CHAPTER1

MY STORY

This is a love story about two people. You may know people just like them, or you might be just like them. It is the story of how these two people loved each other with all their hearts and together faced the hardest thing they had ever faced: a cancer diagnosis with a terminal prognosis. Join Marty (my wife) and Marv (that’s me) in our race to savor each day and all it had to offer. Come along on our journey as we faced the hard stuff head-on, while keeping love and joy alive.

Walk with me while I share stories, experiences and insights from my own tremendous loss and deeply-felt grief process. Learn what I have learned, some of which is conventional but some that is decidedly unconventional—and all of which is, hopefully, inspirational. Come along to explore your own resiliency to recover from loss and what it means to live a full life while staying aware of the impermanence of all that we know.

In each chapter, our deeply wise grief counselor, Carol GoldfainDavis, tells us what is most important to know about each challenge we face during and after a loss. From her years as a grief counselor, she offers practical wisdom for how we can build, access and restore the resiliency we tap into each time we experience a loss. She gives us guidance on how we can move from loss through grief and how to recover to fully embrace life once again.

WHAT DID I BRING?

What did I bring to the experience of Marty’s cancer and death? I brought an open heart wildly in love with Marty. We had been together for eighteen years when we got the phone call telling us that she had cancer, and that it had metastasized in her brain and bones. We had lived together with a commitment to share everything, hold nothing back, face reality no matter what it was. We built a successful business, parented children from previous marriages, and practiced Zen meditation and mindfulness.

I came from a normal, albeit dysfunctional, family. My home was in a rural part of Iowa, just outside a small county seat town in the middle of cornfields. Both of my sets of grandparents, and most of their friends, were farmers. My parents were typical depression-era children who grew up with a sense of scarcity and an overwhelming, primary focus on economic security.

I remember sitting in my chair at the lunch table and my Mom telling me how much money a particular family had. In my own childlike way—I was about seven years old at the time—I asked why that was important. She replied that the amount in your bank account was what you are worth. I asked if I was only worth $35 because that is all I had in my account. She said, ‘Yes.’

I was not like my family, nor was I liked by them. Even as a very young child I believed in the common humanity of everyone and rejected my family’s prejudices toward people who were different from us. The day I started kindergarten, I went to the water fountain t