“What do you think Matt meant by wanting the night off from cancer?” I ask.
Julie sighs. “All the doctor appointments, the lost pregnancies, everything I want a night off from too. He wants to talk about how his research is going and the new taco place down the street and . . . you know, the normal things people our age talk about. The whole time I’ve been going through this, all we cared about was finding a way for me to live. But now, he can’t make plans with me for even a year from now, and he can’t go meet someone else. The only way he can move forward is if I die.”
I hear what she’s getting at. Underlying their ordeal is a fundamental truth: For all of the ways that Matt’s life has changed, it will eventually return to some kind of normal. And that, I suspect, pisses Julie off. I ask if she’s angry with Matt, envious.
“Yes,” she whispers, as though she’s sharing a shameful secret. I tell her it’s okay. How could she not be envious of the fact that he gets to live?
Julie nods. “I feel guilty for putting him through this and jealous that he gets a future,” she says, adjusting a pillow behind her back. “And then I feel guilty for being jealous.”
I think about how common it is, even in everyday situations, to be jealous of a spouse and how taboo it is to talk about that. Aren’t we supposed to be happy for their good fortune? Isn’t that what love is about?
In one couple I saw, the wife got her dream job on the same day that her husband was let go from his, which made for extreme awkwardness every night at the dinner table. How much should she share of her days without inadvertently making her husband feel bad? How could he manage his envy without raining on her parade? How noble can people reasonably be expected to be when their partners get something they desperately want but can’t have?
“Matt came home from the gym yesterday,” Julie says, “and he said that he had a fantastic workout, and I said, ‘That’s great,’ but I felt so sad, because we used to go to the gym together. He’d always tell people that I was the one with the stronger body, the marathon runner. ‘She’s the superstar, I’m the wimp!’ he’d say, and the people we became friends with at the gym started calling us that.
“Anyway, we used to have sex a lot after the gym. So yesterday when he gets back, he comes over and kisses me, and I start kissing him back, and we have sex, but I’m out of breath in a way I’ve never been before. I don’t let on, though, so Matt gets up to shower, and as he’s walking into the bathroom, I look at his muscles and think, I used to be the one with the stronger body. And then I realize that it’s not just Matt who’s watching me die. It’s me, too. I’m watching myself die. And I’m so angry at everyone who gets to live. My parents will outlive me! My grandparents might too! My sister’s having a second baby. But me?”
She reaches for her water bottle. After Julie recovered from her initial cancer treatment, her doctors told her that drinking water flushes out toxins, so Julie began carrying a sixty-four-ounce bottle everywhere she went. Now it’s no longer useful but it’s become a habit. Or a prayer.
“It’s hard to see what’s still there,” I say, “and to let it in when you’re grieving for your own life.”
We sit in silence for a while. Finally, she wipes her eyes and the slip of a smile forms on her lips. “I have an idea.”
I look at her expectantly.
“You’ll tell me if it’s too wacky?”
I nod.
“I was just thinking,” she begins, “that instead of spending my time being jealous of everyone else, maybe part of my purpose for the time I have left could be helping the people I love to move forward.”
She shifts on the couch, getting excited. “Take Matt and me. We won’t grow old together. We won’t even grow middle-aged together. I’ve been wondering if, for Matt, my death will feel more like a breakup than the end of a marriage. Most of the women in the cancer group who talk about leaving their husbands behind are in their sixties and seventies, and the one in her forties has been married for fifteen years, and she and her husband have two kids. I want to be remembered as a wife and not an ex-girlfriend. I want to behave like a wife and not an ex-girlfriend. So I’m thinking, What would a wife do? Do you know what these wives say about leaving their husbands behind?”
I shake my head.
“They talk about making sure their husbands are going to be okay,” she says. “Even if I’m jealous of his future, I want Matt to be okay.” Julie looks at me like she just said something I’m supposed to understand, but I don’t.
“What would make you feel that he’ll be okay?” I ask.
She shoots me a grin. “As much as this makes me want to vomit, I want to help him find a new wife.”
“You want to let him know it’s okay to love again,” I say. “That doesn’t sound wacky at all.” Often a dying spouse wants to give the surviving one this blessing—to say that it’s okay to hold one person in your heart and fall in love with another, that our capacity for love is big enough for both.
“No,” Julie says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to just give him my blessing. I want to actually find him a wife. I want that gift to be part of my legacy.”
As when Julie first suggested the Trader Joe’s idea, I feel myself recoil. This seems masochistic, a form of torture in an already torturous situation. I think about how Julie would not want to see this, could not bear this. Matt’s future new wife will have his babies. She’ll go on long hikes and climb mountains with him. She’ll cuddle up with him and laugh with him and have passionate sex with him the way Julie once did. There’s altruism and love, sure, but Julie’s also human. And so is Matt.
“What makes you think he’ll want this gift?” I ask.
“It’s crazy, I know,” Julie says. “But there’s a woman in my cancer group whose friend did that. She was dying, and her best friend’s husband was dying, and she didn’t want her husband or her best friend to be alone, and she knew how well they got along—they’d been good friends for decades. So her dying wish was that they would go on a date after the funeral. One date. So they did. And now they’re engaged.” Julie’s crying again. “Sorry,” she says. Almost every woman I see apologizes for her feelings, especially her tears. I remember apologizing in Wendell’s office too. Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.
“I mean, not sorry, just sad,” Julie says, echoing a phrase I shared with her earlier.
“You’re going to miss Matt a lot,” I say.
“I am,” she squeaks out. “Everything about him. The way he gets so excited about little things, like a latte or a line in a book. The way he kisses me, and the way his eyes take ten minutes to open if he wakes up too early. How he warms my feet in bed and looks at me when we’re talking, like his eyes are soaking up everything I’m saying as much as his ears are.” Julie pauses to catch her breath. “And you know what I’m going to miss most of all? His face. I’m going to miss looking at his beautiful face. It’s my favorite face in the entire world.”
Julie is crying so hard that no sound comes out. I wish that Matt could have been here for this.