This is message was on a poster in a store window I passed by the other day. I have been thinking about it ever since. Interesting choice of words, because the antonym of resist is "submit to or yield to" and I don't believe that one hundred percent either. The part that I keep going back to is "some people never get the chance". Those of us who have lost someone to a too early death always have the lingering: what ifs and if only. We never get to know what kind of adult they would have become. How might they have aged, who they would have loved, what they might have explored, created, discovered? Would they have had children? Who would they have been? The questions are infinite.
Although thousands of questions will linger for one couple there are new answers.
Lucy Kalanithi's 37-year-old husband Paul chronicled the end of his life and left an unfinished manuscript which Lucy completed "When Breathe Becomes Air"was published posthumously. John Duberstein's wife poet, Nina Riggs wrote her book "The Bright Hour" about her breast cancer. The books were published one year apart, both critically acclaimed bestsellers often wound up on the same lists of must reads. Before her death, Nina was contacted by Lucy after reading a Modern Love column Nina had written for the New York Times, “When a Couch Is More Than a Couch.”
In her Washington Post article about Lucy and John, Nora Krug writes:
In the final days of her life, Nina Riggs was worried about her husband and how he would get on with his life when she was gone. Nina made an offhand suggestion: Contact Lucy Kalanithi. She has experience with this, she told him; she’ll know what to do. He did and it was the beginning of this extraordinary new love and life for them both. John turned to Lucy for help with everything asking "How do I write a eulogy? How do I sleep through the night? How do I not go insane?"
Lucy wrote back, “I felt a desire to support their family,” she says. “And Nina was John’s character reference.”
In the beginning, they had an email only rule, but in April 2017 they finally met.
"At the time, the two had never spoken — they had made an email-only rule. Seeing each other face-to-face was intense. “We held each other a long time,” she said. There were two dinner dates and, by both accounts, “a lot of chemistry.”
They know it won't be easy creating this new family where once there were two. We hope for them the chance to grow old together, it really is a blessing we can all wish for.
