This story does not have a happy ending. Our young hero does not survive and love does not conquer all. And yet, this is not a tragic brain cancer story. For a year, my husband and I lived with hope—a fair amount of delusion, anguish, and fear—but overwhelmingly with hope as he battled a rare and aggressive brain cancer.
Brain cancer is a vicious disease. It violates the mind and soul of a person before it destroys their body and steals their breath. In twenty months, I watched my husband transform from a man who ran an international company to a man who ate cereal with his fingers and often lashed out in irrational bursts of anger. And it was in these moments, when hope seemed most elusive, during which we—sometimes just I—found a quietly burning hope.
Reconstructing A Year In Hope is the day-by-day story of how we found that hope time and time again, even after the treatment that was supposed to be a miracle cure failed, even after the third tumor was discovered, even after the best neuro-oncologists in the world told us to abandon hope. This is also the story of how I found hope in the year after my husband died—the Post-Hope year—as a thirty-five year old brain cancer widow with two small children who desperately mourned their father.
Reconstructing A Year In Hope 