My husband goes into surgery again tomorrow. His second this year, though the in between has been an endless litany of tests, CAT scans, MRIs, radiation, and doctor’s appointments. It has redefined our lives as individuals and our life together. I grew up with a father ill all my life before he died, training for this role as caretaker that I never wanted. He struggles, sometimes more gracefully than others, with his mortality, which has risen up like an unavoidable boulder in his path. I feel this rising tide of panic at stray thoughts of what could be and the frantic claustrophobic feeling of a bird that struggles in a clasped hand. It used to haunt me and shatter every relationship I had. I panic because I was so relieved to leave it behind and yet here it is chasing me again. i panic because I am terrified of losing him and wonder what else I could be doing and where. I attribute this panic to the course that this life has taken and yet:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

I did not let them wrinkle and rot. I chose him and I chose this life. Despite those errant thoughts, I would not give him up for any of those other plums. That’s what marriage is. Choosing the same man and the same life every day, every hour, every minute, regardless of…just regardless.