The Urgent Life

Iwoke up with a start. Typically, I take my time getting up. The alarm rings, I hit the snooze button, and then I lay back down for a few minutes, curling into the quiet before shaking off the last vestiges of sleep and stepping into the fevered rush of my day. But that morning, I sat up abruptly, my heart heavy, my stomach queasy. I wanted to cry and vomit at the same time. It felt like something was coming. I tried to remember what I had forgotten that was so terrible. You know how you go to bed reeling from something awful, and when you wake up, for a split second you’ve forgotten what filled you with such dread? I searched my mind for what that could be, for that horrible thing my memory had briefly hidden in my sleep. But there was nothing. Everything was fine, all things considered. Fine was a relative term at that moment in my life, because both my husband and my mother were battling cancer. My mother’s diagnosis had come first, in January 2013. The doctors had run their tests and determined that after surviving breast cancer two years before, she would now have to fight another form of the awful disease, this time in her uterus. When Mom moved from Colorado to New Jersey to receive chemotherapy, I squeezed my suitcases into her small spare room. She’d emerge from her treatments tired to the bone, so I was there to pick her up, to coax her to eat, to help her to her bed to lie down. But we took comfort on the days in between chemo, knowing that she was getting better. We found out that my husband, Peter, was ill in late May. It was Burkitt’s lymphoma, a form of cancer so rare that the specialist consulting with his primary oncologist was based all the way in Texas. But his physicians said it was curable. The medical team was flooding his system with a cocktail of medications, and it was working. Each time the doctors took a scan to check the cancerous growths in his throat and neck, they had shrunken a tiny bit more. Peter had always been fiercely healthy. He’d walk around Manhattan with a light coat in the middle of winter and never even catch a cold. The cancer diagnosis jolted us, but we were confident he would survive. So as strange as it might have seemed that I felt good while two of the people I loved most were ill, I was actually in a strong place emotionally. Until that Wednesday morning. I wanted to call my sisters or one of my best friends, Leander, but what would I say? And would giving voice to the fear manifest something awful that hadn’t yet happened? Could silence short-circuit it, prevent whatever it was from coming into existence? I reached for my phone. I needed to know if anyone else was feeling the same sense of doom, that something awful was imminent. But instead of making a call, I reached out to the void. I was fluent in social media, but I wasn’t one of those people who shared her most intimate thoughts there. I didn’t vent about politics on f*******: or do i********: videos on climate change when I spotted litter in Morningside Park. But now, I was going to try to express my feelings of foreboding in 140 characters or fewer. My tweet was simple and vague. “I feel uneasy,” I wrote. “Does anybody else?” I got one response back from someone I barely knew. Yes, she said. I feel it too. I got out of bed and prepared to go to work, figuring my early-morning angst would fade. But I couldn’t shake it. Not when I dressed, not during my fifty-minute drive to my office in Westchester County, not as I sat at my desk looking at marketing strategy decks and going through the other motions of my day. I’d checked on my mom before I left the house. She’d rested well the night before and was eating breakfast and reading. And when I called Peter at the hospital, he was in a good mood too. His oncologist would be in later that morning to go over his latest scans. I grabbed some lunch and was sitting at my desk when my phone began to buzz. It was my mother-in-law. “Can you come to the hospital?” She and Peter’s sister, Debra, had come from Massachusetts when Peter first got sick and were staying at my apartment in New York City. They went to the hospital every day, and there was nothing unusual about my mother-in-law calling me at work and asking me to stop by. She’d phone because Peter was asking for me or to see if I could bring something random, like one of his sweatshirts or the rosary beads of hers that she’d forgotten at the house. But when I asked her why I needed to come to the hospital now, in the middle of the workday, she wouldn’t say. “I just need you to come,” she said again. “Right away.” I couldn’t avoid it anymore. The feeling I’d been trying to bury with phone calls and spreadsheets and storyboards began to bubble up and overflow. My mind began to get fuzzy. I couldn’t catch my breath. Panic was smothering me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. I don’t know what I said to my mother-in-law before I hung up the phone. But I knew I did not want to go to the hospital. I couldn’t. I managed to stand up, work my way out of my cubicle, and stumble toward the office of my colleague Chad. Chad and I didn’t really socialize outside of work, but we were confidantes at the office, talking about the latest office politics, reviewing creative campaigns, sharing a laugh to break up the day. At the time I hadn’t really told any of my colleagues that Peter was ill. But if I could talk to anyone about it, I knew it was Chad. I walked into his office and quickly shut the door. “Peter’s been sick,” I told him in a rush. “He’s been getting better. But his mother just called me from the hospital and told me I need to come. I don’t want to. I know something’s happened. I’m afraid.” Chad was sitting behind his desk. “Whatever it is, you can handle it,” he said. “You will be okay. Take it one day at a time.” He stood up, walked around his desk, and gave me a hug. I have a photo of that moment. Someone in the office figured it would be funny to snap a picture. It was taken as we embraced, my leopard pumps edged up against his black loafers. Little did that person know that they were capturing my last flicker of normalcy, the last moment before my life would shift into a new dimension, tipping into an abyss. Chad said I could handle it. But could I? To find out, I’d have to face it first. “Go,” Chad said gently. “You can do it.” As I walked away, I tried to gather strength from his words. I did have some power, the power to look at the situation and decide what to do about it, the power to figure out the best way to respond. Maybe Peter had a bad reaction to one of the medications. We’d be by his side as the doctors figured out what changes needed to be made. Maybe one of the growths hadn’t shrunk this week, but perhaps we could talk about surgery and having it removed. It was a temporary setback. There might be better news with the next scan. It was a fifty-five-minute drive from my office in Purchase, New York, to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan. The whole ride I tried to keep my panic at bay. I was counting numbers. I was thinking about the groceries I needed to buy to refill my mom’s refrigerator. I tried to daydream. Anything that would take me out of the moment. I finally arrived. I passed the front desk, where nurses and physicians huddled and scurried, and approached the hallway where Peter’s room was located. Before I turned the corner, I could hear his mother and sister talking. They spoke in hurried, frantic whispers. I started to sweat. My palms began to itch. I didn’t want to enter that hallway. But I had to face it. My mother-in-law saw me. I saw her. And without a word, I knew. “Oh, Bozoma,” was all she said. What I’d felt was coming had arrived. Hey, you may look like royalty, but you’re not the queen, so please hurry up!” I whipped my head around. You could feel the people in line behind me collectively catch their breath. There were a couple of oohs, followed by some nervous laughter. Even folks who didn’t know me knew that something sharp was about to come out of my mouth. It was October 2000. Little did I know I was about to meet the man I would love for the rest of my life. I was working for Spike Lee’s Spike DDB, a cutting-edge advertising agency that was a joint venture with DDB, a legendary pillar of Madison Avenue. Despite the collaboration, Spike wasn’t leaning on anything DDB had to offer, so we were basically our own self-contained entity. Pretty much the only interaction between the two agencies happened in the cafeteria. That particular morning, I was there ordering my breakfast. I am detail-oriented when I’m purchasing anything, whether it’s curtains for my bedroom or a pair of shoes. I am very precise, so I was making sure my breakfast sandwich met my specifications. “Two well-done fried eggs on a cinnamon raisin bagel with four strips of bacon,” I recited. “And no cheese.” That was when the loudmouth behind me grew impatient and told me to hurry up. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. “Who said that?” I snapped. I saw him, a guy tall enough to play for the New York Knicks literally trying to duck behind somebody who was barely five feet tall. He sheepishly peeked his head around his human shield. Are you serious?” I asked, looking at him. “Man, you don’t know me.” I turned and continued with my order. “Make sure the bagel is toasted dark . . . and that the bacon is very well done.” People were really laughing now. When I finished and moved over to the side to wait, the heckler stepped out of the line and walked over. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I get angry when I’m hungry, and I needed my breakfast.” His name, he said, was Peter. He was a white guy, about six five with reddish-blond hair, green eyes, and eyelashes so light, they almost looked like they weren’t there. He was well built, with broad shoulders. And though he’d started out a bit rude, he now seemed courteous. But he was also wearing this heavy gold chain. I didn’t see a lot of white guys running around with their shirts open, wearing necklaces that looked like a prop from a 1980s Run-DMC video. That told me all I needed to know. I can’t take this man seriously, I thought to myself. I immediately dismissed him and turned back toward the people making my breakfast. A few minutes later, I grabbed my sandwich and left. A couple of days had passed when I was back in the breakfast line again. And so was Peter. Once again, he was rude, but this time that rudeness wasn’t directed at me. Instead, he walked past the two people waiting in front of me, cut off the person standing at the counter, and proceeded to order the exact same sandwich, down to the slightly burnt bacon, I’d ordered the day we met. He walked back to me. “I ordered your breakfast to make up for what I did the other day,” he said. “That’s fine,” I said coolly, “but you cut off these other two people.” He looked amused. “I can’t win with you. What can I do?” I told him nothing and wished he would step aside and let me get my food so I could move on with my day. “Let me take you to dinner,” he said. Now I knew he didn’t know who he was dealing with. I wanted to tell him no. I wanted to tell him hell no. But suddenly I had a thought that would basically achieve the same goal. “Well,” I said, trying to keep my lips from edging into a smile, “if you want to get to know me, you’ll read my favorite book.” I could see confusion crease his face. “What book is that?” he asked. “My favorite author is Toni Morrison, and my favorite book is Song of Solomon,” I said. “If you read that, you’ll know me better.” Toni Morrison’s words had captured me from the moment I’d read The Bluest Eye, her first novel. Her works were elegant and difficult, layered with metaphor and meaning that stretched the edges of the imagination and pushed me to ponder the boundless ability of love and ingenuity to transcend bigotry and the confines of the mundane. I had to read Song of Solomon four or five times before I could even begin to grasp all of its complexity. I was cracking up inside. I figured that was the end of him. Well, a week or two later, I was sitting at my desk when the receptionist rang my phone. “There’s a white guy at the front door looking for you,” she said. White guy? Spike’s agency was on the third floor of the building. Again, we were a cloistered little group, Spike’s own domain. No one dared come there if they didn’t have specific business, especially not a six-five white man wearing a gold chain. But when I went out front, there Peter was. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I finished the book,” he said. I think my jaw may have hit the floor. “No way,” I said to him, shaking my head. “I promise you, I did,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner and we can talk about it.” I was dumbfounded. I was an English and African American studies major who’d attended Wesleyan University, and I knew there was no way that this man could have read anything by Toni Morrison, let alone Song of Solomon, in a week and been ready to talk to me about it. I decided to call his bluff. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go to dinner.” The following evening, we met at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. We sipped a little red wine, and I decided to wait until after we’d eaten our appetizers to finish Peter off, embarrassing him about his complete lack of understanding of what Ms. Morrison had written, if he’d even gotten past the first couple of chapters. fected every aspect of American life and the particular dangers that Black men faced just by their very being. He was unexpected, and I realized he had so much more to offer than I had initially given him credit for. I was floored and enraptured. It was November 9, our first date, and I swear that I fell in love with him that night. Peter asked me to go out again the next evening and after seeing a movie, we went for a drink and began to talk about our families. We could not have been more different. He was very proudly a second-generation Italian American. His maternal grandfather had come from Italy when he was seventeen years old and built a successful construction business in Worcester, Massachusetts, where most of Peter’s family still lived. Peter was the youngest of six kids, and there was a significant gap between him and his oldest sister, who was almost the same age as my mother, so it was like he had two moms growing up. He was babied and adored. Peter’s upbringing loomed in stark contrast to mine. I was the child of Ghanaian immigrants. My father, Appianda, was a member of the Nzema people, who call the southwestern region of Ghana home. My mother, Aba, was part of the Ahanta tribe, who hail from a swath of the southern coast that stretches from Sekondi-Takoradi to the capital, Accra. I was the oldest of four daughters, and I rarely let my sisters forget who among us had been born first. When I wasn’t deciding what games we should play, I was defending them at school. ing my dad. She would eventually work as a seamstress and in retail sales, but during my childhood she was a stay-at-home mother able to pick up and pack up our family whenever my father’s career demanded it. My dad served in the Ghanaian government in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then went on to be an executive in numerous Christian organizations. His shifting jobs made for a peripatetic childhood. I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, but before I could walk, and after my father finished attaining his doctorates at Wesleyan University, our family moved back to Accra, Ghana’s capital. He became a lecturer at the University of Ghana, teaching anthropology and ethnomusicology, before becoming a member of Parliament, representing his native region. When a coup led to my father’s imprisonment, my mother, sisters, and I fled to Washington, D.C. A year later, when I was six, we moved to Pasadena, California, followed by a move to Nairobi, Kenya. Finally, we briefly returned to Ghana before settling down in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when I was twelve years old. Unlike Peter, who’d grown up in a largely Italian American working-class community, I spent my teenage years navigating spaces where most people looked nothing like me. I was one of the few Black children in my neighborhood and in my school. But my parents taught me to never downplay who I was. We were proudly Black, proudly African, and we carried our Ghanaian culture to the edge of the Rockies, cooking up jollof rice and fufu with soup, listening to my dad lecture on global politics and the radically transformative spirit of Kwame Nkrumah, and listening to music by Alpha Blondy. Peter’s and my differences—in our upbringings, in our cultures, in our family histories—fascinated me. I’d never dated anyone quite like him before. We quickly became inseparable. Many days we’d meet in front of our office building and decide on the fly where we would go that evening. We might take the subway to his place or pick up some food near where we worked. I lived in Jersey City, but more often than not, after shutting down a local bar or going to hear some music, we’d head to his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which, despite Peter’s hovering roommates, was far more convenient, and much nicer, than mine. I can’t tell you how many times I had to buy clothes on Madison Avenue as soon as the stores opened, because I hadn’t made it home the night before. Our romance was moving at what felt like warp speed, and by my birthday on January 21, I couldn’t imagine a life that didn’t include Peter. That evening, he took me to dinner with my friends. It was a restaurant we’d been to before, one that we both enjoyed. I’m not a person who blows off the anniversaries of my trips around the sun. I want balloons, phone calls, best wishes. So, I was sort of waiting for the surprise, for the magical thing. After all, I’d been dating Peter for two months by then. Whatever that might be wasn’t apparent at dinner. I was a little disappointed but still hopeful. We went back to his apartment. Before we walked in, he made me close my eyes and wrapped a handkerchief around them in case I peeked. He steered me across the threshold, then untied the blindfold. All I saw was a sheet covering something bulky in the corner of the room. I thought, What the hell is that? Jewelry would have been nice, but what was under the sheet was definitely not a small box. At this point, I would have been good with a bouquet of flowers. He walked over to the mysterious object sheathed in white, looking incredibly nervous. “Your gift is under this,” he said, beads of sweat peppering his brow. I didn’t say anything, but I thought to myself, He’d better be sweating. There was no gift wrap, nothing special or fancy. The guy made a decent living and was usually so romantic. This was not what I’d envisioned. I edged closer. Peter looked like he was going to throw up, fidgeting, pulling at his fingers. I started feeling a little mischievous in the midst of my growing disappointment. I slowed down my walk. Peter became flushed and red. My God, I thought. Is he going to pass out? Finally, I pulled the sheet off. And my heart exploded. It was a painting—Peter’s interpretation of Song of Solomon. He’d never picked up a paintbrush before, but he put on canvas his vision of Toni Morrison’s words, depicting Sugarman—the subject of the song, the evocation of Solomon—as he took flight. It was the most beautiful gift I’d ever received. No one had ever been that considerate of me, that thoughtful. I burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying. For the first time, I told Peter that I loved him, that I’d never met anyone like him. I had known since our first date in that Italian restaurant that he, and this, was something I was lucky to find even once in a lifetime. He said he loved me too, that he’d never felt this way about anybody before. Song of Solomon had changed his life, and so had I. We agreed right then and there that we would get married. We’d been dating for not even three months, so of course it was probably too fast. Perhaps we were irrational. Perhaps we were dizzy and high, and the buzz would wear off long before we ever said I do. But in that moment, it was what we both wanted. It was going to be the two of us. Always. I stood in the hospital hallway, my mother-in law sobbing in my arms. I asked her what was happening. I looked at the closed door to Peter’s room. I needed to know before I opened it and went inside. “Just tell me,” I said, holding her, “so I can be prepared.” She shook her head. Peter wanted to tell me himself. Though his room was big, it felt cramped from all the equipment. There was a heart monitor, a gauge for blood pressure, stands filled with his various medications grouped in clusters. There was also a large chair so he could have somewhere to sit when he got tired of lying in his bed. It faced a window, and he was perched there now, in the hospital gown he hated so much. He turned his face toward me. “Oh, Bozoma,” he said, echoing the words his mother had just uttered. I ran toward him. It was only a few steps, but it felt like it took an eternity to reach him. I was leaving shards of myself along the linoleum floor, trying to bridge the gulf. His arms were reaching out. He usually had so many cords around him, infusing him with his medicine, monitoring his vital signs, that I’d treated him delicately, like the pieces of china his mother collected and that she’d helped me pick out for my bridal registry years before. But in that moment, I didn’t care if I tripped or ripped out every cord from every machine. I just threw my arms around Peter and held on tight. I suddenly realized how much weight he’d lost. He had been a sturdy guy, and hugging him before had felt like grabbing hold of a tree trunk. Now, I felt like I could have wrapped my arms around him and myself at the same time, he was so thin. I didn’t need to see his eyes to see the truth. I knew it in my soul. It had awakened me from my sleep. “What is happening?” I asked, gently pulling back. “What did they say?” “I’m not going to make it,” he said. It was matter-of-fact, just like that. I’d known, but now that he said it, it didn’t make sense. “I don’t understand,” I said. So, he said it again. And again, each time in a slightly different way. The medications weren’t working. The tumors were aggressive and growing. He might have only a couple of weeks left. Finally, we both just started crying. When minutes had passed and we again pulled apart, he reached for a piece of paper on the nightstand. There were several. He was always so organized. Even at a moment like this, he was making plans, putting things in order. “You know I hate lists,” I said, and for a moment we both smiled. My eyes were still overflowing with tears, so it was hard for me to focus. Finally, they cleared enough that I could decipher the bold letters at the top of the sheet he handed me. “Boz,” it read. So, this was my list. At least I could try to concentrate for a few seconds on what he wanted me to do. I was quickly learning the comfort that could be found in distraction. At the top, right under my name, was the most immediate of tasks, the one that was most important to him, and to me. “Cancel the divorce,” it read. Before all this, we had been on the brink, our storybook romance derailed by tragedy, by misunderstanding, by the tedious differences that plague all couples and sometimes rip them apart. We were going to split up. But now, though I wanted to crumble and pull back into myself, I had to summon the strength to do what needed to be done, to cancel the divorce and fulfill the many other wishes he’d scribbled on my list. I had to face what was happening. That was the first lesson, one I had begun to learn when I woke up that morning with that feeling, and when Chad urged me out the door: that when you feel fear, instead of running, you have to shine a light on what scares you. Whatever it was that filled me with terror as I sat at my desk, that left me clutching the steering wheel as I drove to the hospital, that made it nearly impossible to put one foot in front of the other as I walked down Sloan Kettering’s corridor, I had to open my eyes and face it. Everything always seems so much worse in the dark—so much worse when you don’t know what it is. To overcome our greatest fears, we have to confront them, like a child lifting the covers, grabbing a flashlight, and peering under the bed to make sure that the boogieman isn’t there after all. Or maybe he is. But at least now you can see him fully. Knowing what you are up against, you can brace yourself, then gather the energy for the fight. I looked into Peter’s eyes again. The eyes I said yes to when he asked me out the first time. The eyes I said yes to when he asked me out the very next night. The eyes I had also sometimes refused, but said yes to so many times. In them, I could see my past and my uncertain future. I could see the faces of the daughter we were raising together and the daughter we’d lost. I could see myself when I met him at twenty-three and myself at that moment, at thirty-six. In his eyes, I saw a question. Was I ready for the fight ahead? This fool here, I thought, shaking my head. It wasn't sure, but i said yes I’m not sure how long it took to absorb the initial shock of Peter’s news. Minutes, maybe? There was so much to do. How to begin? What was the next step? How did we go on? Fortunately, Peter had his lists. He always had lists for everything—keeping a notepad by our bed, little boxes sketched next to each errand, so he could tick off his progress, like a first-grader’s report card. Make breakfast? Check. Do four sets of push-ups? Check. Call the boys and figure out where we’re watching the game? Check, check, check. I didn’t do lists. If the task was important enough, I figured I’d remember it. Maybe I’d tap some notes into my phone. But when I was done, it was over, mission accomplished. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn’t feel any need to document it, to put an exclamation point at the end of each sentence. That was why Peter never made me lists. He didn’t even jot down reminders for me on Post-its. But at the hospital, E