Five Years On

Would that I meet my own Answer Man.

June 1, 2020.

Five years ago today, Carolyn was diagnosed with leukemia.

This anniversary always sits uneasily with me. It’s not a celebration, but not exactly a day of mourning either. It’s more like a personal holiday; one no one else observes, but which I can’t ignore.

Each year, I find myself circling back to the same question: What do I wish I’d known? The answer shifts. Clarity doesn’t accumulate; instead, it fragments, splinters. In the beginning, I wished someone had told me what to expect, offered a syllabus for how to survive something as cataclysmic as your own child’s cancer.

Later, I wished I’d known she would live, but even now, with Carolyn five years out from her diagnosis, that idea of survival feels tenuous. I know better than to count on certainty— her oncology appointments are regular and necessary, a constant searching eye monitoring for relapse. Her survival is, for now, a present-tense thing. A “so far” kind of consolation.

Last year, I read Stephen King’s You Like It Darker, a collection pitched as his darkest yet, tailored for his readers who have already gone to the hardest places and might as well go further. The final story, “The Answer Man,” took King decades to finish.

I’ve never put down a Stephen King story before, but halfway through “The Answer Man,” I closed the book and put it back on my shelf and didn’t pick it up again for weeks.

The story centers on a father who thrice encounters a mysterious figure— the titular Answer Man. On their second meeting, the father asks the Answer Man a series of casual, almost playful questions about his son’s future. Will he go pro in baseball? No. College? No. High school? The Answer Man shakes his head. As the timer runs out, the father asks, “Is my son okay?”

I’m going to spoil the ending for you now, fair warning.

When bruising began to appear on the boy’s legs, when a nosebleed sent him to the emergency room, I felt a stomach-drop of recognition.

A page later, the boy dies of leukemia, swiftly and without much plot.

Reading this, I felt turned upside-down. It unsettled me that the writer whose books I’d used as an escape hatch from my own horrors might be haunted by a reality I knew intimately. I’d run into an old enemy on the page, one who I’d hoped I’d never see again, and certainly not in a place I otherwise loved to be.

It also struck me, when I was finally able to finish the story, how the father never considered that his son might not live past childhood. It’s not a consideration most parents ever make— it feels unnatural holding a thought like that in your mind— and the parents who are faced with that possibly are forever changed.

There are days when I wonder what I’d ask if my own Answer Man appeared. The first question writes itself: Will Carolyn relapse? And if the answer is yes, what then? What would I do with that knowledge? How would I go on?

Writing has kept the ghosts of our past startlingly close. Each morning, I open the door to five years ago and enter the thick of it: the chemo, the NG tubes, the ambulance rides, the IV pumps that always spoke up right when I’d finally drifted to sleep. I live in that time and place most days. Then I close my laptop and rejoin the present— make lunch, do the laundry, walk the dog…all the mundane things I spent years aching for back then.

I wonder what that past version of myself would say, sitting in a hospital room with numb fingers and a racing heart, if I told her I return to the place she longed to get away from, willingly, intentionally, almost daily. Would it help to know I time travel to our hardest moments and try to alchemize memory into meaning? That the experiences that she barely survived would stretch and shape themselves into essays, into a book, into the architecture of who I’ve become?

Today is, coincidentally, National Cancer Survivors Day. I wish that designation meant more to me, but it doesn’t. It feels strange to claim victory when survival depends so heavily on chance. There are plenty of children who were also diagnosed today, five years ago, who are no longer alive.

Carolyn is here because her treatment worked and because she was very, very lucky— not because she fought harder than anyone else, and certainly not because I did. She was treated by a team of dedicated professionals in a small Philadelphia hospital: doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, nurse practitioners, child life specialists, and other staff who showed up every day to give her a shot at life. That’s what saved her.

There is what this day marks in my mind— her diagnosis day— and what it is at this moment, which is just Sunday after a sleepover with her usual crew. My kitchen is a mess— surveying the counters, I can work out that there were two rounds of chocolate covered strawberries, three bowls of Ramen, and something to do with marshmallows. There is a shipwreck of dishes in the sink. It’s what I wanted, I remind myself: this ordinary mess.

I know the adage— take it one day at a time, and I try. But it’s hard to live that way and also make plans, to have ambition, to write a book, mother teenagers, rebuild a life. Some part of me has to look forward, and that requires a consideration of all that could be, both the good and the bad.

Still, on this day five years on, there’s the ordinary that I once wished for. There’s Carolyn, alive and thriving. There’s a sticky kitchen, a pile of sneakers by the door, shrieks and squeals coming from the living room, interrupting me while I’m trying to work— all of this persistent proof that she’s here.

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Coincidentally, HerStry published a piece I wrote about Carolyn’s NG tube as part of their May Motherhood series. I’m honored to see my work counted amongst so many incredible voices and encourage you to check out the full issue.

Writing about all of this offers its own complicated solace. It’s the only way I know to move forward.