Personal Training

What does it mean to love another person? What does it mean to love someone who is sick? Can you really love everything about that person? Even their illness?

I have been fairly effortlessly healthy all my life. Genetics, nutrition, lifestyle – these all contributed to a fully functioning body that rarely lets me down.

Appendicitis last fall was a gut-punch that sidelined me for a couple of weeks. My cure was exercise, as it so often is. I walked the halls a mere two hours after the surgery, bent over and clinging to my IV cart. I ran a mile or so at the park 10 days after surgery.

Getting up and moving around were the panacea my mother taught me long ago. Be it flu, a cold, arthritis or depression, your ailment can be ameliorated with exercise. That was her mantra. She read “The Bell Jar” at my urging when I was in high school – probably because she desperately wanted some tiny glimpse into my sullen teenaged psyche.

Her response to the lead character’s suicide attempt? “I wanted to slap her and make her go outside for a walk!”

At the time, I thought my mother’s reaction was obtuse, cold even. Now, not so much.

Dating someone who has cancer is harder than I thought it would be. Not because of doctor’s visits or medications or squeamishness about bodily functions. I have no problem with any of those.

No, the problem is that I still think the cure for everything is exercise. I want Stacy to walk to the store with me and do yoga with me. Every time she wants to spend the day in bed or on the couch because she has a headache or feels weak, I find myself trying to get her up and moving. I try to convince her that a walk will do her good, that the fresh air will revive her – even though that air is persistently below freezing this month – that endorphins and other internal cheerleaders will make the effort worthwhile.

In short, I am now my mother.

The really frustrating part is that my own body is beginning to betray me. A nagging issue with my hip is making my regular runs a minefield of pain. And I can’t seem to find the magic combo of stretches and therapy to quell the trouble.

So what do I do? Ignore it. Run through it. Pretend it will work itself out. And, most importantly, get mad at myself when I succumb to the pain and either skip the workout or opt for something less punishing, like a stationary bike. Very healthy.

One day I will not be able to ignore it. Same goes for Stacy's cancer. I've got to train myself to remember that, embrace it, prepare for that moment.

Like everything that I have gone through this past year or so, this situation is trying to teach me patience. I have to be patient with Stacy because I do not really know what it feels like inside her skin. I do not know what it feels like to have endured 14 months of chemotherapy and the maximum radiation allowed a person in a lifetime. I do not know what it feels like to have had the ultimate betrayal from one’s body: a malignant tumor in the brain that might grow back and steal one’s life at any moment.

I do not know what it feels like to have convinced oneself that the end is near, one’s days are numbered – and then to be told that, well, maybe not all that. Maybe death is not so near or so certain. Maybe.

One clean MRI does not mean you’re cured. It does, however, mean that there is a chance for longevity, for a life without a definite expiration date, for the same uncertainty we all live with about death, rather than the ominous certainty of a dire prognosis.

I know I am going to die. And everyone I know is going to die. My mother, my siblings, all of my friends and enemies: we are all going to die. Some day. Some day.

But not today. Today I am alive and the sun is shining behind those frosty late winter clouds. Today I can still stand up, move my arms, walk right out that door and into my life. Today is a vibrant and elusive opportunity to suck a little marrow out of this speedracer careening toward death. Today I am alive.

And I will keep nagging Stacy to embrace her life while she has it. While I have her. And I will do my best to practice patience, with her and with myself, so we can make the most of whatever time we have together.