So, after seven years, I made it back to Manhattan. Out of Brooklyn and back into
the part of the city that only exists in black and white. We made it
actually -- myself and my wife, Dhanushka.
And we moved incredibly close to where I lived when I first
came to the city after college. It was the upper east side, just 20 blocks
south of SpaHa on 2nd avenue. There’s a great halal cart outside our
apartment. Not sure if the guy bathes in his own cooking oil. I can only hope.
And yes, as hard as it might be to believe, I committed to
somebody. Forget about my past commitments to the Mets or to eating handfuls of
double-stuffed Oreos every night after dinner. This was a person. This was
beautiful Dhanushka.
I married her. I loved her more than anything else in the
world. She had a smile that could light up the darkest room. A spirit and love
of living that you could see within the first couple minutes of meeting her.
Nothing seemed to bother her. I felt better every time she was around.
Although we loved our new home, it wasn’t a move we planned.
We were there out of necessity.
Before, we were living in a grand building in up and coming
Gowanus, right next to the canal. We were excited about it. The neighborhood
was hip, the bars were cool, breweries were aplenty. Friends came to visit.
They loved our rooftop, the welcoming lobby and all the new, strange
restaurants you read about in Eater but never think you’ll see in person.
Oftentimes, on warm nights, the two of us would stroll,
hand-in-hand, down the roads of Carroll Gardens – staring at the townhouses and
wondering how much each one might cost. Wondering if, someday, somehow, we
might ever live in one of them.
I even remember the first time we came to the neighborhood
and decided to move there together. We went to an old, woodsy-looking candle-lit
wine bar, hidden away so well in the dark and among the nearby homes that you
wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. Fireflies, fireflies
in New York City, were floating through the air. It felt like magic. We could
stay here forever, I thought to myself. Our future kids would love it (Maya
would be her name if it was a girl, although I preferred the Ghetto Superstar spelling Mya). They’d hate us if we didn’t give it a shot. What if we stayed
here forever?
But then things suddenly became different. After weeks of
massive headaches, my wife, my girl – the one I met one incredibly hazy night
at Williamsburg’s Union Pool six years before – was sick. Terminally. She had
Glioblastoma. Brain cancer. The worst of the worst. At 27 years old.
At first, we stayed in Gowanus. The surgery knocked out the
first tumor. She came out of it well, eating chocolate chip cookies by the busload.
She had six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation while somehow still working
every day. We woke up every morning to do the half hour drive to Weill Cornell
on the upper east side – listening to songs and podcasts and anything else to
take our minds off what we were doing. We learned to appreciate the beauty of
the Brooklyn Bridge and sunrises coming up and over the East River – lighting
up the city for our daily approach.
Dhanush finished up the six weeks like a breeze. We knew how
serious it all was, but besides losing some strands of hair on the back of her head, she was fine. We were fine. It’s weird and probably
wrong, but I counted on her to keep me strong and she was impenetrable. She
refused to be knocked down.
We had a few months of trips and fun. We went to our favorite hotel: Victoria House in Belize. We went on sunset cruises, we drank margaritas, we spent days just sitting in the sun – soaking it all in.
We went
to Bermuda and Martha’s Vineyard. All the while, she was continuing chemo. It
made her sick but you wouldn’t have known it.
And then, in June, an MRI showed it had returned to her
spine. Everyone cried. It’s never a place you want cancer to go.
We were told we had to move to Boston to undergo the most
intense radiation anybody can get: Cerebral-spinal. The entire brain and entire
spine for 5 weeks at Mass General. But right before, we decided to get married.
We had planned on doing the wedding in Newport in September,
but that was, of course, all up in the air now. It crushed Dhanushka – a person
who loved friends and family more than anything -- not to have big ceremony and
party, but the day at the Brooklyn courthouse and afterwards turned out to be
just as memorable.
Boston was difficult. It feels like it was 10 years ago,
when it was just last summer. Her legs, her back, her weight, everything became
weak. She lost all of her beautiful black hair. Everything became harder for
her. By the final week, she could barely make the five-minute walk to the
hospital. She couldn’t get on the radiation table without an Ativan.
Somehow, though, she made it through. Again. She didn’t
complain. She didn’t break down. She was incredible. She even went to a wedding
with me just a few days after finishing. When any of us would’ve been crying in
a corner refusing to move; Dhanushka looked like this. She danced on a night when
she could hardly stand.
And then she had a stable scan back in New York at Cornell. That’s when we decided we needed to move. Back to
Manhattan. Closer to the hospital.
We had another few months of relative calm. She was on a new
drug to try and keep the cancer at bay. Her walking improved with the placement
of a shunt and almost daily physical therapy. Her hair began to grow back –
little wisps, but something we could keep an eye on and note to ourselves as a
small sign of the body healing and improving. We did cocktail-making glasses,
we stayed at the W in Miami over New Years, we had a night up in the Catskill
mountains, we had plans for a whole lot more.
And then, the disease that just wouldn’t go away came back
to the brain and spine in March. This time things began deteriorating quickly. She lost
her sight in her left eye and then began slowly losing it in her right. Her
legs gradually weakened again and stopped working for her. We went from me
walking with her -- holding her under her arms -- to a walker, to finally, a
wheelchair.
But she still never lost that light about her. I remember
coming back early from Florida in March and she opened her mom’s apartment door
with a giant smile. Her left eye was off-center, not working with the other, but
she was smiling. She was so happy to see me. I don’t even know if she knew. I’ll
never forget that. That bright optimism was always there in these heartbreaking moments.
She was always ready for a kiss or cuddle. She never felt defeated. Cancer could
take a lot of things from her, but it couldn’t take her spirit. It couldn’t
make her sad if she didn’t let it.
She began to sleep a lot more post-March. She had confusion
for the small amounts of time she was awake. Bouts of immunotherapy and
chemotherapy did nothing, potentially just causing more issues. Finally, in
May, the doctors told us there wasn’t anything else they could do. We decided
to leave New York to be in a bigger space for most hands-on, in-home care. It
was hard leaving the city and our empty apartment behind, mostly because I knew
it was probably the last time she’d be there with me.
She continued to have more trouble eating and swallowing, we eventually had her on oxygen 24/7. She
was bedbound. Her voice went from strong and clear to a whisper to just
mouthing words, and then, eventually, nothing.
Still, she was there waiting for kisses. She still smiled.
She nodded when I asked her if she wanted me to jump in her hospital bed with
her. She was still there. She was still fighting when everybody else would have
given up.
Finally, after a week of unresponsiveness, she passed away.
Peacefully with no pain. With everyone who loved her most at her bedside. She’s
gone and it’s hard to accept that it’s real.
Life is unfair. It sucks. It’s random bull shit. She did nothing to
deserve any of it. And where is she now? Is she OK? When I look at the clouds
moving in the sky, I wonder if she’s behind them. When I hear the wind rustling
through the trees, I wonder if that’s her telling me she’s all right.
I miss her all the time. Everything reminds me of her.
Songs, movies, TV shows, food, photographs, smells, sounds, ice cream, puppies. It
feels wrong seeing and doing things when she can’t. The first few days back
home with my parents, I’ve almost gone into my bedroom to check my phone to see
what she’s texted me. Maybe a kissy-face emoji, maybe a “hi how you?” And then I
remember that she’s not here anymore.
So what do I do? Where do I go? Do I move to Miami? Do I go
to Carmel by the Sea, the place we always imagined living when we were much
older? What about just staying in New York? It was the place we met. A place
with so many memories and dates and dinners and late-night parties. She loved it
here. She loved walking up and down fifth avenue by herself, eating hit-me chocolate cake at Catch, spending a hot summer day in the Rockaways.
Maybe if I stay, those memories will always be swirling around -- they'll always be a part of me. She’ll always be a part of me.
Maybe that’s what I’ll do.
