When my first wife was dying of cancer, I heard this a lot. The doctors would often ask, “Which do you want—quality of life, or to live longer?” Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they ever got that far and actually asked us that to our face. But it felt like they did, and certainly with the decisions we were making day in and day out, it was definitely on our minds. I would typically blurt out, “I want both! Dammit!” So did Janice.
But it was just as often made clear to us that we couldn’t have both, and that we had to choose one over the other. I still tended to go with quantity if I had to make a choice. Of course, that was easy for me; I wasn’t the one dying. So it was in my best interest to keep Janice around as long as I could. I knew if she was really suffering, I wouldn’t want that, but most of the actual pain I saw wasn’t that severe (thank God). What was serious was the general pain-in-the-butt nature of everything: the chemo, the monthly trips to Chicago from LA, the lost hair, the lost money and time. It got pretty gruelling for me as well, but nothing like what it was for her, poor thing. It was pretty horrible. It wasn’t until close to the end that it all became unbearable; then she couldn’t walk, was in a wheelchair, and her mind started to go.
