In Sickness and In Health

I never thought I’d be around to write this.

For our 45^th Anniversary, I surprised Vicki with an Alaskan cruise for the two of us. Her first response was, “Shouldn’t we wait until our 50^th to spend this kind of money on a trip?” I responded, “I probably won’t be here by then, and I want us to do this while we can enjoy it.”

Little did I realize that I would be the one still here, and that her side of the bed would be brutally empty and deafeningly silent. In some ways, the challenge is that she isn’t where she would normally be at various times of the day and night. The house is so silent. Those are the things that are most painful to me right now. For those who know us well, you might find that statement a bit odd, since our 48 years of marriage were not filled with constant blabbering to one another. I know I get called “the quiet one” often, which is fine, though it strikes me that if I said the opposite, that someone talked too much,” it would be viewed as a bit rude! In some ways, I think I could say that I’m a quiet guy who married a sort-of-quiet girl.

Neither of us thought that in order to be married, we had to constantly be in the middle of a conversation or constantly in each other’s presence. I can’t think of a single day I regretted marrying Vicki, nor can I think of a single moment when I felt as though I were trapped in a smothering relationship that felt like prison. Lots and lots of people have commented to me recently about how much they admired our marriage. I don’t think either of us ever thought “Hey, look at what a great marriage we have,” but I suspect that one of the reasons people noticed our marriage is because we weren’t so demanding of each other that we couldn’t be ourselves and each other’s at the same time.

After going to a movie on 21 January 2019, Vicki talked with the urgent care site we had visited the day before because she appeared jaundiced. Her blood work from an annual physical the month prior had looked good. But the call on that late Monday afternoon sent us to the ER at Piedmont Fayette for what would be a two-year, seven-month journey. Vicki’s regular GI doctor happened to be in the hospital that night. He ordered a scan and admission. The next morning, he told us there was a tumor on Vicki’s pancreas. He sent us to Piedmont Atlanta, because two surgeons there were well respected for their ability to perform complicated pancreatic cancer surgeries.

The next day, one of those surgeons placed a stent in a bile duct that was being blocked by the tumor to address the jaundice. But they also told us that the location of the tumor made it inoperable. We were sent home the next day with an appointment to see an oncologist at the Piedmont Cancer Institute at Piedmont Fayette.

I won’t go into all the challenging details that were to follow. Vicki gallantly faced her diagnosis by participating in a clinical trial that required her to wear electronic pads around her stomach and back and lug around a heavy battery for almost a year. “It might help someone else,” she said. She endured months of chemotherapy, followed by weeks of radiation, followed by months of chemotherapy, right up until the end of June. For a while, she required IV nutrition, which meant she spent time each day with a bag of nutrients attached to the port in her chest. She had a stent placed in her GI tract to help alleviate the tumor’s growth and its impact on her digestive system, which was already impacted by a bout with diverticulosis some years before. In the middle of all of that, she had a compression fracture in her spine that caused significant pain on many days.

In the midst of all this, the pandemic began. Our family got very serious about protecting Vicki from COVID-19. We carefully followed CDC guidelines and recommended practices. Vicki and I received the vaccine as soon as we were eligible, and we were talking about the booster as recently as a few weeks ago.

We were very, very strict about who could come in our house. Masks were required, and once the vaccine was available, it was, as well. We were determined that if she were brave enough to fight so hard against this damnable enemy called pancreatic cancer, we would not let COVID-19 interfere with her fight. It didn’t.

She lived two years and seven months. The average life expectancy for her diagnosis is something like nine months.

During the worst of the pandemic, her sisters and some of her good friends would come and have “storm door visits,” and those were blessings – to her and to us. I suspect some people thought we were being overly cautious, and it’s fine if you think that. But I was determined not to have on my conscience that my carelessness would cause her to contract COVID-19 (and Sarah and Bethany felt exactly the same). Thankfully, we were able to keep her safe. When she left us on August 24, the pandemic was still raging.

For me, the shutdown had a silver lining. I was able to teach and fulfill my other Point University responsibilities from home – so I never spent a day in West Point, nervous about how she was doing at home. Of course, Sarah and Bethany were (and still are!) amazing daughters who love their parents and helped in more ways that I can count. But I’m the one who promised 48 years ago “in sickness and in health, till death do us part,” and I was determined to live up to that promise. Vicki would have done the same and more for me.

I’ll never forget some of the moments we shared as a family after we were all vaccinated, including a few family celebrations on the patio at one of our favorite restaurants, Bistro Hilary, when Vicki felt well enough to go. Before it got too hot, we honored Vicki’s wish to go to Zoo Atlanta. Sarah and I took turns pushing Vicki around in a wheelchair, and we toured the whole zoo – spending lots of time in the Ford African Rain Forest exhibit watching the gorillas, which was one of Vicki’s favorite spots there.

On Vicki’s birthday in early August, we had just gotten home from a stay at Piedmont Atlanta, where she’d had another procedure to alleviate jaundice. I had planned that on our anniversary a few days later, she and I would go to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens – a place we both love. But instead, on that morning, she and I went back to Piedmont Atlanta for the last time. She would come home six days later by ambulance, with home hospice care in place. That next week was a real struggle. But she wanted to be home, and the girls and I were determined to make that happen. The folks from Sacred Journey Hospice helped us do that with their outstanding care.

I could write a book about these two years and seven months, but I hope this summary helps you understand where we have been over this long and painful journey. But more importantly, I want you to know how Vicki dealt with the journey.

This one anecdote tells the story: the last round of chemotherapy that Vicki took was filled with frustration. Her routine for the last year or so had been to go to the oncologist’s office for blood work, then stay for a three-hour infusion in the chemo room. She would come home with a pump which she had to wear for 46 hours as it pumped chemotherapy into her system. On that Monday night, about the time we were headed to bed, the pump sounded an alarm. When you have chemo at home, you get all kinds of instructions and details about “chemo spills,” so to say that the pump made me nervous with an alarm would be an understatement.

I finally figured out how to stop the alarm and called the emergency number on the pump. I talked to a very nice call-center person, who asked me all kinds of details and then said a nurse would call me back in 20 minutes. That happened. I went through the same questions with the very nice nurse. Then she said we were ready to restart the pump. She walked me through a dozen or so steps, and we finally came to a screen that asked for a three-digit security code. The nurse said, “We don’t have security codes.” Then I was instructed to call our oncologist’s overnight number.

I did. Same sort of routine. I gave a very nice receptionist the information. She said a doctor would call within 20 minutes. While we were sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the call, Vicki said, “Why does this have to happen to us?” I saw that as an opening to rant a bit, but before I could get a word out of my mouth, she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. A lot of people have it far worse than we do.” About that time, the doctor called, realized he didn’t have a security code either and said it would be fine to just come to the office the next morning.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. A lot of people have it far worse than we do.”

That was Vicki’s attitude from day one until the day she could no longer communicate with us. Her amazing faith and fortitude carried her through two years and seven months of what were often pretty difficult days, especially the past few months. She wore that clinical trial device around her waist when it was irritating her skin horribly, but she insisted on continuing. She went to chemo infusions with a sweet and positive spirit. She modeled the kind of behavior I can only pray that I will have the courage to model were I to face those moments myself.

To be honest, I have had a heartfelt kind of anger deep inside of me since the GI doctor first uttered the words pancreatic cancer. I’m grateful that over a lifetime of repeatedly reading Psalms, I am convinced God is okay with our anger. That anger has made it difficult for me to talk about this without lots of tears. Of course, I’m one of those “he plays his cards close to the vest” kind of guys, so don’t expect that I will have a long conversation with you about this. But Vicki knew about my feelings, and while I doubt she agreed with them, she accepted that they reflected me.

Vicki’s graveside memorial service was on Saturday, 28 August. I went to my classes on Monday, 30 August. My rationale to the girls was, “Mom would have insisted.” I think I’m right about that. I’m not saying that is easy, by any stretch of the imagination. But then what is easy right now? So far, I don’t think I’ve said anything particularly crazy in class – but I can’t guarantee that won’t happen. But if it does, so what? If you had lost what I have lost, you might say or do something a bit crazy, as well.

Few things have been more comforting to me in these past weeks than those comments from students and former students about how much they admired our marriage. I think that means that they thought we took good care of each other, and that such care showed in our public behavior. I couldn’t live with myself if I thought that some how I had failed to take good care of this remarkable woman I was privileged to call my wife, the mother of my children, the mother-in-law to my son-in-law, and the “Mom” to an adopted child or two along the way.

Sarah and Bethany are in double over-time making sure Dad is okay. I’m grateful for that, and I hope and pray that in making sure I am okay is somehow helping them be okay. Vicki and her daughters were indeed best friends at many levels, and their loss is painful. There are others who regularly check on me and them, and I’m grateful for that, as well.

One of these days, I will get the bandwidth to write a reflection on what I learned about life during this difficult time. That will take a while. But what I hope I have conveyed in this essay is that for reasons beyond me, I was married to the most amazing person I’ve ever met, and she loved me as though I deserved to be married to her. I can’t even begin to fathom that.

Due to pandemic safety concerns, our family held a private graveside service after Vicki died. We plan to hold a public memorial service when it’s safe to do so. In the meantime, click here to read her obituary.