A Brief Memorial

[Vyn]

I have a Facebook account that I created back when you had to prove you had a college degree to be allowed to have an account. I have rarely used it. I have about eight "friends", and have refused so many requests over the years I can't tell you how many. Even from people who are actualy my friends. Debbie had a Facebook account and used it often to interact with friends and family. I made her death announcement to that "group" from her account, and as others began posting their own thoughts and so on, I noticed a pattern. "Cancer bad, Debbie good, sorrow". The same pattern I've seen in just about any internet post (or news article for well-known people) when someone passes from cancer. Or hell, just that they have been diagnosed. Same pattern.

So I thought I'd type up a relatively brief (although lengthy in today's soundbite culture) comment of my own, with maybe a little more detail. A little more insight. A bit more humanity. I made it on my own Facebook account but then shared it to hers. I'm posting it here. She was real, our love was real, I was lucky and hit the relationship jackpot with her...

---------

Debbie died from complications of kidney cancer Sunday morning, May 17th.

We married later in life, though it was the first marriage for both of us. We met in July of 1997 and were married in 1999. We built a life together that became so intertwined, so unified, that over time it stopped feeling like two separate people navigating the world. We functioned as one unit. She had my back in a way no one else ever has, and she made me a better man simply by being in my life.

On Thanksgiving Day in 2006, Debbie was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma. In 2007 she underwent a full radical nephrectomy of her right kidney. It was terrifying for her, and if I’m being honest, terrifying for me too. But afterward, every scan came back clean. Year after year. Eventually we allowed ourselves to believe what every cancer patient and spouse desperately wants to believe: that it was truly behind us.

Then, on Thanksgiving Day 2014, she went to the emergency room for pain. During the workup, they discovered the cancer had returned. It was in her remaining kidney, her pancreas, her spleen, and scattered throughout parts of her abdominal lining. Ironically, the original reason she went to the ER had nothing to do with the cancer at all — she needed a hysterectomy. The cancer had left that alone. How considerate of it.

What followed over the next several years was a level of suffering and endurance that still hurts to think about. Debbie underwent IL-2 treatments, one of which became so severe they had to bring her back to life. After that, no more IL-2. She had 60% of her remaining kidney removed, along with her spleen, part of her pancreas, her gallbladder, and countless tumors throughout her abdomen.

And through much of this, she continued working.

At one point, during one of the many middle-of-the-night drives to the emergency room, a doctor casually asked what she was doing about the tumor in her pelvis. She had no idea she had one.

It turned out she had a tumor roughly the size of a softball that had almost completely consumed the left side of her pelvis, leaving only a thin ring of bone intact. For quite some time she had been complaining of “hip pain,” but no one had identified what was actually happening. By the time the tumor was discovered, there was little that could be done beyond pain management.

Eventually the pain medication doses became staggering. One of her doctors remarked that the amount would have killed a horse.

The tumor took away her ability to walk, and with that came an early retirement from a career she truly loved.

After the recurrence in 2014, Debbie was told several times she had months, maybe a year or two left to live.
She lived another twelve years.

Twelve.

Years.

She was scared sometimes. Anyone would have been. But she took that fear and did what needed to be done anyway. There’s a word for that: courage. Debbie demonstrated that courage every single day.

And even then, her courage somehow paled beside the depth of her love and concern for other people.

Anyone who has walked through cancer alongside someone they love understands the countless small changes to everyday life that hide behind the larger medical language. The routines. The exhaustion. The constant adaptation. The quiet griefs. Through all of it, Debbie hated what the disease was doing to me, while I remained honored to do everything I could for her.

Eventually I reached a point where I could no longer maintain employment and care for her properly. At first that felt like a terrible dilemma. In reality, it wasn’t. I was trying to be everything for everyone at all times 110% engaged. The position I held required someone fully present, and after spending more than a decade helping build that place, I became unemployed.

But what I gained in return was time.

Time with Debbie.

And I would not trade that for anything on this earth.

I cannot adequately express how grateful I am that I was able to spend that time right beside her.

Tonight, sitting in the home we built together, surrounded by all the ordinary objects that make up a shared life, everything feels surreal. Reading the messages people have written about her has brought comfort. The calls and texts have meant more than I can say. Even our two little dogs — the ones Debbie picked out — seem heartbroken. It honestly feels like they understand that this time, she isn’t coming home.

Oddly enough, that heartbreak also reminds me how blessed I have been. What Debbie and I had was rare.

I have never experienced pain this all-encompassing before. But if this grief is the price of having loved and been loved the way Debbie and I loved each other, then it is a price I will gladly pay.

I know the sharpest edges of this pain will soften eventually. I recognize that I am but one drop in an ocean of people who have/are/will be suffering similarly or even worse.

But as of late night, May 19th, 2026:

I am shattered.

[Typhon]

Having never been married myself, or even loved someone as much as you loved your wife, there is no chance I can fully comprehend your loss.  But, I can agree with your main point.  You were lucky. 

[Zzzptm]

Vyn, what you have is real. My wife and I married early - we were both 19 - and are going to have our 39th anniversary this year. We lost a son, 2 and a half years old at the time, in 2001, July. While we still have each other, we tell most people we have three children because the truth that we have four but one is dead is something we share with people who know us better for longer. It'll be 25 years we haven't had our son, come this July.

We have the people we have for the time we have them and then there's a strange mix of pain and comfort in our memories of those people.

You loved her, still do. It's clear from your short history that she held on as long as she did because she loved you, and I believe she still does. I've dealt with death enough to know it's a phase transition in existence, just like birth is. I helped the widow of a man who I did not know in life, but came to learn about him as I helped his widow. In return, he helped me when my son died and my next child, a daughter, was not yet born. Not only in dreams, but in finding medicine on Bead Mountain out in West Texas. He was Choctaw, adopted into an Assiniboine tribe, and his wife, a Cherokee also adopted into that Assiniboine tribe, helped me to find medicine.

I know he was playing tricks on me during that trip that made my boy laugh. It was good fun, hiding things and then putting them right back where I had looked the first time for them.

When I climbed Bead Mountain at sunset, an eagle rose in front of me and circled three times overhead before flying West to where the sun set.

When my good buddy John Harris died, I didn't know it at the time. But I had to listen to a song we had played coming back from Albuquerque, where we had gone for a balloon ride to remember the loss of his wife the year before. It was a Johnny Cash song, and I thought warm thoughts about him as I played the song we had both cried a little to. After that, I got word of his passing, and the emotional compulsion to play the song made sense to me. He was in it, somewhere.

I've had other experiences and talked with other people who have had theirs. I still can feel the loss, deep and painful, in some moments, and I know that that is all right. There's no law that we can't feel pain for a loss, decades later. It's love, and that's how it works. Love is powerful, love is important, and love is worth everything.

Like Typhon said, you were lucky. That'll put a smile on your face, a tear in your eye, a memory in your mind, and a good ache in your heart.

[Thelemech]

Truly you had a wonderful relationship
She was blessed to have you as you were blessed to have her

[Charger]

Beautiful memorial!

I too cannot begin to understand the depth of your loss. But I still feel your pain.

[Vyn]

@Typhon:

Lucky indeed. I never looked to get married, nor did I look to never get married. I had been in many relationships, some short (some really short), some long, most were normal women and we just weren't aligned. But there was also the vulnerable narcissist, the girl-in-a-woman's body, the needy limpet. Then one day all of the small cogs that needed to be in place for me to have met my future wife got in place and then it just flowed like magic.

@Z:

Thanks for sharing those stories. Very cool - I also lean toward the transitory nature of this life and am confident that there is more going on than the eye can see or the brain can perceive. Heh, I read these responses last night. A half-hour ago I looked out back and saw an adult doe eating leaves off of a tree in the fenced in part of my property. Interesting, since it must have thought those leaves were worth jumping over a six foot tall fence. And there's plenty of them outside the fence. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! I have a set of French doors in back, and opened one of them. The doe heard it, of course, and walked right up to the open door and stuck it's snout in. I looked at it. It looked at me. I recalled my wife had some apples delivered last week, so I went and grabbed one. Walking back to the door, the doe still stood there. I gave it the apple, it gave it one sniff and took it, turned around and ran towards the fence, bounded over it like they tend to do, and was gone. Nothing like that has ever came close to happening around here. Plenty of deer to see now and again, but never a doe by herself, never within the fence, and certainly never conducting itself like a well-mannered forest denizen looking for an apple it just happened to know I had.

What. The. Actual. Fuck. I doubt that animal was my wife in doe form, but I'll kiss my own ass twice if she didn't have something to do with it.

This reminded me of what you had written here, and so here I am responding to everyone.

No afterlife my fucking ass.

I recalled you had mentioned your son before. I lightly reached out once and tried to imagine such a thing, and recoiled from the attempt. Man...

@Thel:

While most people understand it, few take the time to actually express that blessings work both ways in those circumstances. Thank you.

@Charger:

Thanks for the kind words, I really do appreciate them.

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

Lovely words Vyn, it's clear you meant a lot to each other. Really sad that she had to go through all that ill health.

[Jack the Stripper]

Vyn, this is one of the most honest and heartbreaking things I’ve ever read. Not just about loss, but about love, loyalty, courage, and what it really means to stand beside someone through everything.

Twelve years after being told months is extraordinary. But even more extraordinary is the life and partnership you two built together in those years. You can feel it in every word how much you loved her and how much she loved you back.

Thank you for sharing her story with such raw honesty. Debbie sounds like an incredible woman, and your devotion to her was just as incredible.

My heartfelt condolences to you and your family Vyn, and all those that were close to Debbie.

[Vyn]

@KDC:
Thanks - yeah cancer doesn't care who you are.

@Jack
I appreciate the kind words, they mean a lot.