Proof of Angels (23 page)

At some point in the days that followed, I said to my husband, “Greg, the doctor is right”:
when in doubt, get it out
. He knew I was referring to the large black mole that was spreading on his arm. He'd assured me he'd have it removed once already and the test had come back saying the mole was benign. I asked him, for me, to go and get it checked. We didn't need to take any more chances or test fate anymore.

On April first, like some sort of cosmic April Fool's joke, Greg received a call from his doctor, who explained that the lab she had sent his skin biopsy to a year prior had made an error. It was not
benign after all. After a few days, we got another call. Greg had, at the least, stage 2, possibly stage 3, malignant melanoma. Anyone who has gone through a melanoma diagnosis knows what this means. If it's stage 2, you're saved; if it has spread beyond the lymph nodes, you have months to live. A couple of years if you're lucky. We both felt like we'd been punched in the stomach. Greg needed to have a large section of the skin and tissue on his arm removed. He needed to have a sentinel biopsy and the lymph nodes removed. More than anything else, he needed to have the uncertainty and fear of impending death removed. But that, we could not take
that
off him with a scalpel. His own mother had died, under similar circumstances, of cancer when he was a child. She had had her breasts removed and had been told she was cancer free, but the doctors had missed the cancer growing in her lungs and she had passed away soon thereafter. Needless to say, Greg was rightfully overcome by fear and anxiety. There is no way to overstate the black hole he was in.

We scheduled his surgery.

To say the next few days went by in a haze is an understatement. I still had to work. I had edits due for my book. I had kids to feed. I had a husband who very well could die if his cancer was not caught in time. A daughter who wheezed at night and cried in pain as we tried to rid her of what was growing in her lung with antibiotics, antiviral, and antifungal meds—for what turned out to be not a bacteria, virus, or fungus after all. I honestly didn't think life could get any harder. (Though, thanks to ample amounts of literature and the nightly news, I knew that life could always get harder. Life has boundless opportunities within it to get even harder still. So it's not that I was comparing it to others' tragedies; it was, for me, as tough as it gets.)

We scheduled my daughter's bronchoscopy and biopsy, too. Greg and Brigid were both operated on within weeks of each other. On the day of Brigid's procedure, we woke at 3
A
.
M
.
and dressed in old bridesmaids' gowns and tiaras, and sipped tea while we watched Princess Kate and Prince William marry in
Westminster. She told me she would grow up to marry Harry, and I wished for all the world for that to be true.

In the days that followed, waiting for results from both procedures, I can honestly say I came very near to complete physical and emotional collapse. I had never felt so alone and so terrified in my life. My fate rested completely in the hands of fortune or God or chaos. It made no sense to me whatsoever. If tests came back any way other than negative for disease, I very well was facing a world without half of my family. Honestly, I never said it out loud, but I felt it over and over:
I just can't do this. I am not strong enough to do this. Please take this cup from me
. I prayed. I bargained.
Give me cancer instead, God. Let me be the one to die
. I felt somehow at fault. Blindsided. I had written a novel about a boy who dies and causes his mother immense heartbreak.
Was life imitating art? Had I conjured this up? Caused this? Was my fixation and anxiety over almost losing my son Colm several years earlier causing me to now pay by losing my daughter and husband? Did the universe act in such a way? Could God be so vindictive?
I admit it, I thought it. I am not saying it was right or good, but I felt totally responsible and yet totally powerless at the same time.

I couldn't sleep at night. Neither could Greg. He paced. We didn't speak to each other. The gulf between us was growing wider and wider. We learned something monumental about each other that we hadn't known until true crisis befell us. When our fear response in our amygdalas kicked in, he was all flight and I was all fight. He wanted nothing more than to go to our room, close the door, and lie in bed for hours. I wanted nothing more than to face everything and everyone head-on. I thought if I made enough phone calls, looked up enough facts on Web sites, made enough dinners, folded enough laundry, wrote enough words, I would somehow defeat cancer—defeat this black cloud that had descended on my family. I thought if I stayed busy—made sure everyone got to where they needed to be, every blogger got their article I was writing to promote my book, everybody I worked for during the day received my assignments on time—then all would be well.

But I was growing resentful and mad. I didn't understand how or why he was so ready to give up, so ready to accept that the cards had been dealt and this was his fate.

I called my mother.

I remember it like no other memory from that time—as fixed and real—because I know that up until I made that call, I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

It was in the middle of the day on Saturday and Greg was having an especially horrible time. I didn't want the kids to see him like this, and if I had to be honest, I also didn't want to see him like this. There is a reason, I thought, that some wise person made couples vow to sustain their love and marriage even in sickness and health. You don't know your partner,
you don't know love
, you don't know commitment until the person you love is so ill and so far gone that they are completely unlovable. Unable to face him, unable to face cancer and all that it might take from us, I packed our kids into our car and headed to the movie theater. (I swear we watched every animated movie we could during the months of March, April, and May of 2011.) I didn't make it a mile from my house before I felt the wave of anxiety, fear, exhaustion, and sadness overwhelm me. I knew at any moment I was going to cry, scream, or crack in two. I pulled into a gas station, stepped out of the car and started to fill it up with gas, and dialed my parents' home number.

“Mom, I need you.”

I felt it completely. I wanted my mom. I was a thirty-five-year-old wife and mother of two and I wanted my mommy. I wanted someone to tell me I wasn't alone. I wanted someone to tell me I could handle this. I wanted someone to tell me this would all work out, that in a few years it would be nothing more than a memory. I needed her to remind me of my wedding vows—in sickness and in health. I needed her to tell me what I knew already—that I needed to stick by my husband, that I needed to give him hope, even if he didn't have any. Even if I, a skeptical cynic, didn't think he had much reason to hope.

I can't remember any specific words she said. All I remember
is my hands holding the gas pump, clutching it for dear life. As if that nozzle filling up my tank was the only thing holding me to the earth. I remember crying,
I can't do this all alone. Help me
. I remember hearing her voice, and feeling, no matter what the words, that I wasn't alone. I do recall, vaguely, her reassurances that I was doing the right thing by taking the kids out of the house, taking care of myself. I remember her telling me she loved me. It felt as if the arms of an angel wrapped around me and calmed me instantly. Just minutes before, I was so desperate, so alone, and then suddenly, because of her, I knew I had the strength to carry on.

There would be many more days like that. Eventually Brigid's neoplasm disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived and Greg's cancer was completely removed and he had only to go in for checkups every six months now. (It will always be, for me, one of those mysterious miracles. If Brigid had not gotten ill, we would never have noticed Greg's arm, would never have pushed to have the cancer taken out. Brigid, in the end, was fine, and so was Greg.) In the meantime, my book hit the bookshelves and as happy as I was to celebrate my lifelong dream come true, I have to admit it was something of a letdown. (Don't get me wrong, I know how incredibly blessed and lucky I was and am, and I know ten years earlier I would have given a limb if it meant I would be published.) But in my, admittedly, CRAZY mind, I felt like I was an epic failure. I had imagined the moment of my debut as something so much more than it was. There was no starred
Kirkus
review. (I had some lovely reviews, I will admit that.) I had no Debut Author feature story in
O, The Oprah Magazine
. No review in the
New York Times
. No worldwide book tour, film rights, foreign rights packages. Oprah didn't call me personally to tell me how awesome I am. Go figure. It sold decently, but it was, for me, not enough. It didn't soar on the
New York Times
bestseller list. I know all of these are just the fantasies of every budding writer. These are things every naive writer thinks are going to happen once they get that elusive pub deal. Instead, the reality of publishing was surprisingly less dazzling. And I felt like
a fool publicizing it on blogs and my Facebook fan pages. In a world that measures success by how many Twitter followers or Facebook fans you have and how much money you've earned, I was coming up slightly smaller than a centimeter. I was nothing. A nobody. My book a pretty dust collector on my shelf. I lived my entire adult life struggling to fit writing into my two kids/two jobs life, and I was looking for a break, something, anything, to make my—no, my family's—life easier and I had failed them. In fact, I had made their lives harder. When I should have been taking care of my husband and daughter and devoting all my time to them, I was working and writing and editing. And for what? I thought. Nothing special. Some bloggers and Amazon reviewers said nasty things, and I felt like calling them and personally chewing them out.
Do they have any idea how hard I worked? Do they have any idea how much of my heart, soul, and life I put in that work?
I have to admit it was crushing. Soul crushing. The entire year leading up to the publication of
Proof of Heaven
and the months following were rough. There is no way to pussyfoot around that fact. We were overwhelmed with medical bills and debt. And then I was laid off. Perfect. Just perfect. Now I had no income. Then to add salt to the wound, another book with the same name,
Proof of Heaven
, by Dr. Alexander was soaring on the bestseller charts. Granted, his was a true account of his near-death experience, but I still couldn't help but feel slighted. By whom? What? I had no idea. I know the universe owes me nothing. I know that, but still, every time I got an e-mail or Facebook comment from someone telling me they loved my book, only to realize they were talking about the other
Proof of Heaven
, I very well wanted to scream: I wrote my book first! I am not Dr. Eben Alexander! Can't you read a book cover?

But every single time I was about to lose it, crack, come undone, call it whatever you want, something miraculous would happen. Over and over and over again, it happened. An e-mail would appear in my in-box. I would open it and it would be from someone who happened to have read my book—usually
by mistake. The writer of said e-mail would explain how they were looking for Dr. Eben Alexander's book and brought home mine by accident. Nevertheless, they stuck to it and discovered that they didn't hate it. (Thanks!) In fact, many wrote to me to tell me how my book had affected them, changed them, and in some ways comforted them after the loss of a loved one. I was touched. Overwhelmed. But, more than that, I took these notes as some sort of sign of encouragement that I needed to keep writing. Despite however badly I thought I had failed or let myself or my family down, I needed to keep writing. It happened more times than I could count. I would be frustrated and lonely and feeling like a complete loser, and someone would stop me in my kids' school parking lot and tell me they'd read my book. It was like they were
angels
, messengers who knew how to reach out and touch me at the exact moment I needed them most. Many of these angels had a singular message in common: all of them wrote to tell me that they had lost someone close to them, usually a child, and in a couple of instances more than one child, and many faced unspeakably difficult challenges along the way, and all of them had a deep and profound sense that they were not alone. They felt compelled to tell me that, like the characters in my book, they felt that someone was with them every day, watching over them, and that there was hope that they would see their loved one again. Some admitted that they had their doubts, but more often than not, readers felt strongly that those who had gone before them were watching over them and loving them. They had all the proof of heaven and angels that they needed.

And so I started writing
Proof of Angels
—a very different book from the one you now have in your hands. For months I was having visions of a woman, Birdie, who came to me in dreams—she was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning and the last person I saw before I fell asleep. I felt like I was having long conversations with an old friend. And I realized something—I not only understood Birdie, I just might be a bit like her. I knew what it was like to have a vision of what your life would be like and then for reasons beyond your
control, things just didn't work out the way you'd hoped. So you got a little bitter. A little hard. Not just hard on yourself but hard on others for no reason other than that life was hard on you. I knew what it was like to be a single mom, a hard worker, and have this calling to create and make things beautiful—make art. I also got my character Claire, who was completely unprepared and torn by her modern life—juggling a career, her children, and her husband—and feeling completely overwhelmed by the crushing daily responsibilities.

I thought I'd written my best work. I was so proud. So full of myself. So certain.
This is it. This is the book
. Three months after pushing Send, to my editor, I received a call from my agent. The news was grim. The book was unreadable. Not good. Nothing like they had hoped or expected. One reader stopped reading just a couple of chapters in. I tried to remain calm. I took the criticism for what it was: criticism. Meant to make me better. Meant to push me further. I had two options: throw in the towel and give up on writing, or write a new book. Instinct told me to do the former, but I knew not to give in to that self-destructive urge. I knew I needed to keep at writing. Fortunately for me, my kids and Greg were at my parents' house for the week. I could cry at night without having my kids hear me. I could process all the range of emotions I felt. I felt like a giant failure. A huge loser. I had created characters that had become like family to me and others didn't like them. It's nothing personal, but it is
totally
personal. It was personal to me. But it was also an opportunity. A second chance. My editor was giving me a second chance. Not many people get them. She owed me nothing. And yet she believed in me and I didn't want to let her down. I didn't want to let my family down. Myself down.