For example: I really did go to Lexington and Concord. I really did go to Yorktown, and there really was a blissfully, almost comically young and uninformed tour guide. I really did spend most of my time in the libraries in Boston and Philadelphia, researching. It really was a research trip. Ninety percent, at least, was research. This is the truth, and not a word of it is made up, embellished, or fabricated. The lie in this case, you see, is one of omission.

I’m leaving out the ten percent of the trip, the detour to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which happens to have one of the top oncology departments in the country. I’m leaving out the reason I was there in the first place, the reason for the entire research trip: an experimental variation of chemotherapy, designed to reduce certain side effects, such as hair loss and the violent liquid expulsion of poison from both ends of my gastric system.

It is successful for what it is: I still have my hair, most of it. It’s more brittle, thinner, but it’s there. And I only spend forty-eight hours or so being violently ill, rather than the days or weeks of the normal rounds of chemo.

How, you might ask, have I managed to keep all this from my wife?

And more to the point, why?

I’ve kept it from her via a very elaborately planned series of research trips, where I build my research schedule around the chemo and recovery days. If I’m still feeling under the weather when I get home, well, jetlag is a bitch, right?

I’m also traveling to receive the best possible treatments. Experimental stuff, cutting edge. I can afford it, and if it’ll prolong the inevitable, I’ll try it.

The inevitable being Nadia finding out I’m sick.

Sick.

Such a trite, flat, flimsy descriptor for this ninth circle of hell.

Sick is the flu. Sick is a cold, or you get pneumonia or something. Sick is…sucky but recoverable. It disrupts your day, your week, your month.

But this?

What I’ve fought hardest against is that when you get the C-word, you become it.

You’re not just sick.

You don’t have cancer—you are fucking cancer.

I hate that word.

I never utter it. Rarely even think it.

I’m sick.

That’s it.

If I focus on that, on just being sick, it’s manageable. It’s a series of things, which need to be done, in order to not be sick.

Ready for the real leap of logic? Here goes.

If I’m just sick, it’s no big deal. I can handle it. I can manage it. I don’t usually tell Nadia when I’ve got a headache, or feeling feverish or coming down with the flu. See, she’s a nurse. But with Nadia, it’s not just a job. It’s who she is.