because deep down, in the center of my soul, I was thinking of how it was such a bloody shame. I was in Vernazza to have a laugh, meet a few blokes, and loll about on the beach. I wanted to have a proper holiday fling with lots of sex and maybe some flippant promises of love. I was in no way looking to mend a broken heart. It wasn’t fair, really. Gianluca was the nicest-looking man I’d seen in the last decade and he was unavailable, moping about for a wife he’d lost five years earlier.
I know it seems so callous to think of his situation as anything but heartbreaking. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for him or that I didn’t understand everything he’d suffered through with Allie. God, untimely death is the saddest thing of all time. Unfortunately, I’d experienced it firsthand. I’d lost my father when I was a young girl and my eldest brother a few years later. Heart failure and a car crash. Both sudden. Both devastating. Two deaths in a family of five had nearly crippled us. My mother fell into life as a widow. My brother, Fred, took over the family title and all the responsibilities that came with running the estate, and I settled into the only role I knew: the court jester, the clown, the only bit of light in our family during those tough few years. I was there through my mother’s heartache; I’d endured the dates and the silly setups because it took my mother’s mind off the real troubles of her life to see me get tarted up for an evening out. I’d joked and I’d forced her smiles through all the hard times because she needed to be reminded that life marches on even when we desperately wish it wouldn’t.
A few years back, my brother had met Andie, the love of his life. They had three children now and my mother doted on them whenever she got the chance. With so many good things going for our family, I finally felt as though I could pack away my jester hat. They didn’t need me anymore, which was why I didn’t feel bad up and leaving London for an adventure of my own.