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But she asked me to meet her in the living room with a towel, scissors, and my beard trimmer. For instance, when Nicole started finding hair on her pillow, I braced for her agony, because she was so young and so beautiful. I do have a few recollections from that year, and Dane appears in each. Taken together, though, the surgeries and chemicals all form a smear that can't be taken apart and examined. Nicole had ovarian cancer, which had metastasized to her stomach, and she endured a series of physical insults that, taken individually, would have been shattering a single trip to the chemo ward, watching what looked like antifreeze flow into her veins while the nurses offered me cheese crackers, would have changed my life forever. And another man's refusal to let it happen.ĭane decided to move in around Christmas 2013, on the night our dog died.Īlmost all of that year is lost to me. I think I've hung on to the sensation of the hospital floor and being lifted away from it because it captures everything that followed in the next two years. The tiled floor of life-morals, ethics, even laws-became a shifting and relative thing. When it happened to my beloved, I lost my footing in more than one way. No one ever told me the truth about it, not once. Real dying, regular and mundane dying, is so hard and so ugly that it becomes the worst thing of all: It's grotesque. We don't tell each other the truth about dying, as a people. I was in shock and stayed there a long time. His name is Dane Faucheux, and I remember noting, even in the midst of a mental fugue: Dane's a lot stronger than I realized. I remember the tile, close to my face, and then watching it retreat as my best friend picked me up from the floor.

'Like somebody dipped a paintbrush in cancer and flicked it around her abdomen.' I staggered down a hallway and then collapsed.

Nicole was thirty-four, and the doctor had been direct: 'It's everywhere,' he said. I remember white tile and a hope: Maybe I will never have to get up. And I have an image of the hospital floor, up close. I remember my wife calling my name while she was still under sedation. I have the way the surgeon's voice shook. Most of September 17, 2012, has evaporated from my mind.

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