“He said I’m going to die,” Witold said. “Eight months, at best.”
I wanted to scream but no sounds came out. Finally, I shouted, “He must be wrong!”
Surely the doctor was just another quack, one of the many awful medical professionals in the health-care system in Communist Poland. One look at Witold told you that he was perfectly healthy. He was handsome, broad-shouldered, and muscular, a swimmer and runner at a time when almost no one else in Poland ran for exercise. We were a beautiful young family with two picture-perfect children. By Polish standards, we were well-to-do, accomplished, and worldly. We had just spent the 1978–1979 academic year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Witold had studied on a Fulbright scholarship. We had ambitious plans for our future. Cancer was not among them.
Early the next morning, we rushed to the same Warsaw hospital demanding to be seen. The doctor was solemn and cold as he repeated his original diagnosis: Witold would die within months. “There is no cure,” he said. “Prepare yourselves.” I felt faint. A nurse pressed a Valium into my palm and ushered us out the door.
“We’re not going to tell anyone about this,” Witold whispered as we lay in bed that night. In Poland at the time, cancer carried a stigma. Even among our enlightened and educated friends, it was viewed as a sign of weakness and loss of control over one’s life. Talking about it was taboo.
A few days later, an oncologist confirmed that Witold had melanoma and scheduled immediate surgery. Within weeks, the melanoma had been excised and my husband had begun chemotherapy.
The infusion unit in the Institute of Oncology on Wawelska Street in Warsaw was frightening and depressing. To make matters worse, we—like most people at the time—knew almost nothing about chemotherapy. No one told us what to expect or what the treatment was intended to accomplish. Doctors and their staffs didn’t communicate with patients, and families were left completely to their own devices. In those years before the Internet, there was no easy way to get information. I was very aware, however, that our situation was grim. Cancer, especially melanoma, was considered a terminal disease. Very few lived through it.
But the weeks passed and Witold did not die. After surgery and several rounds of chemo, he returned to his normal life, and quickly, I started to forget that his cancer had ever appeared. I did more than forget; I deliberately kicked his illness out of my consciousness. I shoved it into a dark corner of my mind, covered it with layers of superficial happiness, and nailed it shut with vodka and partying.
Still, the nightmare of his disease—no matter how deeply submerged in my unconscious—hung over us. Witold grew more and more withdrawn, and in our denial of the seriousness of his illness, we pushed each other away. I was scared, as much as I tried to believe I wasn’t. Fear fueled our isolation, and we drifted farther apart.
By the end of 1981, the political situation in Poland had come to mirror my deteriorating marriage. That December, the Communist government declared martial law in an attempt to crush mounting political opposition inside the country, drastically limiting the freedom of Poles and sending the nation’s already wobbly economy into a tailspin. The streets of Warsaw were blocked with tanks and patrolled by Polish soldiers in full military gear. On freezing nights, they warmed themselves at makeshift fires that bloomed across the dark city. It was an alien world to us, frightening, practically a war zone. Long lines of people waited for food in front of empty stores, soldiers at checkpoints examined IDs, people rushed home before curfew for fear of being arrested, friends were thrown into jail.
By the time I fell in love with another man, Mirek, my marriage with Witold was all but over. I consoled myself with this fact each time I fell into Mirek’s arms; his steady presence was exactly what my children and I needed. Witold took the news of my infidelity hard. He disappeared from our lives by moving to France and he visited the children only a few times over the next two years; crossing back and forth to the West wasn’t easy.
On one visit, as he was leaving my apartment, Witold turned in the doorway and told me I was a great mother, that I had always been such a strong force standing unconditionally by our children, and that he envied my conviction and dedication to them. He was sad, warm, and humble. He kissed me goodbye, his first friendly gesture in years.
I had no way of knowing it then, but those would be Witold’s last words to me. In May 1985, a few months after that visit to Warsaw, he died in a hospital in Bordeaux, France. The cancer had metastasized to his brain. At that time, there was no cure for that kind of brain cancer.
When I got the news, I shook uncontrollably, and the children wept when I told them. They were too young for a funeral, I decided along with my family and Witold's, so I went alone. Later, when I tried to bring up their father’s death, they didn’t want to talk about it. Over the years, we simply did our best to move on, each of us in his or her own way. But Witold’s death still hovers over all of us, and melanoma carries an especially potent meaning for our family.
By Sunday, February 1, 2015, three days after my surgery, I’ve healed enough to be released from the hospital. Mirek and I head to my sister’s house, where I continue recuperating while remaining close to my doctors.
Still full of steroids to keep my brain’s swelling at bay, I feel like a superhero with limitless powers,
