"Where do you even begin?"

“Where do you even begin?”

My friend Adam asked this question after I shared that maybe I’d write about everything from the past year. “I think you just start with what happened,” I replied. And yet…

I have this idea that we’re drawn to the rivers, lakes, and oceans because—deep in our hidden memory—each of us began in water. Long before our first sounds, even before our hands grew fingers, each of us knew our first home in the amniotic fluid of our mothers. So it’s not surprising that Valerie loved the beach. “Lake Michigan is not the ocean,” she used to say, and each summer we booked tickets or loaded our van for the thousand-mile trek from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean. Last summer was no exception, although our plans required extra precaution during a pandemic, especially considering the news we received just days ahead of our trip. 

Valerie was on the phone when I walked into our kitchen. Over her shoulder, I could see the small piece of paper on which she’d written “occipital region,” “neural oncologist,” and “multiple lesions.” In short, tests revealed that the rare cancer working against her body for the past four years had metastasized—that word I can never even spell correctly. More specifically to us, this meant the cancer had spread unexpectedly to Valerie’s brain. The sudden appearance of the cancer cells (a scan five months before was “clean”) combined with the fact that Valerie was having a more and more difficult time reading, all meant that the tumors were growing fast.

Enter every expletive here.

For several years, Valerie’s treatments felt almost routine: tumors discovered, surgeries scheduled to remove those tumors, and then we’d “wait and see” while hoping for the best. Our young children kept us focused on the present, and I tried not to look too far into the future. The latest diagnosis changed everything. We were even forced to acknowledge that, perhaps, our upcoming trip to the Outer Banks would be our last. That said, Valerie survived the previous surgeries and withstood countless medications, not to mention a drug trial that landed her yet again in the hospital. Valerie would not take this lying down, and within days she spoke of shaving her hair ahead of radiation and chemotherapy. “This is happening,” I said to myself. And when I finally allowed a worst-case scenario, I figured we had at least another six months. 

We consulted three separate doctors and there was at least this consensus: go on your vacation, spend this time with your friends and family, and we’ll begin treatment a day or two after you come home. Besides, we were told, they needed the time to make an effective, accurate plan to target these new cancer cells. So, we attempted our trip to the Outer Banks.

It wasn’t until several weeks later that I learned how important this vacation was for Valerie. “Did she make it to the ocean?” first one friend asked and then another. Yes, after delaying several days until Hurricane Isaias made landfall, we arrived in North Carolina. For a few hours on a Wednesday and then again on Thursday, Valerie sat with our children as each wave washed around their arms and legs along the shore. In hindsight, this took much more effort than anyone realized: the following day, a headache unlike any other kept Valerie from leaving her bed. I spoke to doctors, picked up a stronger prescription at the nearby pharmacy, but not even the constant icepacks could help. At last we decided to fly Valerie back to Chicago alone, to our home and hopefully to some small relief from the pain. Early on Saturday, I helped Valerie into her clothes and we drove through the predawn hours to the nearest airport. 

The sun had not risen when I began the drive back to the Outer Banks. And the sun hadn’t yet risen the next morning, one year ago today on August 9th, 2020, when my phone lit the nightstand of an otherwise dark room. When I answered, I heard the familiar but shaken voice of our friend Michelle. She explained that she’d found Valerie, that the paramedics were in our home and trying to restart her heart. “It doesn’t look good,” she finally said.

Memory has a way of resisting the relentless, forward motion of time. The story I’m trying to share isn’t linear and, in fact, goes back before the surgeries and the drugs—so many drugs—to the tests that first delivered Valerie’s diagnosis in 2016, and back even further to whatever building blocks of the body left an invisible fissure through which cancer would enter our lives. And if humans share the same material as the stars, then we can trace this story to the beginning of what we know (or think we know) of the universe. There’s consolation in that fact, but it doesn’t make this sentence any easier to write: Valerie Faith Pell, born on August 11th, 1978, who lived a fierce and courageous life, died on August 9th, 2020, two days before her 42nd birthday.

In the snap of a finger, twelve months have vanished since that morning. I was lucky to be Valerie’s husband for just over a decade. I’m equally lucky for her partnership in raising our children, ages six and nine, who have now celebrated birthdays without their mother. And although we no longer help Valerie in the garden or hear her coming down the stairs to breakfast, her story survives in ours. Today once more follows yesterday. The letters become words and the words become sentences.

This is my attempt at beginning. This is my attempt at continuing the story.