My Wife Was Dying, and We Didn’t Tell Our Children

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We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.

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They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.

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Marla was my first and only girlfriend. We were introduced in October 1987, when we joined a coed intramural flag-football team in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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In 2009, Marla’s radiologist called to tell her that she had early-stage breast cancer. She was also BRCA-positive, meaning that she carried the inherited gene for the disease—a troublesome marker. After a double mastectomy and ovary removal, she needed eight rounds of chemotherapy to clear the cancer found in her lymph nodes.

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Our kids were 8, 9, and 11 at the time, and though they understood then that she was undergoing treatment (wigs were hard to hide), we never told them the news we soon learned from Memorial Sloan Kettering’s head of breast-cancer oncology: Marla had a triple-negative cancer cell, the fiercest of them all. When linked with the BRCA mutation, it is commonly referred to as “the breast-cancer death sentence.” This specialist bluntly told her: “Go live your next 1,000 days in the best way you know how.”

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When Marla beat back the first assault in 2009, we all celebrated. When the cancer returned two years later, we told only our parents and siblings. Aside from them, we were alone with her illness and its lethality. Marla and I launched our stealth treatment strategy together: Everything would be tried; little would be shared. We saw no need to alarm friends, worry relatives, or derail the girls. Subterfuge was essential for survival—not just the literal, existential kind, but survival of the spirit. Our kids would not be robbed of stability; protecting their sense of the ordinary was everything. The ground would stay steady, and we would extend the runway for as long as possible.

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Some might not have made the same decision, believing that the girls had a right to know they should savor diminishing moments. But Marla didn’t want her girls to savor; she wanted them to sail, and that meant less information—not a lie, but a lacuna. Marla refused to let family time together feel too precious, too heightened, too sad.

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Every six weeks, when she got scanned, Marla and I braced ourselves for results. This past fall, we had to confront that we were running out of options.

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At Thanksgiving, Marla and I gathered the kids at the kitchen table and told them the story we’d spared them. She had effectively been undergoing chemo for seven straight years. She had chosen to give our family a routine without a morbid spotlight. She did not want endless questions, pity, or gossip.

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An unanticipated complication developed shortly after, resulting in Marla’s death on December 19.

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Our girls have talked often about their mother’s sacrifice and said to me without prompting, “I am so glad I didn’t know what Mommy was going through. I would have worried every single day.” In these past two months, they have reassured me again and again that not telling them was the loving choice.

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Marla insisted on giving our daughters their youth, convinced that normalcy would allow them to discover their own strengths. And she gave me something just as extraordinary: the resilience of romance in the face of a sure, premature ending.

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Marla said to me at the hospital, “No glory days for us. We almost had the kids out of the house, and now you’re alone. I’m so sorry.”

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I replied, “Sorry about what? You made life worth living. When you kissed me, I melted. I admired your pureness, your power. You outran science. Thank you for taking me on your magic carpet. Rest easy, my one and only girlfriend.”

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