Everything looks perfect from far away

Life threw me a curveball this week. It’s not the first time. I explain how I learned that life is short and things don’t go according to plan, so if you want to do something, go do it.

Trigger warnings: Cancer, dog death.

When you take a 10,000 ft view of my life, pre-retirement, it looked perfect. And I admit, it was an extremely privileged life. We lived (and still do) in a nice neighborhood in an expensive city. We regularly took nice vacations. I had a fancy title at a hot startup. My LinkedIn history showed a breadcrumb trail of promotions and accolades. My husband works for a non-profit helping people experiencing homelessness. We were the perfect power couple, both making money and doing good in the world. Why would I throw this successful career away and jeopardize this whole charmed life?

Boston to San Francisco

First of all, zoom in a bit and I’ll show you some cracks that might make my decisions come into greater focus: When I was 27 years old, I married my high school sweetheart. What took us so long? Who knows, first we had to buy a house, get a dog, and THEN we decided to get married. When I was 28, I took a new job that wanted to pay to relocate us to San Francisco! This was my DREAM. I had been enamored of that city my whole life. It was 2013 and if you worked in tech, you HAD to be in Silicon Valley. My husband agreed to quit his job at a local homeless shelter and find a new one in San Francisco. There were plenty of people there who needed his help, we reasoned.

It would be an understatement to say things didn’t go according to plan. As a self-confessed control freak, I came face to face with the realization that I had no control over our fate. On the job front, my husband struggled to find a new job. My manager, who I had followed from my previous job to this one, left the company. My husband had a nagging cough that was getting worse and he was losing weight. I begged him to go to the doctor, he promised he would… eventually.

The Very Bad Day

Then there came the Very Bad Day when I learned that the company I worked for was divesting my business unit to another, much larger, Silicon Valley company. My new employer was in Sunnyvale, not downtown San Francisco. That wasn’t SO bad. What made it the Very Bad Day was the call I got from my husband that afternoon that he had been admitted to the hospital because they thought he had Tuberculosis (spoiler alert, he didn’t). I rushed over to the hospital in time to wedge myself into a too small room with an awkward ER doc, a nurse, and my husband to learn that it was probably not TB, but actually a giant tumor in my 29 year old husband’s chest. Our whole world was knocked askew and the awkward doctor with a truly terrible bedside manner excused himself and left us in stunned silence.

Ok. This short story is turning into a long story, thanks for staying with me.

A few days later, I started the new job at the new company, driving 90 minutes down to Sunnyvale in our red Mini Cooper, leaving my husband in his hospital room. Believe it or not, this is what ushered in the era of my true workaholism. As I sat in traffic cursing myself for not leaving earlier, I realized that all of the responsibility in our little family of two (plus dog) now sat squarely on my shoulders. I needed to prove to this new company that I was indispensable so I could keep this job, my salary, and most importantly, our insurance plan that paid for the skinny man lying in the hospital bed. I threw myself into this job with an intensity of energy and passion that I had never experienced before. I worked from the hospital lobby with the shitty wifi and the constant interrupting code announcements. I rarely talked about my husband and his health. I did everything that needed to be done and more, I was a one woman marketing department for this acquired product line. Truth be told, I needed an escape, a distraction from illness, from chemo, from radiation, from mortality.

The Dumb Dog

Girl knew how to POSE

This was a lonely year – living in a new city with a few family members and virtually no friends. But I did have a constant companion: the dog. Now let me tell you, everyone will agree, she was a terrible dog, truly terrible. Even past her puppyhood, she destroyed shoes, barked at everything, jumped on people (she could jump HIGH!), and was reactive to other dogs. She ate anything that came within her reach. Once at a dog sitter’s house, she (allegedly) knocked a huge bowl of potato salad off a table, breaking the bowl, and then ate it all. She was universally disliked by our families and many of our friends who were not “dog people”. She was too wild, too energetic.

During those weeks of waking up in a cold empty bed while my husband slept miles away in a hospital bed, the dog’s insistence on a walk was the only thing that got me up in the morning. Knowing that each day I had to rise, feed her kibble, and earn her love by taking her out into the sunshine to poop and pee and lunge at other dogs and people she didn’t like the looks of. But we explored the fancy neighborhoods that curdled my stomach in envy, we explored the ghettos (closer to where we lived than I would’ve liked) where I was glad to have her as protection, we walked and walked and walked, until the nagging buzzing, hovering anxieties faded, at least slightly. Sometimes we walked and cried (well, I cried, not the dog).

The dog wasn’t just my companion, but she also designated herself as my husband’s protector and companion – when he was home, she never left his side. I’ll never forget the day that my husband came home from the long hospitalization, so thin and frail and completely hairless. I wore a mask and gloves and had sterilized the house. I carefully helped him out of the car and into bed. The dog hesitated at the doorway before jumping lightly onto the bed next to him, curling up by his knees and putting her head on his lap.

Life after cancer

Ok, this has gotten too long and I’ve lost most of you already, so let me fast forward a bit. We move back home to Boston, my husband gets a life-saving stem cell transplant. Little by little we returned to a life that resembled normalcy. He was able to return to the work he loved, helping those who were experiencing homelessness, and I joined a promising Series B startup with ~60 employees.

It’s been almost a decade since all of this happened, but it’s all in the forefront of my mind this week because our dog just passed away. She was 13. Since my husband recovered from cancer, we moved to a new house, in a new neighborhood. We have mostly new friends. We have a new car, new furniture. We have a child now, her replacement in a sense. She was one of the last things left. And now it’s time to put the last period in the last sentence. I’m just grateful for this terrible dog. This sweet dog. This crazy dog. Grateful she was in our lives for so long.

As I try to unpack these complex feelings, I wonder: Isn’t that the universal truth that your pet will die one day? And that you will have to mourn it? So why do we keep doing this to ourselves? This loss hurts so much, I’m scared to love anything new ever again. Of course my son is already begging for a new dog, but only so he doesn’t need to think about the old dog all the time. He’s not wrong: the house is too empty, too still, too quiet, too dog-less.

What’s the point of this?

Why am I sharing all of this? I’ve been struggling to explain to people why I quit the full-time workforce. The best I can explain is that the experience of supporting my husband through late stage cancer before I turned 30 instilled in me the clear understanding that life is short and things don’t go according to plan. If there’s something you want to do, go do it. The mythical “later” that you plan for might never exist. So when I had the opportunity to spend more time with my family and pursue my creative passions, the obvious choice was to take that opportunity. Who knows if another chance will come.