I wrote this introduction to my book while my husband was still alive…
A book I’ve never finished writing. Because the minute I write is the minute I delete to keep pace with the changes in our family.
I think it’s time to finish what I’ve started.
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INTRODUCTION
I laid on the table, naked from the waist down, red-faced and feeling a burning sensation near my nether-regions I neither liked nor anticipated.
She kept applying red-hot wax, one swipe after the other. I laid as still as I could, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I was this close to grabbing the aesthetician by her collared white coat and dunking her head in the cauldron of liquid pain she kept dipping those popsicle sticks in before she started ripping away. It hurt. But after two minutes, it was finished, and I had smoother legs than a baby’s hind end. It was worth it, pain and all.
So it was writing this book. Like the hot wax painted on my skin again and again, I kept coming up with excuse after excuse not to write. I needed to attend to my husband. My kids needed their mother to teach them that it’s not OK to draw eyebrows and a goatee on baby brother’s face when no one was looking. I needed to train for the half-marathons I’d signed up for. I had my work. I was tired. But the nagging never went away. Like the hot wax sitting on my skin, the idea kept burning within me.
I’d like to say that five minutes later, this little labor of love was born, but it was more like five years in the making. I initially began writing letters to my children about our journey for them to read as adults. Then as the first year following my husband’s cancer diagnosis turned into a blissful eight months of remission, I found a lightness and levity in my voice. When the cancer returned, my writing slowed, then stopped altogether for a time. My heart was heavy and burdened, but the idea never left me. My writing evolved, changed, as did my husband’s treatment as we began the third year of fighting, and the fourth, then the fifth. All culminating in my husband deciding that having a beer with Jesus beats shooting the breeze with the oncologist.
Then one day I realized I should bite the bullet, yank these ideas right out of my head like the wax-lady did to my poor legs, and see what happens.
I still had a few hang-ups though. Who exactly would I be writing to? Where would this book fit when it hit the Amazon marketplace and inevitably soared to the top? (One can hope, right?) Memoir? Self-help? And most importantly, who would want to pick up a book about living with cancer? Who would want to read about death and widowhood? Cancer and death aren’t exactly Disneyland and sunsets on the beach. It’s ugly and jagged. It’s raw. It’s real. And it’s me.
I wrote this book for me, but I also wrote it for you. For anyone who has lost a loved one. In the darkest of nights, lies a sunrise just ahead.
I didn’t write this book for those sanitized, side-hugging people who can’t handle a profane word and God in the same sentence. Cancer is something that only ugly words can describe at times, and I make no apologies for using those words. If God and cancer can exist in the real world, then they can exist in my book. And I make no apologies for my breasts either. Those who have been with us, supporting and upholding us, helping me in every conceivable way so that I avoid the funny farm, will get a real, honest-to-goodness, boob-squishing embrace. A tight hug that says I wouldn’t be where I am without you.
As much as I loved writing this book, I hated it.
I wish I had a long list of positive things that have happened because of cancer. Truth is, I don’t. I haven’t reached that state of nirvana where cancer is just another neutral event in my life that has made me a better person, re-ignited my love for writing, and other fairy tales I could conjure up. I may enjoy writing and matured to the point where I look in the mirror and don’t even recognize myself, but the bottom line is I hate cancer today as much as I hated it when we found out on our anniversary that my husband had Stage IV colon cancer at 37 years old. However, hate isn’t the fuel that runs through my fingertips.
Hope is.
In the meantime, this book is for you, for me, for everyone who has been touched by cancer and loss. Underneath cancer and death lies a beauty words can barely describe and a hope that is unshakeable. It’s my hope that it seeps through these pages and sinks deep into your heart. And I hope you get a good laugh out of it too, because if you can’t laugh at death, what can you laugh at?
–Melissa
#laughterafterdeath #lookingintherearviewmirror #wanderingwidow #itsme #lifebeginsnow