October 2014
Los Altos & Pacifica, CA
A year and a week after we got engaged in Vietnam, which is also nine months after we got married at City Hall in San Francisco, we drive south on El Camino to the Los Altos CryoBank after an appointment with Dave’s neuro-oncology team at Stanford Hospital. We’ve just learned that if we want to leave open the option of having biological children, Dave needs to bank sperm before he starts radiation and chemotherapy next week.
We haven’t talked about this. We haven’t really talked much about anything over the past month of hospitals and doctors and his diagnosis of a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma, a terminal form of brain cancer with a median life expectancy of two years. We’re both struggling just to keep going, to understand how we got from the riverside in Vietnam to a series of hospital rooms at Stanford.
And now we’re here, banking sperm. Our shared desire to adopt was one of the things that originally brought us together; one of the reasons we got married at City Hall was to start the two year clock on adoption. We agreed it was better for the world that is dying around us, that there are so many children that need parents. We told ourselves it would be selfish to bring another child into the world, especially since neither of us are interested in passing on our genetic dispositions to anxiety, depression, and diabetes. But now adoption is off the table -- they don’t let people with terminal cancer do that. And I still desperately want a child.
We pull up at the clinic, an unassuming tan stucco building in a small shopping center with a Starbucks and a medical equipment store, and disembark into the hot dry October air. Inside, a woman hands us forms on standard issue brown clipboards with blue Bic pens attached by a white string, collecting our vitals, contact information, the stories of our lives together and apart.
I get a text from Dave’s half-sister Jane while we’re waiting. His family and mine put together a schedule of visitors so we always have someone around to help. It’s well intentioned and we need the support — I’m in the middle of launching a new business, my dream of a specialty market in San Francisco that combines the convenience of your corner store with the quality of a high end grocery store. If I’m going to keep working on it while doing consulting to bring in income, we need the support. But I crave peace and care and my own space, which is hard to come by in a constantly full house, especially when it’s full of Dave’s family, who don’t see me as part of their family. I’m too new; we’ve been together for three years and married for less than one. And maybe I’m not quite who they expected Dave to marry – Jewish and Hindu, full-bodied, self-assured, brown.
“Hey, hope everything is going well! My mom and I are doing some shopping, we thought we could get some curtains for your front windows. What do you think of these? Or these? Maybe these?” Jane texts. Photos of gray and white and beige curtains appear. I ignore her, switching my phone to silent. Sylvia, Jane and Dave’s mom, is also visiting, and they’ve taken it upon themselves to organize the house we moved into three short months ago. Sylvia is, shall we say, difficult; her children have learned not to cross her. And I’ll learn soon enough too.
After shivering in the air-conditioned lobby for ten minutes, we’re ushered into an office. Everything is brown, except for the blond woman in a black pleated skirt and white t-shirt.
“Welcome, I’m Tammy. What brings you here today?” She flips through our paperwork.
Dave and I glance at each other. “I’m starting chemo and radiation next week,” he says.
“The doctor….his doctor told us we should think about banking sperm,” I say.
“Of course,” Tammy says, smile dimming. “We see a lot of couples in your situation.” She explains how it works. $1,600 for specimen collection plus an annual storage fee, discounted depending on how long we bank it for. Two years, we decide. I pull out a credit card, one that isn’t maxed out from our recent move, and we sign the paperwork.
“Ready then?” Tammy leads us back out across the lobby, into a small waiting area with some chairs and magazines.
“Wait, now?” Dave asks. “I thought….I’d have some time to prepare.”
“The sooner the better!” Tammy chirps. “You can use room number three. There are some magazines and videos there.”
“Can we…can we have a moment?” He asks.
Tammy’s smile slips further. “Of course! Let them know at the front if you need anything.” She hands him a clear plastic specimen cup with a white lid and a brown paper bag. “Good luck!” She waves as she heads back to her office.
Dave sits down next to me. “I don’t want to do this right now. I’m tired and my head hurts.”
“I know.” I take his hand. “I know and I’m so sorry.” He can hear the tears in my voice. “Could you try? For me? I know we don’t know what’s going to happen. But if we can’t adopt, don’t you want to have the option?”
“I guess.” He sighs, looking away from me. He sits for a moment. My hand itches to check my phone, knowing there’s work emails and Slack messages piling up, but I wait for him to decide. “Ok. I’ll try.” He sighs again. I stand up and pull him into a hug.
“I love you.” I rest my head on his shoulder.
“You, too.” He pats my back and pulls away, heading down the hall towards Room 3.
“Good luck!” I call after him. “I’ll be here if you need me!”
I check my phone as he disappears into the room. Five texts from Jane with more curtains and updates on planters and pillows they’re buying for the backyard.
“I’m sorry but I can’t think about curtains right now.” I text back. “Do whatever you want.” I appreciate that they want to help, but I feel so overwhelmed, like I’m being steamrolled into making decisions about the house that I just don’t have the mental capacity for. I know we need curtains, but what I imagined was taking measurements, perusing my favorite websites, matching them to my tastes and the existing decor of grays and blues and yellows. And I wish they would help with the actually important things – making sure Dave has support and the care that he needs so that it doesn’t all rest on me.
I put them out of my mind and dive into my work messages, arranging calls and responding as quickly as I can. As the managing partner of a new specialty food and wine store in Noe Valley, everyone needs decisions and answers from me quickly, and my consulting clients depend on me for fast responses too. A few people I work with closely know about Dave, but I haven’t had the energy to figure out what to say to everyone else yet. Before I know it, twenty minutes have gone by.
A text pops up from Dave. “Can you come in here please?”
I sit for a moment. In my wildest nightmare I never thought I’d be sitting at a sperm bank, waiting for my husband of ten months to produce a “specimen,” so they can freeze it and I can get it injected into my vagina at some unknown future date and hopefully conceive a baby, whether he’s around for it or not.
I stick my phone back in my purse and knock on the door to Room #3. There’s a toilet and a black plastic chair, beige tiles shiny under fluorescent lights. Dave sits on the closed toilet seat, looking despondent. I wrap my arms around him.
“I’m sorry.” I can hear his tears, threatening to break through. “I can’t…I can’t even get hard.” I stroke his hair, careful not to touch the staples holding his scalp together after the biopsy.
“Oh babe.” I try to remember the last time we had sex. Before he left for his last research trip to the Channel Islands where he collapsed, about six weeks ago. I was sad about moving away from the Mission in San Francisco where I had lived for the last fifteen years, and a little angry about how tired he always was, how hard it was to get him to help paint and unpack. I held on to him as he pounded into me, mildly uncomfortable and wishing I was somewhere else. He came eventually, rolled off of me, and went to sleep. Now I feel terrible that I was so petty, that I didn’t even try to enjoy the last time before we knew. We had a good sex life up until a couple of months ago, sweet and dirty, frequent without taking over as it did in the first blush of infatuation.
“Shhh, shhh. It’s ok.” I say. “We can try at home. We still have a few days before the treatments start. She said that as long as we keep it warm by holding it against your skin, and bring it in within an hour, it’ll be fine.”
We take the specimen jar and the paper bag with us. There’s no one at the front desk and we leave without telling anyone.
I navigate towards Pacifica, each of us lost in our own thoughts as we drive past the lush green lawns of Los Altos through the brown foothills to 280, zooming north in Dave’s little silver Passat that he finally paid off in May. The luminous light of dusk turns into soft clouds of pink and purple over the Pacific Ocean as we drop down into Pacifica on Sharp Park Road. I pull over at the lookout point, opening the windows so the cool salted air rolls over us.
I reach for Dave’s hand. “I love you, no matter what.”
“I know.” He pauses for long enough that I think he’s done. “But really, maybe you should just divorce me now. This isn’t what you signed up for.” Dave says.
“What? No! I would never. I could never do that.” I’m crying again. “I love you.”
“You don’t deserve to be stuck with me.” His voice is flat, emotionless.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I can’t.” I’m sobbing loudly now, tears and snot running down my face. "I love you. I’m not going anywhere."
He shrugs, eyes on the ocean and the painted sky spread out below us.
We sit there, loosely holding hands. I take in the spectacular view of our new home, still sad about leaving the Mission but glad also because we couldn’t get through this in my one bedroom rent controlled apartment. And struck anew by the beauty and natural drama of our town. “Let’s go home. I’m exhausted.” I finally say, tears spent.
Ten minutes later, I pull into our driveway. I punch in the code to the front door, and push it open.
“How did it go? What did they say? When will the treatments start?” Jane and Sylvia, Dave’s mom, pepper us with questions.
“We’ve had a long day.” I say. “I think Dave needs to rest. I do too.”
Dave nods. “It was okay. I’ll start chemo and radiation next Monday. Five days a week for six weeks. Then they’ll see how it goes from there. I need to lay down now.” He starts heading towards the bedroom.
“Wait, wait!” Sylvia says. “Notice anything different?” She looks at me eagerly.
I shrug. “Dinner smells good. Is that tomato sauce?”
“The curtains! Don’t you love them? And now no one can see in.” I turn towards the windows. I hadn’t noticed, not until she asked. But I fucking hate those banal white curtains with stainless steel grommets with everything in me.
“I can’t believe you did this.” I scream. I can feel the adrenal response in my body as my heart rate and blood pressure rise. “I told you I couldn’t deal with making a decision about curtains today, and you go and buy them and hang them up? This is my house! Get those fucking curtains down by the time I come back out, or find another place to stay.” I stomp into the bedroom and slam the door shut.
I slam a few more drawers, then take a very long hot shower, crying and screaming followed by lots of deep breathing. I step down onto the cracked concrete patio amongst the weeds in our backyard and take a few hits from a joint, chase a clonazepam with a handful of water from the sink. Hannah scratches at the bedroom door and I let her in. I assume Dave decided to give me some space and rest in the living room. I feel guilty for taking up the bedroom where he should be resting, but not guilty enough to face Sylvia quite yet. Instead, I lay in bed with Hannah and check email, dive into a romance novel for a few minutes (the only thing I feel capable of reading these days), scroll through Facebook, seeking solace in distraction.
Finally, an hour or so later, I open the bedroom door. Dave, Sylvia, and Jane are sitting around the yellow Formica dining table that I got at the Alameda Flea Market in 2004, on the chairs my ex-boyfriend gave me, eating stuffed peppers and Sylvia’s mac and cheese, two of Dave’s childhood favorites. I pull out a chair and sit down. They watch me warily.
I face Sylvia. “Look. I’m sorry I blew up. We’ve had a rough day.” I look at Dave and he nods, breaking ranks to take my hand. “I just…I really want to make this our home. We just moved in. I want to pick out our curtains and pillows. I appreciate the gesture. But I’d also really appreciate it if you let me do this my way.”
“But you did say to do whatever we wanted.” Jane points out.
I turn to face Jane. “Right. I shouldn’t have said that. What I really meant was, please don’t ask me to think about this right now.”
“Well we just don’t want people to see in.” Sylvia interrupts. “But we took them down. So I hope you’re happy.”
Breathe in. Out. “Thank you Sylvia, I appreciate that. I know you were just trying to help. I hope it isn’t difficult to return them.
“Is there enough dinner for me?” I ask.
“Bad girls who slam doors don’t get dinner.” Sylvia says, never looking at me. She goes back to cutting her pepper.
My face flushes hot. I’m on the verge of screaming again, of telling her to get the fuck out of my house and never come back. Jane and Dave both look at me, willing me to be nice, to not rock the boat. To be the bigger person. In. Out.
“Right.” I say. I go into the kitchen and make myself a grilled cheese pressed flat between two cast iron pans like my mom always made them, with sliced cucumber on the side. Dave, Sylvia, and Jane talk quietly in the other room, laughing occasionally as they eat their dinners and reminisce about childhood in Colorado Springs.
I take my sandwich and a Blue Moon back to our bedroom. I let Hannah out to pee as I blow smoke out into the dark. I sit on the bed, eat my dinner, and cry silently while I read my romance novel, feeding my crusts to Hannah as she lays next to me. Dave comes in a little while later, and we watch Game of Thrones together, the dog cuddled between us.
A couple of days later, Dave finally produces the sperm, with a little help from me. We place the plastic jar under his shirt to keep it warm with his body heat; I remember hoping it would be enough since he was always cold by that time. We race back to Los Altos to drop it off at the cryo bank before heading to Stanford so he could be fitted for his radiation mask.
