Meant to Be

Becky alights from her chair next to me and rounds to her side of the bed, tiptoeing over a dozing nebula of cat hair named (yes, really) Kitty to cuddle beside her husband. She nestles her hand in his and sneaks glances at him that are both playful and measured; affection and concern, emotions reluctantly conjoined in her face and heart.

We've been talking for...well, it's hard to say. Time dissolved once we crossed the threshold. The only clock in my eye line hides on the nightstand next to Chad's side of the bed, obscured by the insulated tumbler from which he carefully pulls mouthfuls of water, a gray oval handle he uses to hoist himself onto his walker, a lamp.

The sun's slide up the far wall is the only evidence of the day's retreat. If I really cared to mark its progress, I could peek at my watch or phone. But I don't. I shouldn't. Time is the other occupant of this room, and it is not welcome here. Numbering and measuring it disrespects what Becky has curated as much for her husband as herself -- a calm and tenuous now before the inevitable after.

Chad and Becky are among the first recipients of a grant from the TriUnity Foundation, a new national nonprofit created by St. Cloud Financial Credit Union to ease the financial trauma suffered by people with terminal cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

In her application, Becky spared few details about Chad's cancer. It was found, quite literally, by accident in the fall of 2019 after he fell during a bike ride. His injured hip still aching weeks later, he made what he thought would be a routine doctor's appointment to get himself healthy again. He never would be.

His pelvis was riddled with tumors, malignant shrapnel from the metastatic squamous cell carcinoma that had slowly detonated in his throat and tore into the surrounding lymph nodes.  

In the last five years, he has endured four rounds of brutal chemotherapy, countless biopsies, over 30 rounds of radiation, the dissection of his neck and the removal of his jugular vein, a hip replacement, then emergency surgery to excise new tumors that sprang up under the scar tissue from the hip replacement. Curative efforts, all. They didn't work.

In May 2024, the most radical procedure yet to stop the pain: amputating his left leg up to his failed hip. It didn't work.

More nodules, as homicidal as the first, have since been unmasked in Chad's lungs, skull, shoulder, and sternum. 

He is only 46 years old.

Chad and Becky are gaming together. They sit next to each other on the bed, tapping and triggering matching controllers, lost in a world that doesn't exist.

The game is It Takes Two, one of their favorites. The developer, Electronic Arts, spares no capital letters to proclaim it is PURE CO-OP PERFECTION and GLEEFULLY DISRUPTIVE GAMEPLAY and A UNIVERSAL TALE OF RELATIONSHIPS.

In it, Chad and Becky become Cody and May, a married couple transformed into dolls by a magic spell and hurled into a larger-than-life fantasy world. To return to normal, they must work together to overcome, from EA's lower-case explanation this time, "genre-bending challenges" that promise "a metaphorical merging of gameplay and narrative that pushes the boundaries of interactive storytelling."

And it works. On the screen, they leap and dash in tandem, strong and sure, solving puzzles and vanquishing enemies. They coordinate their movements in staccato phrases of guidance and encouragement, knead achievements from buttons and triggers and joysticks, escape this feeble world and flit effortlessly through the supernatural, the only realm they fully control anymore.

For a few minutes, they're just two kids with no cares.

Which is, of course, a lie.

Chad's physical decline has been the fault line along which their financial world has collapsed, dream by dream, dollar by dollar.

In the 1,800 days and counting since the diagnosis, they've woken up too early on too many mornings with no guarantee they can afford the bare necessities to make it to the next morning.

Becky became the family's sole breadwinner when Chad's career was the first pillar of life to fall to cancer, just before covid splintered everything.

She works for Smart Organizing Solutions. They simplify cluttered homes and businesses, deliver compassionate and discrete care, help people and make them feel comfortable. A perfect fit for her and them, by every measure.

She couldn't be more grateful for joining the aptly-named SOS. "Julie [the owner], her family, and my team...they know how hard its been financially."

Hard is a profound understatement.

Consider the costs of traveling to treatment. Not costs of treatment - those careened into six figures years ago, so astronomical they defy Becky's best estimates - but the costs of just being physically present at treatment.

They've trekked to the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Rochester, Minnesota too many times. Although arguably one of the finest facilities of its kind in the world, it's also over 150 miles away. The 7-hour roundtrip is a marathon for their overworked van and torture on Chad. 

The stays themselves are equally grueling. Some can last up to a week, crushing any remaining normalcy in their schedule and budget.

"The whole drive, going to Mayo," Becky recalls, "we got so blessed by people giving us gift cards for gas because I paid our $1,500 dollars in rent, and then turned around and had to spend another $700 for a hotel for a week...it was close to a $1,000 that one week alone because the hotel and the traveling money and stuff like that."

The $1,000 for that one week at Mayo vaporized nearly a third of their monthly income.

"We don't have savings accounts," Becky says. "I cashed out my 401k during covid because we had to pay bills. So I don't have a 401k anymore."

Neither does Chad. "I got cashed out too at the last job, or the job just before the last one because I started feeling sick."

Becky can only work from home, a handful of hours at a time:

"I can't be at work right now. I can't," she laments.

"I've tried. I'm so anxious. I worry about what's going on at home, and Chad is very anxious for me to leave. He wants me to be with him...I feel so guilty staying home with Chad or being away from Chad.

Either way, I feel so guilty because I could be making money for my family, so we don't have to worry about bills. I don't talk to him about the bills. I don't talk to him about money. I don't want him to worry.

Money management is hard. It's always been hard for me. But even people that plan for certain things -- nobody plans for cancer. Nobody plans for your spouse to go from working every day and being a breadwinner...and come back with nothing.

Nobody plans this."

TriUnity's grant, according to Becky, couldn't have come at a better time. "It helps a lot. Now I don't have to worry about my car payment and rent and electric for at least this next month. So this is perfect...I don't have to worry about breaking the bank to get those main things paid."

Those three main things alone consume at least 60% of their monthly income. 

Other expenses, more mundane but no less essential, may be met by the grant if there's enough of it left over, like a new toilet that's taller and easier for Chad to use.

There are blessings beyond the material, however, that the grant makes possible. Peace, for one. 

Before the grant, Becky's stress was overwhelming. She would've rated it an 8 on a 10-point scale of ascending panic.

But after the grant? "Like a 1," she says, grinning for the first time since confessing their cancer-related financial trauma.

That's the transformation for which TriUnity was founded, their first victory against an economic crisis hiding in plain sight, softening the unspoken catastrophe wrought by the emperor of all maladies upon too many millions in the richest country in the history of the world.

But surpassing everything is the one gift Chad wants most, the one gift the grant can't conjure, only protect.

Five days before this interview, Chad began in-home hospice care.

It's the formal cessation of all cancer treatments because none of them can stop what's next. Years of excruciating skirmishes alongside the platoon of oncologists and specialists arrayed from here to Mayo are finally over. His comfort is the priority now.

Between these acts of compassion rest Chad's deepest wishes: 

Time to visit his daughter and her first baby.

Time to whisper gratitude and affection over his family and friends. 

Time with his wife unbound by grief, balances due, murmured sympathies of experts and strangers.

Where they can be perfect for one more day. Side by side. Hand in hand. Just two kids in love. Always.

Becky and I retreat to the living room for some final portraits.

I ask an idle question about her shirt to fill silence as I capture test images to measure the light. 

She hesitates.

"That's me and him," she breathes, gesturing toward the bedroom. "We're Jack and Sally."

Jack and Sally are the main characters of the classic 1993 movie The Nightmare Before Christmas, a musical fantasy about sacrifice and unconditional love, perhaps best known for the couple's poignant duet at the film's end:

My dearest friend, if you don't mind,

I'd like to join you by your side,

where we can gaze into the stars,

and sit together, now and forever.

For it is plain as anyone can see,

we're simply meant to be.

Becky goes quiet, staring past Chad's new custom wheelchair toward the sturdy towers of old-growth aspen and oak bordering the parking lot, leaves thick and healthy from another year steeping under the Minnesota sky.

Autumn is already at work, ushering aside the green to reveal the colors beneath, a final spasm of beauty before the fall.

Colors infinite and inevitable, colors only she can see.