My Spouse Has Cancer 

As told to Shoshana Gross

I

sit on a hard plastic waiting-room chair until my body is molded to the shape of the seat. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Twelve empty hours will pass before my husband emerges from yet another surgery. I can’t force myself to work remotely. I can’t talk on the phone. I can’t even daven. I can’t think. And I don’t want to.

My mind is still spinning with the details, the long lists of who’s picking up who and when, the frantic last-minute instructions to the people who are taking care of the children I leave behind on these monthly trips to the clinic in Alabama, where we’re already up to an experimental treatment on this journey the doctors call “cancer.”

All this, only to be told by a clueless woman, “Well, at least you’re getting a vacation out of it!” My jaws ache with all the things I don’t say. A taut smile masks my burning envy at her banal reply. She is planets away from my nightmarish reality.