Cancer and Death:
A love story in two voices
This is the story of two fine human beings—Leah Vande Berg and Nick Trujillo—who had crazy good and mostly happy childhoods, who were, like all of us, occasionally troubled by unrealized dreams and love and loss, but nevertheless lived full lives before they ever met each other.
And then it becomes a story of a crazy happy marriage, occasionally troubled, like all of us are, by big choices and careers and families.
Then something happens and the story changes. One otherwise ordinary California day ovarian cancer entered their lives, rudely interrupting it and the happy story they had lived and worked hard for and imagined as their future together. This cancer brought with it a certain diagnosis of death, the only real medical question was how long Leah had yet to live. Chemotherapy was prescribed on the promise of possibly lengthening what was left of her life, and maybe it did. But inevitably the end came for lovely, intelligent, accomplished Leah Vande Berg at the still youthful age of 55.
But that story is not the only story, nor perhaps for a lot of readers even the most important story, in this remarkable, compelling, heartbreaking, and yet inspiring narrative. For within the story of Leah’s death is Nick’s story of how through this ordeal he learned how to become a true helpmate and brave life partner for his dying wife. How, together, they experienced her illness, her treatments, their everyday challenges to cope and to complete their lives. And, finally, it is the story of how Nick grieved and found within himself the strength to generously open his heart and share the rituals of ash-scattering and personal recovery with close friends, students, and colleagues.
We don’t talk about things like this, about the experience of terminal illness and the process of death and grief and recovery, and yet we must learn better how to do that. As Jim Morrison famously put it: “None of us gets out of here alive.” This book is a major contribution to our understanding of death and dying, but also of true love and the importance of friends and family in times of grief.
If you are like me and never wanted to read a book with the words “cancer” and “death” in the title, then believe me, this is the book for you. I recommend it to everyone. And I thank my friends Nick and Leah for the courage and love it took to open their lives to us.
