Snowy highway in winter - Living and Dying With Cancer: Help From a Beautiful Stranger

LIVING AND DYING WITH CANCER: A kind stranger made our world a better place

This is the follow-up to LIVING AND DYING WITH CANCER: Gaining hope in a White Castle parking lot, published last month, with more monthly installments to come.

So, I’d found hope in the parking lot of a White Castle. One never knows where they’ll find things. As Daryl Zero said in the movie Zero Effect, “When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.” I find lately that if I just pay attention to what’s going on around me, I find the things I need to find when I need to find them.

I mentioned before that my friend Max is a writer. Some of his books are available in the bookshop of The Mindful Word. They’re collections of short stories. I’ve been friends with Max for more than a year, and I still haven’t finished his second book. I’ve told him that his books aren’t meant to be read “cover to cover.” One should read a story and savour it, let it sink in. It seems that whenever I pick up his book to read the next story, I’m at a point in my life where it really means something to me. Serendipitous. But I digress.

The House


Three-storey Georgian-style house - Living and Dying With Cancer: Help From a Beautiful Stranger

I was in St. Louis with my wife, Lily, and we had a job to do. We had to clean out and sell her mother’s house. Before I began writing about my real recovery, I realized that I’d be “all over the place.” So much happened to Lily and me during this period that it’s very hard for me to convey the events in a succinct and linear manner.

I decided that the best place to start, though, was The House. I call it The House like I call a freeway in Southern California The 405. A lot of people make fun of us for using the “The” in front of The 405, but if you’ve never lived there and driven on it, you don’t understand that it’s an entity all its own with its own personality.

The House is much the same. The House is a siren. A money pit. People who come to The House fall in love with it. I fell in love with it the first time Lily and I went to visit her parents. It’s a Georgian-style. three-storey 4,000-square-foot home with a full basement built in 1899. It’s located in a nicer area of St. Louis, near the park.

People think that if you own a home like that, you must have a lot of money. We didn’t. Lily’s parents didn’t. The home had been carved up into a multi-family dwelling at some point, and was left in disrepair. Lily’s parents bought it more than 30 years ago and began renovations. They spent a lot of their money fixing up the first floor. They ran out of money while doing one of the bathrooms on the second floor, and The House was in terrible shape.

People would come over to The House and see the first-floor foyer, the sitting room and the dining room and fall in love. I saw the rest of The House, and I still fell in love with it. I fell in love with what it could be. People would say to Lily, “You must be so sad, selling this house.” It would make her incredibly angry. People would project their love of The House onto Lily. I was the same way. I thought maybe we’d move to St. Louis and fix up the house. Lily and I have never owned a home. I don’t really believe that I’ll ‘ever be able to buy my own home, but I hope that one day, I can.

There are no good memories in The House for Lily. She didn’t grow up there; it wasn’t her childhood home. She only saw what it did to her parents. Earlier in her life, Lily lived for a few years in a small town in Missouri. She wasn’t going to live there again. It’s hard for me to talk about our time in St. Louis without being disparaging to Missouri, but for us, it would be a hard place to live. Starting with the weather.

I hope the good people in Missouri will forgive me, because we ran into so many good people there. So many kind, understanding, and beautiful people, but the more time I spent there, the more I came to agree with Lily. There was no way we could live there. Similarly, the more time I spent in The House, and the more time I had to peek behind the curtain, the more I got to see it for what it really was.

Fear and disrepair


Let me tell you more about The House. The floors sagged in so many places, I wondered if we’d fall through. The porch itself had fallen through. There was a huge hole that had been there for years, covered up with plywood. We lived in constant fear that a mail person or some other visitor would fall, hurt themselves and sue us.

The only working shower or bath in the entire home was on the third floor. Lily’s mother’s bedroom was on the second floor. The kitchen was on the first floor, and the laundry was in the basement. Lily’s 90-year-old mother would walk up and down those stairs every day. It was in the basement where she finally fell down.

The House also had a leaky roof. We lived in fear that it would get worse and we wouldn’t be able to live there, or worse, that we wouldn’t be able to sell it. It had mold in the basement, a second-floor balcony that was about to fall down, and an air conditioning system that was being held together with duct tape and bailing wire.

What made it worse was that the neighborhood was in an historical district. Everything cost more to fix. We were going to fix the leak in the roof, but no roofer wanted to fix the leak; they only wanted to do the whole roof. It would have cost more than $80,000. It costs a lot to re-roof a three-storey home. For the 18 months that Lily was in St. Louis taking care of her mother, she lived on the third floor. I’d never lived in anything but a one-storey home.

Tough discussions and choices


So now you’ve met The House. The neighbours, who are some of the beautiful people we ran into in St. Louis, could no longer buy it. More on them later. Even though my wife had been there for 18 months, she only started going through things once her mother moved into assisted living.

It seemed so ghoulish to make Lily’s mother watch as she started throwing away, giving away or selling her life’s possessions, her keepsakes, her memories, her life.

A side note: It was Lily’s mother who asked about assisted living. Lily could never bring herself to discuss it with her mother. No child wants to have that discussion. Lilly and I both knew it was the only solution. We couldn’t afford to pay for 24-hour in-home care and maintain the house. We found a place that we hoped would be good, but I don’t think you ever really know until it happens. There was a year-long waiting list. Lily’s mother asked Lily when she was going to go home. Lily explained to her that she couldn’t go home, because she had to take care of her. It was shortly afterward that her mother asked about assisted living.

I was the youngest of four children, and I was an accident. My parents were always a lot older than my friends’ parents. Since my parents passed, I tell friends who are starting to understand the challenges associated with aging parents that they need to have a plan. They need to have that tough discussion before it’s too late. But I’m getting off-topic again.

So, in the six months that Lily was at the house by herself before coming home, she’d done an incredible amount of work. If one or more of your parents are still alive, you have no idea what it’s like to go through their belongings, their life. Years of keepsakes, treasures and memories, both good and bad. It’s emotionally draining, and it takes time. So Lily had done most of the hard work, and now we had to get rid of it all.

A lucky break and a beautiful stranger


Classical piano - Living and Dying With Cancer: Help From a Beautiful Stranger

I’ve talked a little about being lucky and silver linings. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were about to catch a huge wave of lucky breaks. We were going to find silver lining after silver lining. One of the great silver linings was (for me, at least) that the house was three storeys high. I’d started to eat more, and without knowing it, I started to get in shape. I had to go up and down those stairs all day. I’d carry things up and down all those stairs. We worked our asses off. Lily pushed herself and pushed herself. She was determined to be home by Christmas. I tried to keep up, but we still had so much to do.

The lucky break that really turned things around for us was related to her mother’s piano. Lily’s mother has a Master’s of Music in piano performance. When she was a little girl, Lily would sit under the piano and listen to her mother practice. It’s one of the things that gave Lily an amazing ear. That piano was in the foyer of The House. It was beautiful. It was worth some money. I tried to do some research to see how much it was worth, but it’s tough. We didn’t want to have to pay someone to do an appraisal.

My memory fails me regarding the details, but there was a music store where we’d purchased an electronic piano for Lily’s mother to play in her new residence. They weren’t interested. All businesses were really suffering during 2020. I’m not sure how it came about, but Lily reached out to her niece, who is also a musician. She wanted the piano and was willing to give us a nice chunk of money, and pay to have it shipped. We were thrilled.

I cry every time I think about that moment. Lily’s mother’s piano was going to stay in the family. It was going to be played and cherished for years to come. I can’t convey just how much this meant to us. But this isn’t the lucky break I spoke of.

The lucky break came when the movers showed up to take the piano. It had been raining a lot since we’d been back, but it had stopped when they got to the house. The senior guy had moved many pianos. He’d moved a lot of pianos out of homes where the parents had died, or like Lily’s mother, no longer lived in the home. He knew that these pianos weren’t just pianos. They meant so much more. He took such great care with taking it apart and wrapping it up. It seemed to mean just as much to him as it did to us. It was such a beautiful thing.

But Lily and I were still on pins and needles. We were still anxious because of The House.

I spent a lot of time telling you about that house. Remember the hole in the porch that was covered with plywood? Plywood that would bend and give when you walked over it? It wasn’t possible that the piano could be moved out the back door. The front door was the only way it would leave.

Lily and I were convinced that when they took the piano over the porch, it would be a disaster. We even thought the movers would see the plywood and back out, but they didn’t even bat an eye. So when they got the piano out the door, over the plywood (it sure creaked a lot), down the stairs and onto a dolly, we breathed a sigh of relief. We thought, “We made it!” Nothing bad had happened. We were overjoyed. And then it happened.

The piano was on a dolly in the street. It was vertical, so it was taller than it was wide. They rolled it onto the metal lift at the back of the truck, with one mover on each side. We held our breath as it lifted off the ground, amazed at its ability to hold that much weight. When they got to the top and stopped, the lift bounced and the piano started falling backward, away from the truck. Lily and I both gasped at the same time. We both thought the same thing: We’d come all this way and the piano was going to go crashing into the street before our eyes.

It didn’t. It was one of those rectangular dollies with six wheels, the two in the centre a little larger than the ones in the corners. So when it tilted back, it just stopped when the back wheels hit the lift. They rolled the piano into the truck, and it was over.

We both turned to each other, full of joy and hope. We couldn’t stop laughing. It was like a rollercoaster of emotions, all in such a short period of time. It was at that moment when Lily and I began seeing our lucky breaks. And once we did, it seemed that we’d get lucky break after lucky break. And it all started because of such a beautiful man, who saw what the piano meant to us. His respect for us and that piano made us feel special.

It’s hard to explain. His kindness and gentleness meant everything to us. He was just one of the beautiful people who’d not only get us home for Christmas, but make our world such a better place to be.

This is the fourth in a series of monthly installments about the author’s journey through illness, so check back in January for Part Five.


image 1: Pixabay; image 2: nick macneill; image 3: Pixabay