After finding out that my wife’s breast cancer was not treatable with hormones and had spread to her lymph nodes, a recurring dream began to plague me nightly. In it, Carol would be lying motionless on a hospital bed, and it was never quite clear whether she was just sleeping or something worse. My daughters would then walk into the room and begin to weep, their little faces contorted with grief. It was then I knew that Carol was not asleep. She was dead. I would wake up at that moment with a gasp, and turn quickly in my bed to check on Carol. She was lying there, still but breathing, sleeping peacefully.
About the fourth or fifth time I had this dream, or some nightmarish variation of it, I turned to make sure that Carol was alright, and afterward began to weep, not in relief but in exhaustion. I couldn’t take it anymore, the fear, the uncertainty, the thought of losing my wife. Not wanting to wake Carol, I left our bed, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. But when my sobbing refused to subside, I went downstairs to the living room instead. Even that wasn’t enough. Eventually, my crying became so deep and uncontrollable that I had to go down into the basement so I could give voice to my trauma without traumatizing those I loved, a "three-story" kind of weeping.
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