Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I should go to the doctor.” My heart skipped when he went out the door. But the doctor waved it off: not a problem, probably just a mole, nothing major.

  The pain persisted, and six months later Stephen was at a different doctor who didn’t wave it off. A second doctor was called in for consultation. A biopsy was ordered. We went home with grim expressions and couldn’t sleep for days. One afternoon, Stephen got a call from the hospital and took it in his office. He came out shaking his head. “It’s melanoma,” he said. “Stage IV.”

  Stage IV meant that the cancer had spread. Stage IV meant a five-year survival rate of less than 25 percent, on average. I spent days reading the literature and learned that melanomas were more severe when they occurred on the sides of the feet, the palms of hands, or in the nail beds. I learned about the difference between punch biopsies and shave biopsies. I absorbed all the information I could. And then I went into savior mode. I was determined to do everything for the man I loved, for the father of my children. I called the best surgeons directly or used my fame to figure out how to get to them. I was consumed by the challenge of getting Stephen the best care possible.

  We were pretty quick to tell the kids that we were in the middle of a battle. When I used the word “cancer,” I made sure not to say it so quickly that they wouldn’t think I was afraid of it. The plan, we explained, was to operate and hopefully get the whole tumor out of Stephen’s head, after which they would look at the lymph nodes and assess the spread. The surgery was brutal. They had to dig into the skull to get all of it. They wrapped his head afterward. He looked like a half-mummy and had to sleep sitting up.

  Initial results looked promising. The spread was minimal. But cancer isn’t just about tumors or blood tests. It’s about gauging your power (or powerlessness) in the face of a largely unseen adversary. It’s your attitude. It’s your environment. And it’s your intake. It was this last component that I focused on, mainly. My obsession with food hadn’t started when my mother had gotten sick, but it had intensified then: that’s when I had started to develop my ideas about foods. When Stephen got sick, I was working with a holistic healer who was also a chiropractor and spiritual teacher. He was big on how sugar feeds illness, and how internal organs need consistent detox.

  The hospital let me down—not with the surgery, but right afterward. I remember the first meal Stephen was served during his recuperation. He hadn’t eaten in days, and his first tray was filled was the most disgusting food: a piece of chicken with every last nutrient boiled out of it, a tiny carton of milk, a cup of green Jell-O, and a slice of chocolate cake. Wouldn’t a hospital know that he needed green vegetables? Was that what the Jell-O was supposed to be? I confronted the doctors, who responded with blank faces. They hadn’t studied nutrition since college, and even then it was for two weeks at most. “I’ll take care of your food,” I told Stephen. “I’ll take care of you.”

  * * *

  “QUIET,” STEPHEN SAID. The girls weren’t being noisy. I wasn’t, either. I could hear wind going through the trees outside the window. But Stephen put his head in his hands. “I need total quiet.”

  When he came home from the hospital, Stephen was difficult: demanding, short-tempered, intolerant. It sent me back to the early seventies, in Ketchum, when my father returned to the house after his heart attack. Like my dad, Stephen wanted to make sure that he was king of his castle, that his authority was never challenged. It was a ridiculous situation—and yet, he had cancer. How was I going to make a case that he didn’t deserve what he was asking for? And so I told the girls to be quiet. I told them to help their dad. I bit my tongue whenever his requests became unreasonable. Above all, I swallowed my own doubts about the marriage.

  The last of these was the bitterest pill. Our holistic healer, who also fancied himself a kind of therapist, was quick to make sure that I understood my obligation to Stephen. “I know you don’t always want to go on with this,” he said. “But you can’t leave him, of course.”

  I had two answers. Here was answer one: “That’s only true until you’re unhappy for two decades.”

  Here was answer two: “You’re right.”

  The second one was the only answer I let anyone hear. It was also the answer with the deepest roots. Thirty years earlier, cancer had forced my father to set aside any thought of ending his marriage to my mother. Stephen’s cancer restarted that entire cycle. Cancer was the ultimate anchor. All of a sudden, it wasn’t a question of whether or not your relationship was bad. It was a question of whether you were making good on the marriage contract: for better or worse, in sickness or in health.

  It was an extreme time. There were days when I felt completely connected to Stephen. I made appointments for him. I planned his diet. And then there were days when I felt desperate and trapped. I hadn’t done a single thing to solve the problems in my head—my trouble finding out what I really wanted from life, my inability to communicate, my tendency to do a good job whether or not the task really mattered.

  One day, exhausted, confused, and resentful, I sat on a chair in the kitchen and thought about ending it all. It was mostly melodrama. I don’t think I had any real intention of killing myself. I certainly didn’t have any specific plans. But I was so out of my depth. I felt like I hadn’t chosen any aspect of my life, like everything since childhood had been sent to me and I had neglected to send it back. I had no real ownership of it, no control, no productive solitude. I had nowhere to turn, and so I turned inward, but I didn’t like what I found there either. The day in September that planes flew into the World Trade Center, I watched the news as if in a trance. It was my former home—my Manhattan—under attack. I huddled in a corner of my couch and wondered if anything would ever be okay again.

  My moment of despair passed. Stephen helped it pass, in part, by coming around to a better way of thinking. That first year, he changed his lifestyle. He calmed down. He began to exercise regularly. He quit drinking. After nine months or so of mindful living, his body responded by returning to health. By the end of that first year, he was cancer-free.

  But even with a healthy husband, I needed to work. Money was suddenly a huge priority, both to deal with Stephen’s treatment and to pick up the slack for the months when he couldn’t work at all. I took any job that I could get my hands on, including projects I never would have considered a few years before. I acted in TV movies, straight-to-video productions, strange Canadian films that no one would ever see—just because there was a paycheck.

  * * *

  “DON’T DO IT,” I SAID. The doctors had just left the hospital room. I didn’t expect an answer from Stephen. I gripped his hand. “I’m begging you,” I said.

  After the year of remission, Stephen reverted to his old ways. He started drinking again. He ordered pizza late at night. I tried to enforce healthy eating, but I could only do it when I was around. If I went out of town to work, he was in charge of the house and the girls, and he ate what he wanted.

  In late 2001, his cancer came back. Doctors found little spots in his liver and his colon. They met with us, faces even grimmer than the first time around, and recommended aggressive chemo and radiation therapy. They were lined up on either side of his bed: like pallbearers, I thought briefly, and then banished the thought. When they left, Stephen just looked at me and took my hand. He started to talk and stopped.

  “Look,” I said. “You know where I stand on this. Chemo and radiation are killers. They might kill the disease, but they might kill you too, especially if you don’t pay attention to diet and meditation and exercise.”

  “If you say so.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I said. “You have to want to do this. You have to want to eat the right food.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “But I want to talk to more doctors too.”

  “We’ll talk to them all,” I said. “We’ll learn everything about every cutting-edge treatment. We’ll find other options.”

&nb
sp; He nodded. As it turned out, there was an option—a trial in which cancer patients were injected with cells harvested from their own bodies. The thinking was that it would trigger an immune response and teach the body to fight the tumor. It was incredibly painful for Stephen, having needles jabbed into his thighs, and painful for me to watch. But it started to work, and it seemed to me like the effects were accelerated by the diet. After four months, the results were promising. After six months, there were guardedly optimistic smiles from the same doctors who had stood grimly at Stephen’s bedside.

  Stephen’s second bout with cancer had a short-term boost for our marriage. He also believed that the diet had accelerated his recovery, and it changed his opinion of me. I wasn’t some diet-obsessed, New Age–susceptible nut job. I was a levelheaded wife with insights about the way the world worked and maybe even a special wisdom. I remember being at home once, coming into the kitchen or going out of it. Stephen was sitting on the couch, and he heard a fork clink against a plate. The noise brought his head up. “Hey,” he said. “Thanks.” It was short and simple, but it was completely genuine and unconditional, and it filled me with warmth and hope. That’s how the pattern went: bleak months stretching into bleak years and then, at unpredictable intervals, fantastically affirming moments that made me think that everything would be okay.

  We fought less about the marriage in those days and more about questions of parenting. Dree was spirited, headstrong, stubborn—all wonderful qualities that didn’t always seem so wonderful when they were powering a fifteen-year-old through the world. Stephen indulged her. He went easy on her. And she took the temperature of the room, decided how she could best play her parents off of each other, and tried to make her life easier. She reminded me of myself at twelve.

  But I had also been a quiet kid who went off on my own to avoid tension. In that way, Langley reminded me of myself at twelve. She stayed in her room, drawing or reading. I tried to go by at regular intervals and knock on the door, or ask her if she wanted to come out for a snack, but she was adamant about protecting her solitude. I’m sure, too, that she felt we were focusing on Dree while neglecting her. When you have one child who demands a disproportionate amount of energy, it’s sometimes hard to be there for the others. As parents, you say all the right things. You say that you love them both equally. You say that they’re both important. You say that the squeaky wheel doesn’t always get the grease. But saying it doesn’t make it true.

  * * *

  “WOW, MARIEL,” the therapist said. “You’re powerful.”

  The marriage had continued to decline. As Stephen returned to health, he lost some of his softness and his kindness. He depended on me less and seemed to resent me more. At some point, I told him I thought I wanted to end the marriage. I must have said it with enough seriousness that it got his attention, and we went to see a marriage therapist.

  It was a typical therapy office: impersonal palette, Kleenex boxes, comfortable leather chairs to help you deal with the uncomfortable things that everyone was feeling.

  “Tell me,” the man said. “What’s your main concern?”

  “It seems like everything is all bound up together,” I said.

  “You’re worried about your career,” Stephen said.

  “That’s not it,” I said. It was, at least in part. My most recent role had come in a TV movie about the political ascendancy of Arnold Schwarzenegger—I played his wife, Maria Shriver.

  “You think you deserve better,” he said.

  “Also not true.” It was also true, at least in part. Since Stephen’s first diagnosis, I had felt more and more trapped.

  “And sometimes,” Stephen said, “I feel like you wanted me to get sick, because then you’d be able to get free.”

  I had been on autopilot, but this got my attention. “What?”

  He backtracked, but only a bit. “I don’t mean that you wanted me to get sick, but the way that you act—the way you want me to notice you but you never really come forward—creates this environment where everything that’s poisonous is held inside. Who knows what the results of that are? You talk all the time about healthy diet, but that’s the only thing that’s healthy.”

  I was surprised by Stephen’s eloquence. I even saw the truth in some of what he was saying. But to blame me, even in an indirect way, for his cancer was beyond the pale. I looked at the therapist. He looked at me. A smile creased his face. “Wow, Mariel,” he said. “You’re powerful.”

  Neither Stephen nor I said much on the ride home. I was grateful the therapist had backed me up, but it was also a shock to see how critical and negative Stephen was. That night, in bed, I realized why it bothered me so much. I hadn’t become my mother—he had.

  * * *

  “EXCUSE ME.” It was a woman’s voice. I started to turn toward her. Usually, when people excused themselves in advance, it was the prelude to an autograph request. Dree and I were boarding a plane for New York, where she was studying with the New York City Ballet. The woman who had excused herself pushed past me at the edge of the jetway, crushing my toe with the wheel of her roller bag. If she recognized me, she didn’t show it.

  We found our seats. Dree put on headphones and turned toward the window; I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The flight was smooth, but there was plenty of turbulence. Months, even years, had passed by in a whirl of loss, anxiety, and disorientation. I hadn’t had much time to focus on my career. And yet, I was also under financial pressure to keep working. The result had been a string of less-than-memorable projects: a female version of In the Line of Fire called In Her Line of Fire, a Russian thriller called Time of Change. I thought of them as “get me by” movies, but it was a risky gamble: when you take projects just to get by, you’re making a move in a chess game where you can’t see the other side of the board. Sometimes you can move from that to a more substantial role. Sometimes people start to see you as somehow synonymous with those kinds of roles.

  On the plane, in the midst of that turbulence, I did what many people do on planes. I tried to communicate with a higher power, or at least a clearer inner power. Just help me find a direction for myself, I said. I wondered where I was headed in the industry, whether I could reenter it on my own terms, and whether, in the broader scope of things, that even mattered. Thirty thousand feet above the ground, movie sets were even smaller and farther away. Maybe the things I had learned about myself, my family, and healthy living were more important. Maybe there was a career shift that put those things in the foreground: I could teach yoga, or work as a nutritionist, or confront the challenge that scared me the most, which was learning how to tell my family’s story to a broader audience. When the plane landed, I had more questions but also the beginning of an answer. The woman who had pushed past me on the way in also pushed past me on the way out.

  20

  THE TIME IN THE DRIVEWAY

  “INDIA?” I ASKED HIM.

  “India,” Stephen said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’ll show you how serious I am.” Stephen went to his computer, opened up a website, and India appeared before me: an illustrated itinerary that took us through a half-dozen cities in as many weeks, highest-level accommodations the whole way. The girls were even allowed to bring friends along for part of it. I was flabbergasted. I wondered how much it all had cost and where Stephen had gotten the money, but I didn’t ask questions.

  We stepped inside the pictures on the computer. We went to India. It was amazing. The family visited ancient temples and went on hikes together, and though Stephen and I were uncomfortable when we were alone together, it was still one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. The country was teeming with people, and it had majestic examples of nature; it was half a world away, and when you were there you felt like you had never been anywhere else.

  And then it got better. “We have a private audience,” Stephen said.

  “What do you mean? With who?”

  “With the Dalai Lama,” he
said.

  A private audience wasn’t exactly private. What it meant was that Stephen and the girls and I, along with a small group of other pilgrims, got to travel to Dharamsala and sit in a room with the Dalai Lama—monk, Nobel Laureate, and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.

  The day of the audience, we arrived at the Dalai Lama’s residence in McLeod Ganj, or Little Lhasa, the uppermost settlement in Dharamsala. Cell phones were confiscated in exchange for check slips. We were shown down a hallway and into a waiting room that could have been a dean’s office in a university, except for the large portrait of the Buddha. Outside on the porch, there was a long line of pilgrims. We waited. Others in our party shuffled papers and jotted down notes. Guards instructed us on how to greet the Dalai Lama: how we were to stand, what posture we were to use when we offered him the traditional kata scarf as a gift.

  A ripple went through the crowd outside. “He’s here,” said Dree. Langley craned her neck to see. His Holiness had arrived, and he was working the line. A guard came and moved us from the waiting room to the porch, and suddenly we were face to face with the Dalai Lama. He led us into his office, which was filled with chairs and sofas. I ended up right next to him. I had seen pictures of him a hundred times: the shaved head, the calm but slightly playful expression, the red and yellow robe. But now he was only a few feet away. An interpreter explained the rules, and the audience began.

  I was nervous at first, but he was so delightful: attentive, serene. He smiled and barely spoke, but when he did he seemed to radiate pure wisdom. Others in our party had prepared questions for His Holiness. “How do we bring peace to the planet?” “What is the role of business as the world moves forward?” I didn’t have a question. I was too nervous. But I watched him watch the room, now and again looking at me directly, which made me giggle every time.

  The time passed quickly—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it didn’t seem like time existed at all. We had turned in our gadgets and devices. No one dared check their watch. Questions were asked and answered. Pauses were allowed to settle into the room.