TO THE ELEPHANT by Janet Champ
I am aware that we do not save each other very often.
But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.
– James Baldwin
There are the ugly things in life, and we talked about them. Looked them in the eye most the time, although every so often one of us just blocked the sight. Those things most of us don’t prepare for because they’re so unexpected: being unable to have children together, for one. Being told we couldn’t keep both our relationship and our jobs, for another. Once we were together for about a year, we wrote separate lists of imperative needs and wants, and then read them together over dinner or maybe after, one of those, and I know the fact of these documents is both weird and wonderful. One of us had already been married. The other had already lost a parent while too young. We knew adversity would come. How we handled it would say everything about us. Even define us. Because no marriage, no relationship, exists in a vacuum. There are elephants in so many rooms, aren’t there? We had two of them.
So, trust me, this isn’t a story of bravery.
It won’t tell you how courageous my husband Rick was, although in all the essential, unstoppingly human ways he made bravery seem routine. When cancer comes in words and pictures and explanations of stages and treatments and months expected before an expiration date, we often look for superlatives. For all the deft, wondrous thinking that might lead to the rabbit out of the hat, the body surviving being sawed in two, a sudden We were joking! from the powers that be. Because if you beat the devil, can’t everyone? Can’t the rest of the world sigh and relax and think, Oh, look, life goes on?
You’re so strong, you’ll beat this. Stay positive, it definitely helps. Don’t let this get you down! Fuck cancer, no way will it win. The nearly identical phrases and syllables uttered with meaning for nine and a half years were as if from a book we hadn’t read, a cheerleader prayer. Rick knew these shining attributes meant both well and little. Cheers felt hollow, sometimes, against cells radically multiplying, tricking flesh and blood into thinking the pain, the numbing exhaustion, was normal. Dealing with cancer is both mundane and profound: one foot in front of the other until you can’t walk anymore. It’s doing what you have to do because this is now your life. Far too often, it’s also your probable death. You’re waiting for the executioner to come but there might be a last-minute stay, a reprieve, that beautiful beckoning word we never, ever heard: remission.
For all those years Rick—my husband, best friend, creative partner, lover, ballast, and a human being all his own, so smart, so talented, so often impatient and beautifully, sarcastically apt—survived Stage III and Stage IV cancer. He lived through it with a kind of dignity that honestly, and almost always deeply, inspired others. He beat at it with hope, fear, blindingly quick humor, sorrow, gratitude, a simple and dedicated decency. Six times he was told death was imminent; six times he just kept passing Go. Healthy as that proverbial horse when he started feeling something was wrong, our endocrinologist of 13 years ignored his concern and pain, telling us both There’s no reason for a scan, even though Rick had previously battled thyroid cancer, where the only offered treatment was drinking radioactive iodine. Everyone, please: demand a second opinion when you’re told to shush, stop, behave. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who believes their body wrong, sick, off-kilter, take that body into your own hands and find a place where attention is paid. We did not demand. We acquiesced. By the time of his emergency surgery, his abdomen was suddenly swollen as if four months pregnant.
Anyone reading about cancer lately has heard that deaths are declining: as much as 33% in the last thirty years. And you’ve also heard that exceptional new treatments and cures and improvements abound. But the truth is so much more complicated, and I’ll go with the words more frightening, than that. In late 2023 CBS Evening News quoted a new study that found “an alarming rise in cancer rates among people under 50” between 1990 and 2019. How sharp a rise? A staggering 79.1%. And then there is this new reality asserting itself: that same research flatly states that by 2030, cancer deaths will rise by 21%, while early-onset cancer rates will have an increase of 31%. My husband was not under 50 when he was diagnosed with his second cancer. Yet he also had absolutely none of the markers that doctors use to predict cancer: he was a lifelong non-smoker, dedicated athlete, a vegetarian for decades, fortunate to have a specialist as his primary care doctor. Yes: his diagnosis came as a shock.
What happened in those nearly ten years? Almost seven years of chemotherapy. Anaphylactic shock where the paddles stood waiting, an inch from his chest. An ostomy bag opening while out with friends, leading to shame and dread it might be permanent. A clinical trial nicknamed The Mother of All Surgery and The Shake & Bake (look it up, it’s chilling) that patients half Rick’s age weren’t healthy enough to have. Neuropathy so terrible he couldn’t walk in the heat, or pick up a knife, until acupuncture and Eastern medicine finally reversed it. Sepsis from an infected port after an “easy” surgery. Paramedics here at 2 AM when he fell on the floor with a fever of 104. Seven emergency room visits for sodium IVs (chemo can destroy hydration). One visit for sudden blood clots throughout his heart and lungs (chemo and cancer make these common). Our loved “last” house, built by friends in these old-growth woods, burning to the ground two years after his diagnosis, the fire taking everything we owned except for our garage. Starting a new job two days after that fire without telling anyone what we’d lost because fighting cancer costs . . . it’s obscene what it costs.
What else happened?
Nurses who make the word hero riotously insignificant. Two oncologists—ones the director at the OHSU Cancer Institute called rock stars—we fell in love with after we refused the first one when she patted Rick on the knee as she emphatically told us the next time she saw him, it would be for palliative care. A deeply humane surgeon who cried with us, laughed with us, gave Rick more time. The wide saving grace of phenomenal friends and unconditional family. A purpose for Rick: the women and men and children he met in chemo wards and waiting rooms and holistic clinics, in our own little community and through other friends. The ones he shared war stories with, hope with, panic with, advice with, for some reason being so outrageously optimistic, him believing in every magic trick in this daunting world. Working through chemotherapy treatments in all those hospitals, all those clinics, because why wouldn’t we, weren’t we both alive? Weren’t we going to keep trying to be?
After the fire we began to ask ourselves if we might be the reincarnation of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, a dozen other tyrants rolled obnoxiously together. It was our metaphysical joke, a way of never asking why us? The luck we tried to make just kept falling into crevasses. But then it would rear up again, rise. Both of us, knowing so many family and friends who hadn’t survived longer than six months, six weeks, two years after their own diagnoses. Who didn’t receive our chances, even our choices. So, one more foot placed again and again: we built our new house on precisely the same footprint where our original house had stood, uncomplaining, for 14 years. Then that new foundation began to sink, a quarter of an inch at a time. That philosopher the world loves to quote was wrong: what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It beats and scars the hell out of you. What makes you stronger is: you.
All this time there was a ludicrously loud cacophony of praise for my caretaking, saying that it was me who was saving Rick’s life. As if all the doctors all the treatment all Rick’s own raging agency wasn’t doing the heaviest lifting. But when the person you love more than anyone (no: everyone) gets up every hour from the couch to walk slowly to the garage and back just to try to keep the cruelty of chemotherapy from deleting his entire sense of humanity, you don’t think what a wonderful cheerleader you are. You think How is this person still standing after all these endless assaults? How is he making giddy inane jokes as he makes us breakfast at the same time?
And I realized it’s far easier and way more comfortable for too many people to identify with the one taking care instead of the one who might die. We’re not fond, our species, of mortality sitting next to us. We look for mistakes made, cigars smoked, foods not eaten, so we can maybe avoid the whole death trap. But what if the meaning of life is that it ends? And that in all our unacceptance, we surround dying with terror and avoidance, instead of the decency, grace, and kindness it deserves?
Since very young, I haven’t been particularly afraid of death. Quite the opposite, unfortunately. And the thing is, Rick did save my life once. A fact known only to ourselves, our local hospital, the state police, a grief therapist. And now, you.
Ten months after my mother killed herself and eight months after my only brother died of misdiagnosed cancer, my cousin Dana—a best friend to Rick and myself—called with a quiveringly odd voice to say he’d just been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. He was sure he’d be all right. Having seen my father die at only 49 when I was 19, also of cancer, I had forgotten that shock is a bumper, a protective shield against pain far longer than we assume. Dana’s call shattered that gorgeous bubble and out my grief and pain came bellowing. I knew a voice like his was a clarion call of malignancy. And I did what I had wanted to at nine years old, and again at 15, and yes, a few times since, now armed with pure hopelessness and a way to do it, and that’s kill myself.
Or at least I made the attempt. It was Rick who found me, wrapped my arms in towels, rushed me to the hospital. Rick who watched as the police were notified. Watched as I told them in the smallest voice he’d ever heard that I’d had a hard year. Rick who heard them say I had 30 days to begin mandatory counseling. Rick who found the therapist, drove me two hours each way once a week for three months, telling me that Yes, I could do this and No, he wasn’t turning the car around. Rick behind the wheel to Seattle to spend time with my cousin and his devastated family. Rick who held my hand at Dana’s funeral when he died thirteen weeks after that diagnosis of benign.
If cancer and death are the largest elephants in a room, depression is nearly the same size. It’s still wildly misunderstood. Still considered a weakness, something akin to mere sadness instead of raging despair, hope ripped and vanquished. Yes, and thankfully, mental health is talked about more openly now than ever before. Publicly and without apology, well-known celebrities including Billie Eilish, Kerry Washington, Bruce Springsteen, Taraji P. Henson, Dwayne Johnson, Emma Thompson and Channing Tatum have revealed their own struggles with what is, in every aspect, a disease. But when William Styron wrote his groundbreaking memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, in 1972, it shattered the silence around our illness and let thousands of people not feel so deeply alone.
Styron knew the word depression is almost meaningless – it sounds like we’re just slightly down, half an inch below soil – and woefully inadequate in describing how true depression attacks the body not just the mind, the way it suffocates hope with what he called “despair beyond despair.” Styron described his illness as “the grey drizzle of horror . . . that takes on the quality of physical pain” and colors abound in descriptions of depression, but they’re surely not rainbows; Churchill called the depression that would overtake him his “black dog.” It’s also ferocious, feral: being buried in mud you didn’t realize was rising, the “fury of rain storms” that pummeled Anne Sexton until she could not survive the storm any longer.
For me, and so many others like me, forced therapy was a lifeline. An existential flotation device that uncovered unfinished mourning and traumas sealed away for so long I’d thought them gone. Everyone, please know therapy is there for any of us who are sinking. Who tread and keep treading the waves without realizing we can get out of the water. My husband, angry that I would try to leave him, saved me and kept saving me just as surely as I helped to keep him thriving through his last years on Earth.
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with love?
Isn’t that what any kind of vow, spoken or silent, is for?
And then, after so close to ten years of survival, Rick died on his birthday. His vital signs so robust, so vivid, that our hospice nurse was filling his prescriptions for another two weeks just moments before he left. Write the story of us he said a week or three before he died. But the story of “us” is miles and fathoms more than the last few years of his life. Repeatedly and with occasional furiosity he said that cancer is not a character trait. Nor is it a character flaw. It will never define anyone it touches; it’s malicious and horrifying and petty. His story, like millions of others, is far greater than that he did his best to conquer it, lay waste to it, simply live.
My husband was here. He was a breathing, joke-making, handsome, and extraordinarily decent man. And then in a split second of a second, he died. I was holding his hand. His blue eyes open, looking at me. He had been utterly non-responsive for over 19 hours. Until he suddenly wasn’t. After he died, his body was so warm. I don’t even remember letting go of his hand.
Trauma and loss, they alter everything. The flop of your heart. How past tense feels immoral. How you can appear upright to others simply because showing them your true fetal position is too much to bear. Nick Cave describes grief so well not simply because he is a brilliant writer, but because he understands its supremacy all too well: “There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence . . . that ultimate and inevitable departure of the other takes with it a fundamental piece of ourselves, a part of our being, leaving us with a terrible feeling of incompleteness.”
It’s grief that is laying waste to the human I was. It’s what I must go through, not around. What I loudly refuse to ignore or throw euphemisms at, even knowing that others want me to be, well, “fine.” In our abnormal culture we treat grief as another disease. It’s so ugly, isn’t it? It doesn’t want to dance, it sure doesn’t play well with others. But grief is the measure of love. It is the measure, width and depth and height, of love. Depression often accompanies it. It has for me. And while I am a pugilist against my depression, I take the gloves off near grief. The site and podcast refugeingrief.com have helped tremendously, because the woman behind it sees me, understands this echoing vacuum because her loss was also overwhelming. She knows there is no “Time’s up, get over it!” because grieving is to move through at my own time, own pace. You, too. You, too.
But. To be honest. To be writing and living through this while reading C.S. Lewis and stopping at his perfectly accurate words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Yes. That’s why the heart races. That’s why the panic of reality, the past tense so universally accepted, the cloak of invisibility that’s thrown over the one you loved/ love while you’re wondering Of course they’re dead. But does that mean you’ve all forgotten they were here at all?
Good friends said that Rick’s death was a hole, a cut across their lives. For me it was a tear in our own little universe. At times it begins to knit together. At times all I think of is the beauty. There isn’t a single cell of me that doesn’t know Rick would want me to remain alive. My lost father, mother, brother, cousin, and far too many gone friends would want the same thing. Still. It isn’t up to them. It’s up to me. Several months after the love of my life was forced to leave, my executioner might be me. I don’t know. Every day is walking on waves that submerge or carry or radiate towards shore or yes, overwhelm.
Sometimes when the light is just right I want very little, or very much: I want to want to live again. Sometimes, the one we get to save is ourselves.
“To the Elephant” is Janet Champ’s debut essay publication.