Tina Ballerina

The oncologist's office was small.

That always struck me- how small it was for the size of the conversations that took place inside it. A desk, some chairs, a window that looked out on nothing in particular. We had been in a room like this many times over four years, Christine and I, and I had never once looked at what was outside that window. There was always something more important happening inside.

It was April of 2014.

We had been waiting for perhaps 10 minutes, which in that room felt like a different kind of time- slower, more deliberate. Christine had her notebook. She always had her notebook. Leather bound, burgundy, the pages filed with her careful handwriting-dates, dosages, questions formed and refined over the days between appointments. It contained observations about what her body was doing that she wanted Dr. Vogel to know precisely and not approximately. She had filled notebooks like this one for nearly five years. She was not a woman who left important things to memory or to chance.

She wasn't writing in it now. It sat on her lap, closed, her hand resting on the cover.

I was holding her other hand. We weren't talking. There was nothing left to say that we had not already said to each other in the days and nights leading up to this appointment - in the careful, quiet conversations that happen between two people who have been married long enough to know that some things require time to arrive at and cannot be rushed. We had taken that time. We had arrived.

So we sat. We waited. We understood.

And somewhere in that sitting, in that particular quality of silence that exists between two people who love each other, I became aware that we were breathing together. Long, slow breaths, almost synchronized, like we were doing it on purpose though neither of us had suggested it. Like the body knows things before the mind has finished working them out.

She turned and looked at me. I looked at her. We smiled. Not the large smiles of happy occasions but the small certain smile of two people who knew exactly where they are and have decided together, that they are all right.

She squeezed my hand. The door opened.

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This is the story of how we got to that room. It began in 1978, with a yellow Karmen Ghia and a girl who didn't particularly like me. It ends on the Hudson River, in a house we built for reasons that kept changing until the only reason left was love.

Her name was Christine. Everyone who knew her before Wall Street called her Tina.

This is what she taught us about living.