Given how we’d lived our married life for more than twenty years, perhaps it’s not surprising that, as we started to plan for being on our own again, Amy and I were like a couple of kids whose parents had left them alone in the house for the weekend. We had the whole place to ourselves. We had the whole world to ourselves.
We’d gotten a small taste of this back in April 2012 when we went to Thailand together, without the kids. Because of her success as an author, Amy was in demand for book tours throughout the country and the world. The majority of her trips took her away from home for only a couple of days. Others were longer and more exotic, and gave me a chance to reap the benefits of being married to a creative force who was in demand in many different settings.
Such was the case when we got to take that trip to Thailand on our own. Between her commitments, we spent a few days off the mainland on the magical island of Koh Kood, celebrating our twenty-first wedding anniversary. Koh Kood is as romantic as it gets. Crystal-clear water. Fresh, delicious food. No kids, no emails, no cars, nothing but time, time to be together, to marvel at where we were as well as who and what we’d become individually and as a couple since that blind date on July 2, 1989. If this is possible for two people who were already in love, Amy and I fell in love all over again on the island of Koh Kood.
From there it was back to the mainland, where Amy was enveloped with love and admiration by the International School Bangkok while I roamed the urban streets with my camera. I was feeling lucky, grateful, and excited about the future.
Needless to say, as the time approached for Paris to head off to college, we were getting increasingly excited about being able to focus just on us for the first time in years. To the surprise of, oh, no one, we created an Amy-initiated list of empty-nest plans that we were constantly adding to. In no particular order . . .
Travel with Ann and Paul (Amy’s parents) on a trip to South Africa.
Live in a foreign city.
Go to Burning Man.
Apply for the Harvard Loeb Fellowship (Amy).
Tour Asia with Mother (Amy).
Go to Marfa in Texas to see the “Marfa Lights.”
Do writers’ residencies in foreign schools (Amy).
Spend more time in New York.
Do more painting (Jason).
Do more social service.
We had a lot to do, and we couldn’t wait to get started.
But first, Amy had committed to a trip to Washington, DC, for the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress. I was too slammed with work commitments to go with her to Washington, but she’d been allocated two tickets. So Amy did what Amy did; she reached out to her online community and initiated a contest, the winner of which would be her date to the event.
Her Facebook post read, “Would you like to be my ‘plus one’ at the Library of Congress National Book Festival gala dinner on Friday night, September 4th? I was told I could bring a guest and thought it would be fun to offer up the opportunity to a nice, book-loving human in the DC area. To put your name in the hat, simply chime in in the comment section by Wednesday 5PM CST . . .”
The winner, a lovely woman from Virginia, told me later that going to this event with Amy was “one of the most exciting days of my life.” She also said that Amy had to excuse herself at one point because she was having stomach discomfort and needed to pick up some over-the-counter medication, something that I didn’t learn until much later.
The next day, September 6, 2015, Amy called me before she boarded the plane for her scheduled flight home to Chicago. She was having pain in her right side, and she’d called her doctor, who suggested I take her to the emergency room when she got back.
It shook me up—twenty-six years together, and this was a first. I tried to ease Amy’s mind, and mine, by theorizing that it was probably appendicitis.
I picked her up at the airport and drove her straight to the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. After the obligatory hours of waiting, waiting, several diagnostic tests, and waiting, a baby-faced emergency room doctor sat us down to give us the results of the scan he’d ordered.
Yes, he said, the appendix was involved, but what was going on had nothing to do with appendicitis. Instead, Amy’s appendix was mildly thickened with multiple nodules. Her lymph nodes, which he defined as a network of small structures throughout the body that filter fluids to help minimize toxins and neutralize infection, were enlarged. The liver was involved too.
It was obvious that this doctor hadn’t had much experience at delivering upsetting news to patients. He was as nervous as we were, and to get it over with, he just kind of blurted out the word he’d been leading up to: “Tumor.”
That word invaded Amy’s body as well as our lives.
It seemed the scan was “suggestive” of a tumor, and she needed to get more testing right away.
What? What?!
We were completely silent for most of the drive home as the news set in. My mind was unsuccessfully scrambling to think of something wise, positive, and optimistic that I could say without my voice breaking. Amy was slowly letting her emotions catch up with the news that had just blindsided us.
It didn’t really come crashing down on us until we got out of the car, grabbed Amy’s luggage from her DC trip, and walked through our front door into the deafening stillness of our empty nest.
Part II
Loss
5
Something Is Not Right
We are secrets to each other
Each one’s life a novel
No one else has read.
Even joined in the bonds of love
We’re linked to one another
By such slender threads.
—Neil Peart*
Amy was freakishly gifted at wordplay, automatically and almost involuntarily seeing letters within words that formed other words. She saw an Exit sign and thought how nice it would be to have it read “Excite” instead. She thought “creation” was a stimulating, active, valuable time investment, as opposed to “reaction,” which contains exactly the same letters and implies letting other people dictate how you’re going to spend your life. The rest of us Rosenthals kept trying to pick up the skill, but even when it was staring us right in the face, we couldn’t hold a candle to her.
But how much would we have given for her diagnosis to have been acne, tucked neatly into cancer, this abhorrent new word in our vocabulary?
We immediately reached out to our considerable network to get the names of the best and the brightest oncology surgeons in the country. It turned out that two of them were right here in Chicago. We went to an appointment with the first of them on September 8, 2015, when the phrase “suspicious for metastasis” (aka “the cancer appears to be spreading”) entered our vernacular.
Our second appointment was with the renowned Ernst Lengyel, MD, PhD, an expert in ovarian, cervical, and endometrial cancers, which was where our journey began in Ernst (I try, Amy). We went to see Dr. Lengyel on September 11, 2015, at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, which soon become our new home away from home.
Surgery was scheduled just a few days later, on September 16, 2015. It was time to start notifying children and family, but that came with its own set of baffling questions—most notably, just how exactly were we supposed to give people this news out of nowhere? Of course, Amy and I hadn’t been prepared either, but at least we’d been in the room(s) as the awful events unfolded and had had a chance to start processing them, together. Picking up the phone and calling with terrible news just felt so daunting.