It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  So I called all of our friends, and everybody said yes. Just about the only good side effect of her having cancer is that nobody could, in good conscience, turn down an invitation to this party.

  I come home at the end of the day on Friday, which is Kirsten’s actual birthday, and Kirsten’s parents are here, and this proves fortunate, because some dumbasses have, for no apparent reason other than to be assholes, thrown a rock and broken a storm window on the first floor, and with Kirsten’s dad here to help me, we are able to get the offending pane out without too much trouble. I think it says a lot about my new improved mental state that I just take care of this without lamenting my fate or getting so stressed out I feel like I need a nap. We all go out to our new favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant, and I eat myself into a stupor. Appetizers, soup, entrees, what the hell, it’s a party, right?

  And I do feel like celebrating. Kirsten is really back. She has been taking Rowen to school this week, has been medically cleared to go where other humans are, has energy, and is feeling as close to normal as a bald woman can feel. We are still riding the wave of hope from last week’s doctor’s appointment, and it looks like we will be able to have periods of normalcy in our lives after all. I guess we have had to redefine what normal is, but that’s okay.

  Rowen has also been much better. One of her teachers told us that she had said something about various things that would happen “when my mom comes alive again,” and now, I guess, her mom has come alive again, and she is acting much better than she has in months. I didn’t really notice at the time, but now that Rowen is feeling better, I look back at the time when Kirsten was in and out of the hospital and think that Rowen was unusually quick to tears, petulant and cranky during the whole time. But then, so was I.

  Saturday comes and Rowen says, “I want to help you get the cake! And we have to get balloons and decorations and hats!” I’m glad she said something, because I didn’t even think of decorations, much less hats. As it turns out, we go to three stores and can’t find party hats, but we do get streamers and balloons before picking up the cake, some seltzer and plates, and a six pack of Rolling Rock (which I buy for the first time in ten years despite its vile flavor because it’s Kirsten’s thirty-third birthday and the bottles have the little inexplicable “33” on them) and we come home and start setting up the party.

  Everybody shows up, and it starts out slowly in the living room but ends up taking over the living room and the kitchen, and this is pretty spectacular because a lot of weekends when we are going to bed at nine on Saturday night, we feel like we don’t have any friends, and it has been years since we had two rooms’ worth of people in our house. I run around like crazy and eat way too much, and have two Rolling Rocks over the course of the afternoon and find that they are not as vile as I remembered, and I make sure to point out the little “33” to everybody, and nobody else seems to think it was especially clever of me to buy them. Anyway, we tell people to come any time between 12:00 and 5:00, so most people come at 3:00 and stay till 7:00, and it is a great time.

  At various times in the afternoon, people will sort of draw me aside and ask how Kirsten is and what we know about her prognosis, and I strangely do not find this annoying and don’t mind telling them that we know the treatment worked, but we don’t know exactly how well, that she is having a mastectomy in a couple of weeks, and that we hope that’s it, but even if it’s not, we are, as Dr. J told us, entering a new era of how we treat this disease, so there’s a lot of hope and not much data, and that is just fine with both of us.

  As Joe and Katy are leaving, Katy says, “You know a lot of really nice people,” and I think it is true. This is not one of those parties where anybody leaves going, “who was that dickhead who wouldn’t shut up?” or something like that. (Unless they were talking about me, but I think I was running around too much to be really annoying).

  So now it is Sunday morning after the party, and, as I always do after I have eaten too much, I feel disgusting. I got lots of bread and appetizers from the local Indian restaurant and overindulged in those, and I also had three slabs of the cake, which turned out to be so dense that all matter and light were sucked into it. So I feel disgusting, but most of all, I feel happy.

  I am happy because Kirsten is thirty-three, we had a great party, I have friends I love, I can hear Rowen down the hall playing dress-up, and a light snow is falling. I am happy because I thought there was only one outcome to all this that was hopeful, when in fact there were many hopeful outcomes, and we seem to have one of those, and I think I’m not going to take you to the PET scan or the mastectomy, because, well, everything that happens after this is basically postscript. Like I said, I know you want a definitive ending almost as much as I do, but it looks like medical science hasn’t reached the point where we can get that for this kind of cancer. So here is the most important fact: Kirsten is alive today. So am I. So is Rowen. So, if you are reading this, are you. And I guess that has to be enough. Enjoy your day.

  Afterword: Where Are They Now?

  A couple of times a year, I get an email from someone who has just read this book for the first time. “How is Kirsten doing?” they ask.

  Though of course it doesn’t fit the question exactly, I am always tempted to answer with Balthasar’s line from Romeo and Juliet: “She is well and nothing can be ill.”

  Kirsten died in October 2003, three years and one month after she was diagnosed. So we had two and a half years together after the events of this book. I thought about writing about it sometimes, but I found that I wasn’t feeling anything different than what I’d written about in this book.

  We reached a kind of “new normal” during that time. She would have chemo on Fridays, but she tolerated it very well, and she traveled and gardened and worked and generally enjoyed her life up until about six weeks before the end.

  She faced death with more grace and class than I can ever possibly relate. I fictionalized it in Forever Changes, though. It’s probably my favorite of my books.

  The last seven weeks of Kirsten’s life, when we both knew she was dying, were the most terrible gift I’ve ever gotten. On one hand, shepherding someone through the dying process creates a level of intimacy that’s unmatched by anything else I’ve ever experienced. I have never felt as close to Kirsten as I did at that time, even as she slipped away from me a little at a time. It was an amazing experience that I recommend avoiding if you possibly can.

  After my second memoir, Losing My Faculties, I decided to stick mostly to fiction. If you’re interested in reading stuff I wrote that’s informed by the experience of loving and losing Kirsten, you can check out my novels Donorboy, Long Way Back, and Forever Changes. And pretty much everything else I’ve ever written too, but those are the ones where these issues are foregrounded.

  In 2004, I fell in love with Suzanne, a parent and speech pathologist at Rowen’s school. We got married in 2005, and I got her awesome kids, Casey and Kylie, as part of the deal. I wrote about the surreal experience of falling in love while grieving for the New York Times’ Modern Love column. You can probably read it online if you’re a subscriber. It’s also in the Modern Love anthology edited by Daniel Jones. I also wrote about how two people with a lot of sadness in their pasts can form an unlikely (and hot) alliance in my novel Dear Catastrophe Waitress.

  I love my new family more than I can possibly communicate. One of Kirsten’s final wishes for me and Rowen was that we should be happy. At the time, I promised through tears to try, but I didn’t believe it was possible. Suzanne has been an amazing friend and wife for me and a wonderful mother for Rowen, and I’m really happy Rowen got instant siblings in Casey and Kylie and really happy that I got to parent two more awesome kids without ever having to change their diapers. Suzanne, Casey, and Kylie have made our lives richer and fuller than I ever dreamed they could be. I feel lucky every day to have this family.

  I’m not going to write much about Suzanne, Casey, and Kylie, because they don’t app
ear in this book and I kind of don’t feel like they signed on for having their lives publicized. And Rowen is, like her biological mother, a very private person, so I will just say that as I write this, she’s fifteen and passionate about acting (and way better at it than I ever was) and sometimes gives me this “you’re full of shit” look that comes directly from Kirsten and makes me smile every time.

  The school where I worked went to shit in the year after the events of this book. The full story is in Losing My Faculties. I moved to another school, then stopped teaching for four and a half years when Kirsten died, and I started again in 2008. I work at a nonprofit in Boston teaching communication skills to 18- to 24-year-olds. I love my work, I love my students, and I work with a group of people who are incredibly smart and caring and committed.

  Suzanne and I were married at First Church, whose members took such good care of Kirsten and me when Kirsten was in treatment. These awesome people also went out to the hospice facility to sing to Kirsten the night she died. I am forever in their debt. And yet I stopped going to church some time in 2007 or 2008. I found that church was the one place where I felt most angry about Kirsten’s death. Where it used to be a place of solace for me, it became a place where I went and felt awful once a week. This is through no fault of anyone in or affiliated with First Church. It’s not them; it’s me.

  Religiously speaking, I’ve pretty much done a 180 since I wrote this book. I suppose that’s what happens when your admittedly weakass faith is tested. I read about this guy going to prayer group and don’t even really recognize him. Honestly, I have little tolerance for prayer now. If you feel like it helps you, then, you know, great. But if you think your prayers are helping someone else, I think you’re delusional. You want to help somebody? Bake them a casserole or go clean their kitchen when they’re neutropenic. Your prayers and three bucks will buy them a latte. And if you have to choose, they’d probably rather have the latte. At least I would.

  Kirsten’s mom Cynthia died after having a stroke in 2010. She was very forgiving of how I portrayed her in this book. I mentioned this to her at the time, but I will expand here: though this book is accurate and true, it’s far from complete. Any real person who appears in this book is of necessity a character in my story. But of course there’s far more to everyone who appears in this book—even me—than could possibly fit into its pages. After writing two memoirs, I’m convinced that this is what really hurts people—not so much having something unflattering written about them, but being summed up and dismissed in a relatively short space rather than depicted as the complicated, multidimensional people they actually are. I guess that’s the danger of producing this kind of art. I looked at this issue from the other side in Dear Catastrophe Waitress, whose two protagonists had been the subjects of breakup songs.

  Kirsten’s entire extended family has been incredibly kind and gracious about accepting my new family—we vacation with them every year, and all three of my kids all consider Nan’s kids and Andrew’s kid to be their cousins—and Cynthia was most passionate about insisting that we were all still family. I miss her a lot.

  Kirsten’s dad, Dave, married a wonderful woman named Rosalie in 2011. They’re very happy together and seem to appreciate every moment more keenly than just about anyone else I know.

  My relationship with my mom recovered nicely from me writing about her. She has just retired from the police department. She’s had a lot of health trouble since I wrote this but remains a strong, funny smartass. I realized a while back that I got my inability to keep my mouth shut when stuff is fucked up straight from her. She’s the best kind of troublemaker, and I admire her tremendously.

  About a year ago, Rowen and I were walking out of the grocery store when someone else was walking out. “Are you Brendan?” he said.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  “I owe you an amends,” he said. It was the man who I refer to as The Troll in this book. “I’m so sorry,” he said with tears in his eyes. “I was a real asshole to you, and I’m so so sorry.” He looked at Rowen, fourteen years old, and was literally speechless, overcome with what appeared to be both remorse and a kind of sincere joy to see her all (almost) grown up. “Are you…are you doing okay?” he asked, with genuine concern.

  “We’re doing really well,” I said. “And thank you. I really appreciate it.”

  I shook his hand and accepted his apology and went into my car and cried. (Yep, I’m still an emotional pussy—not everything has changed!) So let me say publicly here, much as I’m no longer the guy depicted in this book, neither is he. It was a tremendous relief to be able to forgive him and not to be angry at him anymore, and his contrition was so deep and sincere that I honestly feel kind of bad about putting this out into the world again with this picture of him in it.

  But not bad enough not to do it. For all of its flaws, this book is an accurate reflection of who I was and what I was thinking at the time. It’s not who I am now, but whatever power this book has derives from my willingness to set fire to bridges and be recklessly honest about what was happening at the time, and I’m not going to cheapen that by editing it now, as much as I’d like to.

  I’m older but not much wiser than when I wrote this. Nobody knows what all this means, and I’m deeply suspicious of anybody who says they do.

  Thank you for reading my book and sharing this experience with me. I hope this is as close as you ever get to living this experience, and if you are living it, I hope in some small way reading about my grumpy, horny, terrified self was helpful, or, failing that, entertaining.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Peer music for permission to reprint an excerpt from “I Never Will Marry” by A.P. Carter, copyright © 1951 by Peer International Corporation and copyright renewed, and an excerpt from “Lonesome Valley” by A.P. Carter, copyright © 1931 by Peer International Corporation and copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Copyright © 2003 by Brendan Halpin

  Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox

  Cover photograph copyright © 1989 by Nan Olson

  978-1-5040-0965-2

  Distributed in 2015 by Open Road Distribution

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com