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November 13

St. Joseph, St. Joseph

The gospel, Luke 17:11-19, was about lepers crying out to Jesus “Jesus, Master, Have pity on us.” Jesus healed all ten but only one understood that there were two gifts: the healing and an invitation to have a closer relationship with Him. Father Jerome Tupa asked “How often do we cry out for help and receive the calming of our souls and spirit in the face of disease or cancer?” I actually looked around to make sure he wasn’t talking directly to me and Scott caught my eye and squeezed my hand. In one of  the shortest but most personally powerful homily I had ever heard, Father Tupa spoke of the uniqueness of finding peace in suffering and thanking God for it.

My Heart: Scott

St. Joseph’s is the oldest church in Stearns County, built in 1869 with thick stone walls that could withstand tornadoes and blizzards from the outside and years of candle soot and incense from the inside. Scott was my St. Joseph’s: as strong on the inside as the outside. Over the course of the pilgrimage, Scott started going to a few more Masses even during the week. Often we’d hold hands during the readings and only let go when it was our turn for communion. Even on the trip to communion, he’d poke me in the back.  Soulmates.

An injury could be credited with bringing us together. An ACL injury in track the spring of my eighth grade year put an end to all school athletic activities. Tracey, my sister’s friend, put in a good word for me with her employer and I started my first job at the Paynesville Bakery that summer at the princely rate of $2.83 an hour.  I worked every Tuesday and Thursday after school and all day Saturdays from 8:00 until 5:30.  A cute boy named Scott worked in the mornings. I would see him only on Saturday mornings since he started at 5 and then went to his second job. He was a grade older and sat behind me in band class as part of a baritone trio that included Scott, Sean and Dwight. They had a short playlist of tunes that I would select from during warmups: “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” “I’ve Got the Music in Me,” “Beer Barrel Polka,” and the theme songs from The Monkees and The Muppet Show. Unforgettably, he wrote in my yearbook, “don’t get any raspberry filling on your pants,” referring to our Bakery connection.

At first we were friends. He dated a friend of mine; I dated a friend of his. Out of the blue on a summer day in 1986, he called and asked me out. I asked about his girlfriend and he said she was going with my former date. Hmmm. It seemed more like he might be asking me to help him break up with his girlfriend than a date, but I “like liked” him, so I agreed. After watching Summer School at the Koronis Cinema, we walked through Paynesville. It was an odd date. When he brought me home, he leaned up against his car and we tried to talk, but the recently weaned lambs were making an incredible ruckus, bleating for their mothers who in turn bleated back to them.  The date was over, not exactly a made-for-television high school romance. From this awkward, inauspicious start, we grew closer, went on more dates and fell in love. I knew from our first kiss that I had met the love of my life. I was right.

Throughout high school, I worked at the bakery including all day Saturday before prom my junior year.  The “Nothins’ Gonna Stop Us Now” prom theme was fitting as I had half an hour in the tiny, stuffy bathroom with a six inch square mirror to get ready. The cloying sweet smell of baked goods matched the romantically-laced trimmed light pink dress. With our meal in the school gym and a live band in the cafeteria, we had a blast.

We had been dating for over a year when I had a very distinct moment that I knew he was “The One.” Our church youth group was preparing a fundraising meal and because parents always helped my Mom was there too. She and Scott were tasked with using the industrial mixer to make mashed potatoes. They were having so much fun, laughing and working with bits of potato flying around. It might seem so odd, but there was truly some indescribable force there; I knew without a doubt that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Scott. As a young woman I had vowed not to marry a Stearns County guy. He lived six whole miles away, technically in another township plus a whole bus route away, and he was irresistible.

During marriage preparation class, Father Kloeckner gave us a cynical look as he handed back our compatibility surveys. We had scored very high. So high, the priest was a bit skeptical, like we had cheated somehow despite Scott completing the form in the parish office while I filled it out in the living room. We had a bond that was strong, starting as friends, but long past being high school sweethearts.

I remember the morning of our wedding and knowing with every fiber of my being that this would be the best day of my life. I had no doubts, no cold feet figuratively or literally on the humid mid-August day. We had an incredible relationship that we valued and always worked to keep the other person first in our lives.

We were married young; I was 20, Scott 21.We got engaged in October 1989 and planned to marry after college, maybe June 1991, but a short visit to financial aid made us move our plans up to August 1990. Thereafter I would joke that we were bound together by our financial obligations, but I think everyone knew we had an incredible bond. A happily ever after. Our wedding was magical. It rained, but in that summer drought, it was a blessing. We had memorized our vows, declaring our love for each other before God with full eye contact and no need to repeat after the priest. We knew what we were promising.

Unequivocally, Scott was the best roommate ever!  I honestly wouldn’t change a thing. (Well, maybe his inability to see huge bugs in my eyes. I kept a mirror in my golf bag to resolve this shortcoming). I bet I thanked him at least 100 times for asking me out. And we never stopped dating and always considered each other’s feelings. I invited him to social events but never made any demands that he attend. Mom had not modeled that well with Dad. Going to events with someone who does not want to be there is no fun for either party.

Why did our marriage work?  I’d credit our copacetic relationship with having a sense of humor, strong and open communication, commingled finances, and similar social expectations. We just really got along and seldom fought. Our marriage preparation courses had a session on fighting fair, not using loaded language like always and never or laundry basketing with old issues. I also think we never took our love for granted. A friend who described the love in his eyes as Scott looked at me. “I just wish, just once, someone would look at me the way you two look at each other.” There was visual proof too. Over the course of golfing with a group of friends on Saturdays one summer, Kitty made a video of the photos she had taken to play at their Christmas party.  She pointed us out in one picture and it became a game to yell, “And there’s Spinner with T-Mick”  as picture after picture showed us together.  We watched and laughed, cuddled together in an oversized armchair.

Scott was my husband, best friend and medical advisor. That’s a lot for one human. His medical knowledge was a boon for me, but a sometimes burden for him because he knew how serious sepsis was while I was worried about how soon I could have another Italian ice. While I slept off anesthesia, he could scan quickly through a medical report for nefarious findings or discuss results with the surgeon. Though I tried not to burden him, he was highly perceptive and very experienced at noticing pain  He was also incredible at finding the positive and offering unconditional love and support.

My Chemo Sabe. Scott hated to miss office visits with medical or radiation oncology, and I dreaded going alone. I could bear any news with him, but if he was not there, I had the extra agony of telling him, and hearing his voice break or seeing one tear was harder for me to bear than the bad news itself. It hurt to hurt the ones I love. There was no way to contain cancer, but I was always bothered by the effects my cancer had on others. Wasn’t it enough that it was destroying me?

Our relationship even withstood many discussions about the end–quick chats to avoid spiraling into depression, casting a pall over the day. In our meetings with our financial advisors who whisked over life expectancy set at 93 years for me, we’d bite our tongues knowing me living a fraction of those years was unlikely.  Afterwards, we’d celebrate knowing we were financially viable beyond my years by decades. Somewhere there is a CentraCare receptionist who surely confided in a colleague the zany experience she had when we dashed up and asked her to witness our advanced directives then file them, suddenly and with nervous giggling like characters eloping in a romcom. Our will was up to date and our sons knew where we banked; our affairs were in order.

In March 2020, when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Scott took a leave of absence to stay home with me since I had been treated earlier that month with my third round of targeted brain radiation, compromising my immune system. It was an incredible twelve weeks  In the beginning of the leave I taught him mahjong and we played hours every day by the window watching the snow fall. By the end of the leave, kids zipped by on their bikes to hit the hill to the trail, spin around and then speed back down.

To lighten the mood, Scott would regularly jest that I would survive him and since my father had “budged” my mom’s dismal prognosis, I was not too quick to protest. We found my limited time made our relationship stronger even with “in sickness”  and “‘til death do us part” vows staring us in the face. I could not explain it but it made a lot of our intimacy more intense, both of us appreciating the moments more. If I wrote this memoir with the intention of making heaps of money, I would include gobs more racy sex scenes, but this will have to do. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

As I wrote, I read: 64 memoirs in 2020. The biography shelves in the Paynesville branch of the  Great River Regional Library were loaded with books I had requested, read and returned. Memoirs from all types of lives helped me listen to voices and study structure, but few were about terminal cancer. Julie Yip-Williams’ memoir about her life and colon cancer, Unwinding the Miracle, was published posthumously by her husband and included several references to her replacement as Slutty Second Wife (SSW). Reading it both resonated with and horrified me. Yip-Williams promised to haunt the SSW if she tried to replace her as Mom to their children or redecorate their New York City apartment.I tried to relate. I tried not to relate. Purses maybe were relatable for me. I carried a small, functional and usually black handbag. Like my parents, I was thrifty to a fault. The thought of some hussy replacing me and purchasing multiple spendy designer bags with money I may have earned and intended to keep my husband and sons comfortable made my blood boil, but over time, this reaction made me feel sheepish.How could I be jealous of the future? I would always be Scott’s Wife and Mack and Ben’s Mom.

In her pain and suffering and frustration and anger, Yip distilled wisdom. Our lives were vastly different, especially our childhoods. Her struggles made me cherish even more the idyllic glow I felt when I thought of my childhood on the farm. Of course I saw parallels in our life with too many elements of terminal cancer consistent and it scared the shit out of me. I struggled to sleep at night when I read her book in the same manner as I struggled to sleep when I wrote this. A conundrum she posed will haunt me until I get to that point: Is it braver to decide to cease treatment or to continue treatment that will prolong life but with devastating loss of quality of life.  In the end, her story made me appreciate mine, especially my faith and the calming peace I felt and grace I was able to muster when confronting a new diagnosis or cancer progression. Two years into stage IV I was actually surprised by the peaceful calm I felt when I found out via phone  that more tumors had taken residence in my brain. After I ended the phone call, I found Scott who was working in his woodshop and even though I was calm, he read my face and knew something was wrong. The peaceful calm I felt was matched by the total love in his embrace and I could only think of Romans 12:12, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” Later, I was able to call and tell Mack and Ben without crying, keeping us focused on the good news that the tumor was treatable.

No one could take the decades I had with Scott, but I certainly wasn’t going to be like the woman who wrote “You May Want to Marry My Husband” in the New York Times, lauding her husband’s positive attributes to find a companion for him as she faced terminal illness. I trust the many friends and family to intercede as needed. My handsome, Jason Stathamesque husband might need some ten foot poles to keep them away. I just wanted someone who had Scott/Mack/Ben’s best interest at heart. My heart flipped every time I saw couples who golfed together and had met after the loss of a spouse. I wanted that for Scott, I wanted holidays for the kids, maybe someone who makes gravy, because I never did. Or quilts or Hollandaise or fried fish. Good luck with grilled cheese though, because that’s mine.

Is there a finite amount of happiness? If so, I’ve  lived a lifetime and then some. I knew of no one who was as happily married as we were. Given my situation, I was as happy as I could be and  would not trade places with anyone. My joy in this life and belief in the hereafter sustained me.