Chapter 1

Clark and I met on the Thursday before Labor Day, August 30, 2007. I don’t know exactly when we first said I love you, but the first email exchange containing the phrase, which he casually includes before signing off, is dated October 3 of that year.

Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me. The way we spoke to each other about what I’d bring home for dinner or whether it was a PBR or a Grolsch kind of night. In nearly every conversation, there is something that releases the pressure from my chest by forcing a giant laugh.

Clark: did you eat?

ruby: yes i had soup and chips but whatever someone else has smells delish

Clark: k just as long as you ate something

how do you spell Bodasifa?

from Point Break?

ruby: let me look it up

Bodhisattva

Clark: ?

really?

sattva?

ruby: yep

it’s a buddhism thing

I can break down Clark’s illness into one diagnosis (metastatic melanoma), one prognosis (between 4 and 14 months to live), three surgeries, three clinical trials, seven hospital stays, three doses of chemotherapy, and five weeks of hospice care. The first surgery, a deep lymph-node dissection of the left groin, and its subsequent days-long hospital stay, spanned the first week of April 2008. The second surgery, which removed the cancer’s recurrence from underneath the tender flesh of the first, was June 11. He was hospitalized from November 11–19 and again from December 1–6. On February 20, 2009, he had emergency surgery to remove a tumor the size of a baseball from his gut. He started chemotherapy on April 15.

ruby: i am sorry i wigged out last night.

Clark: oh baby do not say sorry

Me: i really was just exhausted! that’s obvious.

Clark: I totally understand

i know you were so tired and I know that you want

to make sure I’m going to be okay and safe

and really makes me want to cry

Clark: i feel the same way about you

I want to always want to make sure you are safe

and warm and comfortable

Clark: and I didn’t mean to yell but you are so stubborn

ruby: no i know

haha SO ARE YOU, for the record

Clark died two months later. He was 33. I was 25.

I spent a lot of time after his death looking at photographs of us camping, at a friend’s wedding, with my family at our first Thanksgiving. I listened to “The Ocean” by Sunny Day Real Estate, the song he heard when he imagined me walking down the aisle at our wedding. I cried when Archers of Loaf, the one band Clark insisted make an appearance on any playlist, announced its reunion tour. I watched YouTube videos of his band, Statehood, scanning for hints of what his voice sounded like, afraid I’d already forgotten.

The memories of my life as Clark’s caretaker buzz in the back of my brain at a low hum. Two years ago, I was on autopilot when I changed his diaper or scrubbed the smell of urine from the armchair he sat and slept in. I didn’t question how I found the strength to support his crumbling frame as we hobbled to the bathroom. Without even thinking about it, I’d roll my jeans halfway up my calves and get into the bathtub to pull him up. I shaved his face and gave him his painkillers at perfectly timed intervals. I dressed him.

Now my breath quickens when the answer to a clue in my crossword, “Body fluid buildup,” is “edema,” the condition in Clark’s left leg that caused it to swell and dwarf his right. My eyes sting as I read a newspaper article describing the latest study to come out of a cancer conference, which involves a drug trial that Clark was too sick to participate in. I slink off to the bathroom with my head down, ignoring my friends at the bar, when I catch a glimpse of his obituary, which hangs on the back of a door at the Black Cat, the bar where we met.

I go looking for evidence of our partnership that’s not tied to a memory of me sleeping on two chairs pushed together next to his hospital bedside. My Gmail is a priceless hoard of us making plans, telling inside jokes, calling each other “snoodle” and “bubbies.” I type his name into the search field and enter a world of the unscripted dialogue that filled our 9-to-5 existence. I become immersed in the coziness of our union. In hundreds of chats automatically saved to my account, we express our love for each other readily and naturally in our own private speech. This is a history of our relationship that we didn’t intend to write, one that runs parallel to the one authored by his uncontainable illness.

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