Left on Tenth – A Second Chance at Life: a Memoir
Delia Ephron (Back Bay Books, 2022)
In 2015, Delia Ephron’s husband died of cancer. She was seventy-one, and they’d been married for more than thirty years, supporting each other in diverse and successful writing careers. He died at home, thanks to hospice, but it was exhausting and disorienting. With the help of sisters and friends, she planned a memorial, and reoriented her life toward taking care of herself. Her sister Nora had died of leukemia in 2012; Delia had been seeing Nora’s hematologist regularly, and she had seven years of ‘all clear’s.
“People always asked ‘How are you?’ Emphasis on the are so I knew it was a serious question. But I never had a clue how to answer it...I couldn’t articulate my grief. And to try seemed to cheapen Jerry’s memory.”
A year and a couple of days after his death, Delia got a message from a man in California who wanted to reopen an old acquaintance; old, as in, they went on a few dates when she was in college. But in the present, they had a number of interests in common besides their recent widowhood. The e-mails that ensued are reproduced in the book – they read like the first drops of a monsoon. She liked him, he liked her, they talked on the phone like teenagers used to do. Peter flew to New York a couple of weeks later. “Looking back, we were already in love and possibly set up for catastrophe. The phone calls and e-mails were almost dreams, perfect versions of ourselves.”
But at the next blood test, things are not so good. “I should say that I am someone who keeps myself nearly completely medically ignorant. In spite of all the googling I do, I have never googled myelodysplastic syndrome or AML...Everything else is about to change on this day, but my attitude toward illness will not.” Like her late sister, she has leukemia. Dr. Roboz says, not for the first time, that she is not her sister, and her illness is not her sister’s. Possibly more to the point, treatments have advanced continuously, and there are new drugs and procedures to try. It’s good news that her new boyfriend is a doctor; a Jungian analyst, actually, but a trained scientist, who’s happy to handle what the doctors need to tell them.
Delia and Peter get married in the hospital where she goes for the first treatment with CPX-351, a drug so new it doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a optimistic move for two seventy-two-year-olds, but it bespeaks a hope that could only help, over the coming months. This first time is not so bad; five weeks to kill the bone marrow white cells and hope that only healthy ones grow back. But no – her disease comes back, and the doctors want her to have a bone marrow transplant.
We know, because she survived to write this book, that it worked, but, wow, what a harrowing ride it would be. Delia doesn’t know this, because she doesn’t want to know it. “If I do research I will panic, I will become hysterical, I will misunderstand, I will obsess.” Instead, she marshals friends and friendships, right down to a neighbor she knows from dog-walking.
The marrow graft means another six weeks in the leukemia wing, so many pills, so little appetite, so much weakness. Worst of all, after the graft is in and starting to work, she’s visited with a crushing depression. She hates it all, and wants to die–but then she doesn’t, and lives to tell about it. Credit the doctors and the inventors of CPX-351; credit Peter’s love, wisdom, and constancy; credit all those devoted friends. “And luck. Is luck another word for miracle?” Maybe not, but does it matter? She’s grateful, and so am I.
Any
Good Books, June 2023 by email 6/1/23
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