Sowing & Reaping

The Next Great Adventure: A True Story

Sowing & Reaping

Menu from Stampede 66
31st Anniversary Dinner

January 15, 2014, 31 years into it, we were poised for the next phase, the next adventure, and our conversations often drifted to retirement, to what's next, to the future. Cindy was well into her career at Oxy and many of her peers and mentors were actively planning retirement. She had declined promotion and transfer opportunities for many years, opting to stay put in Plano, close to family, to have a stabile home, and to continue working with the group she thought so much of. I had been wandering around the IT/software world for nearly 20 years, and in 2012 had taken a job with a small, private software firm that offered some equity in the company as part of the compensation plan. The plan was to make that my last hurrah in IT/software, work hard for 5 or 10 years and hope to cash in when the company made it big. Griffin was entering his senior year in high school. He was ready for what was next, too.

We weren't just ready for a change. We needed one. Like many, maybe most, married couples at some point you get too comfortable, complacent even. You get to the point where you know each other so well there's no point in even arguing. Someone says something, an eyebrow gets raised, shoulders are shrugged, and you each go on doing whatever it was you were planning on doing anyway. Nobody gets mad, you already knew what was going to happen. We were well past that point and though life was easy, it was not especially fun, and we knew we needed an adventure, a new plan for the upcoming empty nest phase.

Our life was busy, often too busy for my preferences, and we rarely did things that were "just us" as a couple. Family, friends, work and church filled every hour. That was our normal mode of operation. Cindy never tired of planning, hosting, gathering, and caring, but it wore on me. One Sunday afternoon Cindy mentioned that she had been asked to serve another term as an elder on the Session of our church. I raised my eyebrow. She shrugged her shoulders. I thought it was too much, that she had served too long, and that there was a reason that terms were supposed to be limited. She wanted to do it, she wanted to be involved, and to help our struggling congregation however she could. I didn't argue and operations continued apace.

In February 2014 I found myself in Suriname, teaching a software training class. Cindy had recently

On the main road - Paramaribo, Suriname

completed a long project in Chile, and we had finally wrapped up a house remodeling project. I was tired of coordinating hectic schedules, balancing priorities, choosing between my work, Cindy's work, Griffin's activities, church, family, finances. I was at work more than I wanted, rationalizing that if I just worked a little bit harder now, to be more efficient in the long run, it would free up time for other things.

Back in Plano, I found myself at the office on a Sunday afternoon, clearing the decks for Monday, when it occurred to me that I didn't really have to be there. That I was working to avoid being at some church social function. For almost 30 years I arranged my life to be with Cindy, and now I was making excuses to not be there. Things needed to change.

In mid-October I changed jobs. It was difficult leaving. I liked the company, my co-workers, the product and much of the job itself, but small companies require individuals to have broad responsibilities, and I did not think I could continue putting in the effort that they needed from me. I moved to another company where I would be doing similar work, but could work from home and would have a few more resources to call upon. The pay was less, and there was no equity, but my plan had changed from hoping to cash in to slowing down and doing something manageable in the long term. Working from home would be a great relief for Cindy, too. I could "hold down the fort" for routine stuff - errands, meals, maintenance - that I hoped would eventually free up time for "just us."

Cindy & Griffin
Plano West Senior High
Wolfpack Band - Senior Night

Two weeks later, early on Halloween morning, Cindy had a biopsy of a lump in her breast. That afternoon, before Griffin was due to be home from school, I heard the garage door opening, looked out the window, and saw Cindy pulling into the garage. Her coming home early, without calling, could only mean one thing. I went downstairs and met her in the garage. She hugged me fiercely, crying, her face pressed into my chest, the tears immediately soaking through my shirt. Sobbing, her only words were "How are we going to tell Griffin?"

Suddenly there were no plans. There was no concern about the future, our relationship, or jobs. We were forced into a one-day-at-a-time perspective in every aspect of our lives. We had no guarantees, and we had no control, but we did have each other. We had always been a good team, leveraging each other's strengths, compensating for the other's weaknesses, and were able to work independently or together, but this was a new test. I knew Cindy had all she could handle, and that she didn't need to worry about me or abandoned plans, and that the partnership would change.

By December things had changed, drastically. We, like most people, assumed the medical community had a good handle on breast cancer. The diagnosis we received in November, however, was invasive ductal carcinoma and the biopsies showed that the cancer type was triple negative, a type that limits the treatment options and is quite aggressive. One night, mid-December, days before the scheduled bilateral mastectomy, we laid in bed, her head on my shoulder, and we talked, discussing a lot of difficult "what ifs." Cindy eventually slept. I'm not sure that I did, but the following day, for me, things had changed.

My role changed, overnight, from partner to caregiver. As I saw the dawn, I saw my new purpose.

Cindy, Griffin & Cooper
pre-chemo haircut - Jan 2015

She was scared, and I was, too, but I knew it was my job to be strong, to be positive, to be accommodating, to be actively involved in her treatment and care, and to do my best to protect her, insulate her, let her just deal with the treatment and disease. She had, as always, lots of plans and multiple priorties. She was determined to deliver on all those committments, and I was determined to relieve her of them the best I could. It was a big change, but fortunately it was something we were equipped to do. We'd spent many years learning to be "independent together." There was no hierarchy, there were no dependencies, we each knew what we had to do and were capable to do it.

Griffin, leaving Mom
behind on Lehigh
campus stairs

We survived 2015, but it was difficult. Between Cindy's treatments and surgeries, and Griffin's graduation and departure to college, it was a year full of suffering and celebration. We learned to navigate the health care system, particularly within the cancer treatment industry, and we managed to make a smooth transition from parents of a teenager at home to simple long-distance worrying about our adult child. For his part, Griffin truly stepped up, handling the transition with maturity, making his mother proud and less prone to worry. Trips to Lehigh were a great break in the routine, and fortunately Cindy's treatment schedule allowed us to make them.

By early 2016 we knew things would be changing again. The next big adventure landed in our lap when it was announced that Cindy's offices were relocating to Houston. She would begin working from Greenway Plaza on July 1st. We spent the spring looking for a new house in Houston, and eventually decided to build one in a developing community in Sugar Land, on the southwest side of Houston. Cindy's commute would be easy, we liked the neighborhood, Cindy loved the house plan, and we thought there was potential for the value to increase. We wanted to downsize, and we did, slightly, but ultimately decided on a house sized for resale. We planned to live in the house until Cindy retired, then sell it and move back to family and Plano.

Cindy began spending some time in Houston and I worked on prepping the Celadine house for sale. We had minor repairs and landscaping to do,  and we needed to get rid of a bunch of things to fit in the new house. The movers estimated that we had 27,000 pounds of stuff and it would take two days and one and one-half trailers to pack and load us, so we began 'Project Downsize.' We got rid of 1/3 of it before we listed the house for sale in August. I stayed in Plano to sell the house; Cindy lived at the Residence Inn across from Oxy offices. She came back to Plano periodically for check ups and to visit, and I would visit her sometimes, too, to check on the house and keep her company. We started having a few more "just us" opportunities, but she was a long way from recovered and most of her energy was spent on work. I was happy just to sit with her and read while she watched TV and dozed.

The Sugar Land house was scheduled to be completed in mid-December. Cindy had some further

Cooper waiting to leave Plano

reconstruction surgery in early October, and the Plano house was packed and loaded later that month. We slept on a blow up mattress in our bedroom for one final night, and the next morning loaded up her car, my pickup and a small U-Haul trailer with clothes and things we didn't want in storage. We moved into a temporary space, a two bedroom apartment, and lived there until December. We closed on the house on the 20th and moved in on the 22nd.

Frances' reward for
helping to unpack

There was tons of unpacking to do. Cindy's Mom, Frances, came down to help, and Griffin was home for Christmas break. We went to Plano for Christmas but came back to finish unpacking. When New Years rolled around I opted to stay in Sugar Land and unpack and keep Cooper from another kennel stay, while Cindy and Griffin went back to Dallas for the holiday. They stayed with Frances. Griffin called me early New Years Day to say that Cindy had hurt herself and was in a lot of pain. As she was going to bed New Years Eve, she coughed really hard and felt something pop in her chest. She felt like something from the reconstruction surgery had torn and scheduled an appointment the next day with her plastic surgeon. They did an MRI. They did not find anything wrong with the reconstruction, but they did see a spot on her sternum that was concerning. CT scans and biopsies later confirmed that the original breast cancer had metastasized and it was now in her bones, specifically in her sternum and her 8th right rib, near the spine.

At the end of her initial treatments the oncologist told us the goal was to make it five years post treatment. Statistically, if you made it to 5 years, there was an 80% chance it would never come back. I knew from all of my initial frantic research that if it did come back, the prognosis would be 18 to 24 months. In late January, 2017, about a week after our 34th anniversary, I knew that our time together would be limited, and that it would mostly be consumed by treatment and medication and misery. I knew this would be the final adventure.

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that all human plans are subject to ruthless revision by nature or fate. I can confirm the accuracy of that statement. We planned to retire. We planned to return to Plano. We planned to spend time together, just us, reconnecting and enjoying the results of our work. None of those plans worked out. It would be easy, and maybe even understandable, to be bitter about it all, to be Job's wife, to say "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die!", but that's not who we were, that's not who we intended to be. It's trite, but we knew we could only control our response, not what had happened.

In the few years leading up to Cindy's diagnosis, we struggled, not that anyone would notice, and not that we were any different from any other random couple that had been together for 30+ years. We were too comfortable, too complacent. We took each other for granted. We had expectations. The plan was to regroup, reconnect, recapture some romance and fun as soon as we had time, as soon as we could retire. What I realize now, in retrospect, is that the years we spent loving and learning and living didn't create complacency in the relationship. Instead it built the trust, and the confidence, and the dependability that we would need to endure, to eventually help each other make it until the end.

I am not ashamed to admit that many of my early prayers were "why me? why this?" Cynically, I often ended up at Galatians 6:7 ... "Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow." ... and wondered what I had sown to reap this particular tragic harvest? Now, I realize that we had sown love, and that our harvest was not deliverance from tragedy, but the strength to bear it.