Those Florida visits involved a lot more than just throwing some clothes in a suitcase and hopping on a plane. If it was even possible, my already incalculable love and admiration for Amy were growing stronger with every minute of every day.
I never went to see her without bringing her an illustrated book. Art helped to fill her up, and she was incredibly connected to the illustrators she used for her own books.
Some of the books I brought to Amy in Florida.
Courtesy of Brooke Hummer
I recently came across a note I wrote to her when I’d decided to be by her side regardless of life and work in Chicago:
You asked me recently if there is anything I want to tell you in light of the shitstorm that has hit us. I want to say I love you. Not in the way I say it every day, like “love you,” as in “see you after work and remember while I am gone that I truly love you.” But in the way that I never have loved nor will ever love anyone again in my life. In the way that you complete me fully. In the sense that you gave me support and confidence and intimacy in a way that those three words are the only way to explain it. In a way that allows me to be me and you to be you because of the love I have for you. Meaning, you are my soul and it would be nice if we can beat this battle and love each other for a long time—as our love should be.
I will be with you for this round of treatment, because I love you.
7
Is It All a Bunch of Crap?
I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.
—Ezra Koenig
Settling in with Amy, Ann, Paul, and Cougar in Florida felt exactly right. Work would suffer. So would finances. Too bad. As far as I was concerned, at this point I couldn’t afford to be anywhere else.
Amy’s chemotherapy was progressing on schedule, but we were open to exploring any other options we could add that might help to stave off the relentless cancer cells that were trying to infiltrate her body. And according to the internet, there were a lot of them. Have you ever googled what ginger, curcumin (the active ingredient in turmeric), and mushroom extract do for cancer patients? Try it. The amount of information is exhaustive, and, as we all know, if it’s on the internet, it must be true.
Ginger: “Ginger is 10,000 times stronger than chemo in cancer research model”; “Ginger causes cancer cells to commit suicide” (interesting choice of words there!).
How about curcumin? “It has shown incredible promise in the prevention of cervical cancer, the leading cause of cancer death among women in developing nations”; “Experimental studies have identified curcumin’s ability to prevent metastasis in breast cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, thyroid cancer, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer.”
Hey, what about ’shrooms? “There is good evidence that mushrooms are among the most powerful functional food in a growing cancer-fighting and cancer-preventing arsenal”; “Known for its immune-building and anti-aging virtues, more recent research highlights the antibody-mediating, multi-mechanistic power that makes the Reishi (mushroom) a super cancer-fighter.”
Eastern, Western, holistic, homeopathic, woo-woo, you name it—we were on board for trying it, as long as it couldn’t hurt. There was a health food store in the neighborhood, and they must have thought they had a couple of ginger, turmeric, and reishi mushroom junkies on their hands. Oh, and a specific type of almond butter, and the ingredients for the “packed with purpose” muffins Amy made in batches and ate for breakfast every morning, as our friend Ava recalls. But zero sugar of any kind, and absolutely no alcohol. (Damn, a few sips of vodka would have been nice at the end of these brutal days.)
And through it all, I kept it very much to myself that my faith in alternative remedies, and traditional ones, and even my faith in general, were becoming intensely strained as I watched Amy physically disappearing right in front of my eyes.
How dare . . . somebody . . . something . . . do this to her? How much harder did she have to try to earn back the health and the life she never took for granted for a single moment? She wasn’t just going through chemotherapy and following every order from her doctors and every lead she was given on how to beat this. She was also working day and night, between chemo sessions, on her latest memoir, Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal. All this, and it still wasn’t enough? If there was a God, she must have been sleeping on the job this time.
There were some bright spots along the way in the stress of this new life we were living, but none of them was more memorable than Thanksgiving of 2015. Justin, Miles, and most of our family were gathering in Florida at Ann and Paul’s to spend the holiday together. We wanted all of them with us, of course; there was just a practicality/logistics issue when it came to our daughter, Paris. She was in college in British Columbia, an almost six-hour flight away. Since Canada doesn’t celebrate our Thanksgiving, Paris didn’t have a long holiday break ahead of her, and Amy decided that twelve hours on a plane over a brief Thanksgiving weekend was far too arduous a trip for our daughter to go through.
I “agreed.” Then I snuck off by myself, called Paris, and we made all the arrangements.
Trying to act nonchalant on the appointed day wasn’t easy, let me tell you. But finally I got a text from Paris, letting me know she’d arrived, and she was waiting exactly where we’d agreed she’d be. Then I asked Amy to come with me to look at something in the garage.
Sporting her wig and her favorite knit hat, Amy stepped into the garage. The instant she saw her beautiful little girl standing there, she lost all control of her body and began screaming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!” over and over again. The pure joy, love, and appreciation in their long, tight embrace is an exquisite emotional snapshot that will stay with me forever.
Like Thanksgiving, holidays and other special occasions became more and more precious as time went on. The most memorable during this time was my trip to Florida on the day of the Oscars in 2016.
I’d grown up watching the Oscars with my mom and sister, and Amy and I never missed them either. Many years running, I would be on the phone with my sister, “watching” together. These were loving phone calls where we often said nothing, just enjoyed the ceremony in mutual silence. It was more a tradition than a cause for a huge celebration. We didn’t throw viewing parties or glue ourselves to the TV to see what the stars were wearing on the red carpet. We’d try to see all the nominated movies and enjoyed our annual tradition of pulling for them, or against them, to win the Academy Award.
Amy and I hadn’t said a word about the Oscars that year, understandably; we had plenty of other, far more important things to talk about. But a couple of days before that particular trip, I noticed that if my flight landed on schedule, I’d arrive at the house just in time for the telecast. So I decided to greet Amy with an invitation to be my date for our own private Academy Awards viewing party, and I boarded that plane wearing a tuxedo. Apparently it’s not as uncommon as I would have thought to see a guy in a tux on a Southwest Airlines flight. No one commented, no one asked about it, no one even did a double take. Oh, well. The only reaction that mattered was Amy’s, and I couldn’t wait to see the surprised smile on her face when I showed up at the door in formal wear to share Hollywood’s biggest night with her.