Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

  After Andy finished his scans, we awaited the results in an alcove in the ER. An hour went by. Then two. Patients came in and out of the neighboring spaces. Every so often, I’d walk out into the center of the ER to ask a passing doctor or nurse how much longer things would take.

  “Just a moment,” said one, an hour into the stay.

  “I believe the results should be coming soon,” said another at the two-hour mark.

  As day passed into night, a nurse finally came by to get Andy some water and check on us.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m okay,” he answered, his voice a bit shaky. “But I’m a cancer survivor, so I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Oh, I’m sure everything will be fine. I believe the doctor should be in here shortly,” she responded warmly, while pulling Andy’s chart up on the computer. As she clicked on different pages, scrolling through, she talked with us about the weather. Then she got to one page and I saw her body language change. She stood upright and the small talk ceased. She abruptly, but calmly, excused herself.

  “Let me go check on the doctor,” she said with a smile that masked something darker.

  Andy didn’t notice the change in tone, but I did. I got up from my chair and walked over to the still-open computer screen. I pretended to look around the windowsill, not wanting Andy to ask what I was reading. But there it was. In the middle of a long paragraph filled with otherwise indecipherable medical terms was the news I feared.

  “Masses have been found in both lungs,” it read.

  I tried to hide any surprise on my face as I turned around and looked at Andy, who was reading on his phone. I took him in for the split second before he looked up. He smiled at me and I managed to smile back.

  Oh my God, he’s going to die, I thought to myself, recalling the hypothetical scenario Sean had laid out to me months before.

  Just then, a doctor pushed aside the curtain with two younger doctors by his side and calmly delivered the bad news. It looked like Andy’s cancer was back and that it had spread to his lungs, something that tests would confirm in the coming days.

  He didn’t say anything about the prognosis and Andy didn’t ask. The conversation was focused purely on the next steps. They’d admit Andy to the hospital for the night for monitoring and to drain some of the fluid that had begun filling the cavity around his lungs, fluid that was a result of the tumors. As Andy talked with his nurses about the logistics of being admitted, I stepped out to call his mother, Ardis.

  “Andy’s cancer is, um, back. It’s spread to his lungs. He’s being admitted to Sibley,” I told her, trying not to scare them beyond what I imagined they would inherently feel.

  “Do you think we should come out?” she asked. She was sensitive to Andy’s wishes on the matter, and I think instinctively understood that the family flying out might spook him.

  “I think it would be a good idea for you to come out,” I said. I didn’t know how much time Andy was going to have, but I wanted to make sure his family got as much time with him as possible. I also knew we were going to need help.

  Time started to slow as the gravity of the situation began creeping up on me. It was like I was gradually getting the wind knocked out of me. With every passing second, the reality—that Andy was going to die—began to truly hit me. But it was still premature for me to tell her or Andy just how serious the situation was, that his cancer was almost definitely terminal. It was too soon, and it wasn’t my place. I wasn’t a medical professional, and I worried, particularly for Andy, that he would resent the person who delivered the news. I didn’t want him to hate me, and the information wouldn’t change the steps his doctors were giving him.

  Still, I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. In moments like these, I’ve learned it’s always hard to know for certain what’s right and what’s wrong.

  “I love you,” I told his mom as she hung up to tell her husband and call others in the family. I had never said “I love you” to his parents before, but I felt it and I knew they were going to need all the love they could get in the coming days and weeks. Nothing is more difficult than losing a child.

  Then I stepped into a dark, single-stall restroom just off the center of the ER to call my own parents. As I waited for my mother to pick up the phone, I looked at myself in the mirror. Seeing my reflection made everything feel so much more real.

  This is real life. This is happening.

  When I heard my mother’s voice, I burst into tears.

  “Mom? His cancer is back. He’s…he’s…he’s going to die!” I cried into the phone. I started hyperventilating. I could barely stand. Leaning against the sink in the dark restroom, I cried like I had never cried before. The type of crying that could burst a blood vessel. I was inconsolable.

  But I needed to let it all out on the call because I had to return to Andy’s side and be calm and present. I explained to both of my parents what we’d just learned and what I already knew: He had probably a year left.

  “He doesn’t know and I can’t tell him. I need you! Please come down! I need you!”

  My mom was, understandably, also hysterical at the shocking news, and my dad was concerned with her driving down to D.C. in her distraught state.

  “Can she come tomorrow?” he asked, going into the calm, logical attorney mode that had helped us work through intense conversations before. I wasn’t able to match his calm. I was a mess. I fell to the floor of the still-dark restroom.

  “No! I need my mom! I need my mom! I need my mom! Please!”

  Hearing the fear in my voice, my dad relented, and my mom bought a train ticket down for that night. With my mom on her way, I stepped out of the bathroom, cleared my eyes, and sat for a few moments to catch my breath. I walked back into Andy’s room, where the nurse was helping him into a wheelchair for the trip up a few floors to his hospital room. He grabbed my hand and I walked beside him as he was wheeled up.

  “I just can’t believe I have to go through all this again. I’m exhausted and I thought I was done,” he said. “But if I beat it once, I’ll do it again.”

  My heart broke, but I just let him talk. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I also didn’t want to add to his burden. He would find out in due course. I decided that my job was to provide positivity and reinforce his hope. My role was to love, not to be the realist. And after all, there are always those people who get a terminal diagnosis and end up defying the odds. Andy could be one of those survivors. Right?

  It was just two days later, as Andy prepared to go with his mom to an appointment with his doctors at Johns Hopkins, that he asked me to marry him.

  I had a feeling the question might come as he began to grapple with the possibility that the recurrence of the cancer was far more serious than his first go-round had been. And as the initial shock of the news wore off and he began to think about what came next, it was clear the thought of death was again on his mind. But it wasn’t until his proposal that he acknowledged the realization to me.

  I worried about every word I said to him, particularly in those first days after the diagnosis. I worried that if I said yes instantly to his proposal, he would interpret that as a sign that I had already given up. But obviously, I wasn’t going to say no, either.

  “Let’s see what your doctors say before we start talking about that.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. A few hours after Andy and his mother left for the doctor’s appointment, I picked up my phone to a text from him: “They said it’s terminal.”

  I didn’t think, I just called immediately. It wasn’t a surprise, but that didn’t diminish the shock. Even though I’d had three days to prepare for this moment, I didn’t know what to say. I told him that I was sorry. I told him that I wasn’t going anywhere, that I’d be right there with him every step of the way.

 
“And to the question you asked before you left,” I said, “the answer is obviously, certainly, without question, yes.”

  I waited anxiously with my mom for Andy and his mom to get back to our apartment. When he walked into our living room, he appeared completely deflated. He fell into the couch and just sat there, his eyes a blank stare.

  I sat down beside him and held his hand. “What did the doctors say about next steps?” I asked hesitantly.

  “That I have probably ten months to a year with treatment. That I…um…will start chemo, but that it will be to prolong my life, not save…” He trailed off.

  It was practically exactly what Sean had said all those months before. Staring at the ground, Andy’s eyes were filled with tears, the kind that just rest on your eyes, ready, at any moment, to burst onto your cheeks.

  How do you console someone who knows that they are going to die? I couldn’t tell him that it would get better. I couldn’t tell him that he’d beat it. But I also wanted to be careful not to remove his last bit of optimism that would inevitably give him the strength to put one foot in front of the other, pursue the treatment, and grapple with the stages of acceptance and grief. I realized that I just needed to listen to him and love him.

  Over the next few days, the shock subsided into crying. Lots and lots of crying. He was scared out of his mind, perpetually locked into a look of terror, the literal “fear of death” buried underneath his beautiful blue eyes.

  “I’m so scared not to exist anymore,” he’d scream through the tears, his voice still muffled and impeded from the surgery almost a year before. His cries and deep breaths merged into depressing gasps. “I’m so scared, Bean. I’m so scared.”

  And it wasn’t just the fear of death. He also spent those days crying about what he wouldn’t be able to do for other people: the friends he’d leave behind, the work that would remain unfinished, and the pain that he wouldn’t be able to help alleviate for others, including me.

  “I’m sorry I won’t be able to be there for you, Bean,” he told me, scrunched up on our couch in the T-shirt and shorts he’d been wearing the last few days. “I’m so sad that I won’t be around to tell you that I love you, to tell you how beautiful you are, and to tell you how proud of you I am.”

  I tried to stay strong in front of Andy, but I couldn’t hold it in. I couldn’t bury the emotions anymore. I felt so bad for him. And here he was, facing death, apologizing that he wouldn’t be able to be there for me.

  Every passing day felt both precious and torturous. We were forced to appreciate every hour, no matter how excruciating or cruel they felt.

  On August 9, ten days after the initial diagnosis, we celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday. We ordered pizza, another one of Andy’s favorites. My parents and Andy’s mom and stepdad were in town, as were Andy’s stepbrother, his wife, and their three-year-old daughter, Addison. Addy, a giggly, cherub-faced little girl, was the apple of her uncle Andy’s eye. He adored her, and as she played with her toys on the floor of our apartment, he tried to muster up his clearly decreasing emotional and physical strength to join her.

  I hadn’t been away from Andy for longer than a few minutes since he had learned that the cancer was terminal. We had both effectively given up going to work, a situation more than tolerated by our flexible and generous coworkers. So, with Andy surrounded by family during my birthday “party,” I asked my parents to join me on the roof of my building for a few minutes.

  “Is everything okay?” Andy asked, after I told him my parents and I were going to go up for a bit.

  “Yes, yes, of course. I just want to get some fresh air,” I assured him. I could see in his eyes that he knew we were going to go upstairs to talk about him. It was obvious. What else would we be talking about?

  I had to let loose, though. I needed to vent to someone. Over the last week, Andy and I had effectively been confined to our one-bedroom apartment, the two of us largely alone with the creeping darkness of death hanging over us at all times.

  Sitting on the roof of my building with Washington, D.C., spread out in front of my parents and me, I hesitated to speak at first. I was worried what I was about to say would be selfish. But I needed to process my emotions with someone, and I knew my parents wouldn’t judge me for feeling sorry for myself.

  “I really do always look on the bright side,” I told them, almost pleading for absolution for what I was about to say. “I try to always understand that someone has it far worse. I try to find the silver linings in any of the challenges I face. I try to remind myself that negative experiences build strength and character, but aren’t I already a good enough person?! Didn’t being trans do that? Wasn’t Andy’s cancer enough? What other life lessons do I need?! Why is this happening to me?! Why is this happening to him?! Why is this happening to us?!”

  I was trying to rationalize the irrational. I shook my head and looked down, suddenly ashamed. “Every day, I wake up and it feels like a nightmare,” I confessed. “And I want this nightmare to end, but I also know what that means. The end is Andy dying, and I hate myself for feeling that.”

  “I find myself feeling the same way,” my mom confided, sharing the burden of those feelings with me.

  “It’s okay,” my dad said. “It’s okay. This isn’t easy. Sarah, you have had more life in the last few years than many people have in decades. And you and Andy have gone through more than most couples in a lifetime.”

  I needed permission to be human. I needed to be told that it was okay to be selfish, to feel sorry for myself. No one had to tell me Andy’s plight was far worse than mine—that much was self-evident—but I did need to know that I could acknowledge and wrestle with my own emotions through it all. I just needed to hear “It’s okay to feel like this.”

  Soon after we returned from the roof, Addison and her parents got ready to leave for the airport. They packed up her ladybug backpack and walked her over to her uncle Andy and me to say goodbye.

  “Can you say goodbye to Sarah, Addy?” her mom prompted.

  “Bye, Sarah,” she repeated in the hushed tone of a three-year-old still learning to speak.

  “Can you say goodbye to Uncle Andy, Addy?” her mom added.

  “Bye, Andy,” Addy whispered as they hugged.

  As Addy disappeared out the door, Andy looked at me with tears filling his eyes.

  “What if that’s the last time I see Addison?” he asked, overcome with the visual of the world that would continue on without him, these cruel realizations occasionally hitting him. “She’s too young. She’s going to grow up. She won’t remember me! She won’t have any memories of me!”

  The simple moments of life that had felt like such triumphs in his initial recovery, and that we held so dear in the months following, now took on a morbid darkness as he struggled with the knowledge that every experience could be the last of its kind for him. That the world he knew would go on without him. That a normalcy would return for everyone but him.

  Between the tears, we talked about the coming months. We talked about traveling with friends. He told me that he wanted to continue doing the work that he had been doing for so long: trying to expand health-care access for LGBTQ people. He began researching cutting-edge technologies and clinical trials that might offer some small, last bit of hope for living.

  And we talked about our wedding. With the ten- to twelve-month timeline the doctors had given Andy, we tentatively planned for a fall ceremony. Both of us had always wanted a wedding as the seasons changed, and a young coworker of ours volunteered her parents’ farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, for free.

  Daydreaming about it was our escape—a sunset wedding with the Blue Ridge Mountains as the backdrop, a crisp autumn evening reception under a big white tent right next to our friend’s farmhouse. We both knew it would be emotionally difficult, but the idea of ensuring a big life event—a bucket-list item—for both of us, together,
was a helpful distraction.

  But then, on August 14, two weeks after the initial diagnosis and exactly two years to the day after Andy sent me that first Facebook message introducing himself, a doctor delivered news that threw ice-cold water on our plans.

  “You might not make it to treatment,” he said, referring to the chemotherapy that the doctors hoped would extend Andy’s life for as long as possible.

  Those were the first words I heard as I walked into Andy’s hospital room. He had been admitted back into Sibley three days earlier, after his cough returned with a vengeance and his strength and energy had left him almost entirely bedridden. Since being admitted, his need for oxygen—initially a low dose through small nasal tubes—had increased dramatically.

  “So you think I may only have two weeks?” Andy asked, his face completely white.

  “Yes,” the doctor answered. He paused. I wasn’t quite sure where he was going next. There was silence. He seemed to be deep in concentration. I figured he was contemplating the next thing to say, since this couldn’t be a more serious conversation.

  Then he said, “Hold on, there is a fly. Let me kill it.”

  He slowly lifted his hands up in the air. Andy and I watched, our mouths still ajar. The silence continued, broken only by a loud clap. The body of the fly fell to the floor. “Hold on, let me pick it up.” And he slowly bent over, lifted the fly’s body, and threw it in the trash.

  I wanted to scream at him, but I was too stunned by both the news and his appalling apathy toward Andy’s emotions.

  After several seconds, which felt like an hour, Andy broke the silence. “Nice job.”

  Finally, the doctor returned to the conversation at hand. One of Andy’s lungs was failing at a rapid rate. “You need to decide whether you want to go on a respirator. Just know, given your condition, that if you go on a respirator, you will likely never be able to be taken off of it. And to put you on a respirator, you will have to be sedated. And given your condition, you would likely never wake up.”