Chapters 4,5,6
Chapter 4: Meeting Mike
When I met Mike, I was 31. I was living in a row house with a few others in Washington, D.C. for $350 a month. The room had a tiny annex that was perfect for my two-year-old Jonah. He had a crib-size mattress on the floor. I made him a little desk out of cinder blocks and two boards.
I had a bike, named Lil Tigr, with a toddler bike seat. We biked or walked or Metro-ed everywhere. On laundry days I pulled him and the laundry in the red wagon down three blocks to the laundromat.
I was a manager at The Diner. The regulars and staff were like family to me. Mike came in for dinner on a Thursday. He flirted with me. I flirted with everyone. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it wasn’t nothing. That night I went home and sent my boyfriend a text.
“Can we meet for breakfast tomorrow?”
I wanted to be single for a few minutes.
The next morning my boyfriend and I sat across from each other sipping coffee. “I think we should break up,” I said. He teared up about losing Jonah, not me. I would have done the same.
That evening Mike called me. By our third date, I was confident there would be a 10th. He swept me off my feet with his dimples and Philadelphia charm. He was funny and tall and handsome. He worked at National Geographic, had a Philosophy degree from Harvard and a navy-blue Subaru Outback. And even better, he had a two-year-old sidekick, his son named Jack. Jonah liked the previous boyfriend’s convertible Volkswagen bug - but with Mike, he was getting a twin brother!
A year later, Mike asked me to marry him. He filled a yellow Tonka truck with ice and champagne and bought me a silver ring from Tiffany’s with the tiniest diamond ever, exactly what I asked for. We had the most magical wedding in Wisconsin. I looked incredible, and the angel food cake at every table was spectacular. We rented a house in the Petworth neighborhood of D.C. and got the boys bunk beds and a goldendoodle. We had our daughter Elizabeth, bought a house in Takoma Park, then we had Mary, and got some backyard chickens. For one year, two young women lived with us and convinced us to buy two goats. Jonah’s dad, Eric, married Kate, and they had two children. Jack’s mom, Lydia, married Ian, and they had four children. Our two boys went back and forth between their two families. The girls were stuck with Mike and me full time.
One of those two goats gave birth on Valentine’s Day in our backyard. Then there were three, and a refrigerator filled with goat milk.
Was it chaotic? Absolutely! Also beautiful and stable and adventurous and exhausting.
A few weeks after Mike and I had started dating, I went to National Geographic to have lunch with him. He gave me a tour, and I met Izzy, the editor.
“Ah… so this is “the moment.”
“The moment?” I asked.
“I call you ‘the moment’ because whenever he talks about you, he pauses. His whole body breathes and smiles, and then he continues with whatever it is, Katie this, Katie that.”
I was his moment.
Chapter 5: The Diagnosis
Mike was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer in the pancreas. This was explained to us in a tiny room by a tiny doctor we didn’t know on day three at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Koh, who had told us a week earlier that Mike had a Johnsonville brat-sized tumor (Mike’s phrase), and sent us there, we never saw again.
