is an award-winning science and healthcare journalist, and the author of six books, including How to Write It (3rd ed, 2011), Personal Notes: How to Write from the Heart for Any Occasion (2003) and Writing Well for Business Success (2015). The phone rang five times, and then it rang some more. I was calling from Charlotte, North Carolina – wedged into the cracked-leather passenger seat of a friend’s Honda, my suitcase still exhaling the recycled-air odour of the airport – trying to reach Charles at home in Denver.
It was eight in the morning in Denver, long past the time he’d normally be stirring raisins into his oatmeal, waiting for his toast to brown. Each one twisted something in my chest. We’d had words that morning as he drove me to the airport – one of those marital skirmishes that feels urgent and forgettable at the same time, but leaves a residue.
On the 10th ring, there was a clatter – the sound of the receiver being knocked, fumbled, dragged across the nightstand. Then Charles’s voice, dry as autumn leaves: ‘Hello.’ Even through the phone line, I could hear the sleep thick in his throat. I apologised for waking him.
Just go back to sleep.’ I told him I loved him, hoping he heard an apology tucked inside those three syllables – a white flag folded and slipped between the words – for my role in the dustup. He said something I couldn’t quite make out. Charles was having three kinds of days then: good days, not-so-good days, and what he called ‘soldiering on’ days.
I couldn’t tell which this was, but he was fine when I left, and we’d agreed I should make this trip. We’d bought tickets to California for the following weekend – relatives in Lodi expecting us. He’d also rented and paid a full month’s fee for a condo in Palm Springs for the following month.
Charles was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and though he seemed to be tolerating the treatments most of the time, his determination to get well had a quality I recognised: the same straightness of spine and iron resolve he’d maintained through one family crisis after another. Seven years earlier, we’d sat in a small examining room painted institutional green. With clinical precision, Han Myint, the oncologist, delivered the diagnosis of mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma: ‘You have two choices.
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