My last steps looked almost like dancing. There was no one there to see them. No music was playing in the kitchen. I was simply doing something I had done hundreds of times before, sliding my feet across the cool tile because, for reasons I never understood, I preferred gliding across that floor to walking on it. Lacey always thought it was cute. To her, it looked like I was dancing through the kitchen. I had no idea I was dancing toward the edge of my old life.
A few weeks earlier, everything had still been wonderfully ordinary. We had family over for one of our traditional Sunday dinners, and my niece Harmony had bronchitis. I knew she was sick, but she was still my little niece. I picked her up, hugged her, twirled her around and danced with her the same way I would have if she'd been perfectly healthy. Getting sick was a possibility I was willing to accept for the privilege of loving her normally. A few days later, the cough started.
I have always been stubborn about being sick. Some of that may come from being a Taurus, if you believe in that sort of thing. Mostly, I think I had simply spent my life believing I could outlast whatever my body threw at me. I would buy some over-the-counter medicine, drink ridiculous amounts of water, bury myself beneath blankets and wait for my immune system to win. Usually it did. This time, the cough kept getting worse.
By the second week, coughing had become a full-body event. My torso folded around itself with every fit. The muscles between my ribs and across my back felt stretched and bruised from working so hard, and my chest burned as though somebody had built a fire behind my sternum. When I coughed anything up, it came out thick and electric green. There was a wet rattle buried deep in my chest that made it sound as though my lungs were carrying around a gallon of fluid they desperately wanted to get rid of.
Lacey, being a registered nurse, had already been telling me to see a doctor. At first she suggested it gently. As the days passed and I continued insisting I could handle it myself, concern gradually became frustration. She knew me well enough to recognize the pattern. I would keep moving the line in the sand until my body finally made the decision for me. By the weekend of Easter, I had decided Monday would be the day. If I wasn't miraculously better by then, I would finally go in.
Saturday night made that promise feel increasingly necessary. When I coughed hard enough, bright spots began appearing in my vision, little flashes like the ghosts left behind after staring into a camera flash or looking toward the sun. I had dealt with dizziness and fainting spells for several years, so the sensation wasn't completely foreign. My spine would begin to tingle, my vision would wash toward white, and my head would feel strangely inflated, like a balloon being filled from the inside.
Then my hands started going numb. Tingling ran down my arms and into my fingers, and my grip didn't feel right. I mentioned it to Lacey and asked whether I should be worried. She has always had a good poker face when it comes to medical things, especially with me, but I could see something shift behind her expression. That worried me more than the symptoms themselves.
By Easter Sunday, I had finally had enough. I booked a virtual appointment with a physician and described the coughing, the green mucus, the dizziness, the passing out, the visual flashes, the numbness and the strange weakness in my hands. He agreed that bronchitis was likely part of the problem and thought I needed antibiotics. Then his tone changed when we started talking about the neurological symptoms. He wanted me to see a neurologist that week, and he was emphatic about it. I promised him I would.
At the time, that sounded like an appointment I would make sometime in the next few days. I could not have imagined how much of my life was about to become neurologists, scans, hospitals, specialists, rehabilitation and conversations about nerves that could no longer carry messages where they were supposed to go. That knowledge belonged to another version of me. The man sitting in our living room that Easter Sunday still had plans.
Two nights earlier, on Friday, Lacey and I had been sitting together with The Office playing in the background, as it so often did in our house. It was our comfort show. We watched it while we worked on hobbies, while we relaxed, while we got ready for bed. Sometimes it was entertainment, and sometimes it was simply the familiar sound of people we felt like we knew filling the room.
That night, somehow, the conversation wandered toward Santa Monica. It may have started with Forma, one of our favorite restaurants there, where they would take fresh pasta and toss it inside an enormous wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano until the cheese melted into it. Talking about the restaurant led to talking about California, which led to remembering our years traveling the country while Lacey worked travel nursing contracts. Eventually, I asked her whether she would ever want to go back on the road.
What followed was almost funny because we had both been afraid to bring it up. We had come off the road and built a stationary life together in Greenfield, Indiana. We bought furniture, a washer and dryer, bedroom sets and all the things that make a house feel settled. We decorated rooms. We created the kind of home people are supposed to want after years of moving from contract to contract. Yet both of us had quietly begun feeling restrained by the permanence of it.
Once one of us finally admitted it, the other did too, and the whole thing spilled out. We laughed at how carefully we had both been guarding the same secret. We talked about returning to Santa Monica first and seeing the country again. Lacey loved the experience she gained moving between different hospitals and specialties, and I loved the life we created around those contracts. We had also been talking about starting a family. Our loose plan was beautifully simple: go back on the road, keep trying, and if a baby came along, we would come home again and begin whatever chapter came next.
I was still building my own career in hotel sales downtown. There were careers ahead of us, places ahead of us, a family we hoped was ahead of us. That Friday night, after finally admitting what we both wanted, I remember feeling lighter. We had been holding the same secret separately and suddenly discovered we were dreaming in the same direction. I slept incredibly well that night.
WE THOUGHT WE KNEW WHAT CAME NEXT
Our Greenfield house held the evidence of every direction we had already traveled together. It was the first home after our years on the road that felt completely ours. The colors downstairs were cool gray, cream and the pale soft green of succulents. Pictures from our travels appeared on end tables, counters and the dining room buffet. Candles and potpourri sat beneath the television, and two huge three-foot vases framed the entertainment center with branches and flowers that changed with the seasons. For spring, the house softened into pale blues, whites and fresh floral colors. There were pieces of us everywhere.
One of them was a glass sign in a wooden frame that had followed us since our first place together. It read, Home is wherever I'm with you, with a small heart beside the words. We loved it partly because the phrase was tied to music we had listened to when we first met. It had become one of those little private artifacts couples accumulate, an object that looks like decoration to everyone else and contains an entire history to the two people who own it.
Upstairs held even more of us. Our bedroom walls carried photographs from dating, our engagement, our wedding and the road. The guest room carried pieces of our journey. My office and bathroom were nautical, filled partly with things that had belonged to my grandpa, including photographs, seashells and memorabilia he had collected. Another room upstairs had become what we called the Zen Den, where our library sat among collages and photographs from the years we spent crossing the country together. Every room remembered something, although that Easter afternoon none of that history felt particularly significant. It was simply home.
I had slept late because I felt terrible. I barely ate, maybe some eggs in the morning, and spent most of the day drinking water and taking medicine. I wore basketball shorts and a T-shirt and did what sick people do when they have finally surrendered to being sick: I dug myself into the couch.
Around four o'clock, Lacey prepared to leave for Easter dinner at her parents' house. Phil and Amy would be there, along with Melody, Chris and the kids. I had wanted to go. Family dinners mattered to me, especially holidays, but by then it seemed irresponsible to carry bronchitis into another room full of people and keep passing sickness around. Lacey felt bad leaving me and was uneasy about it, given everything that had been happening, but I told her to go.
Before she left, she tucked me into the sectional beneath a king-size black silk blanket she had made for me. That blanket was one of my favorite things. The fabric felt cool when it first touched your skin, yet somehow kept you warm. It was heavy enough to feel comforting without making you feel trapped beneath it. Watson curled up near me. He had traveled the country with us and had spent years attached to my hip, my best buddy then and now. Shirley, still a puppy at the time, settled in too.
Lacey leaned down and kissed my forehead so she wouldn't catch what I had. She asked whether I needed anything before she left, a drink, something to eat, anything at all. I told her I was fine. She said, “I love you,” and walked out the side door.
ONE KISS ON THE FOREHEAD
THREE WORDS
ONE SIDE DOOR
A QUIET HOUSE
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES
I TOLD HER I WAS FINE
It was the kind of goodbye she had given me a thousand times before and would give me a thousand times again.
For the next forty-five minutes or so, the house settled back into its familiar little world. The open floor plan could make sounds carry and give the place a slight hollowness, yet our home always felt insulated from everything beyond its walls. Outside, it was one of those early Indiana spring days that reminds you winter has finally started loosening its grip. The air was still cool, and clouds moved through a blue sky without completely covering it. Inside, daylight filled the living room while the kitchen light glowed around the corner because that part of the house never received much sun.
On television, Kevin Malone was preparing his famous chili. Anyone who has watched The Office enough knows exactly what happens next. Kevin talks about how seriously he takes the recipe, how it is probably the thing he does best, and then drops the enormous pot onto the floor. I had my laptop open, playing around with designs without working on anything particularly important. Watson and Shirley stayed close, and my legs were stretched out on the ottoman beneath the blanket.
Sometime around quarter to five, I got thirsty. Strangely, I felt a little burst of energy, enough that I didn't drag myself slowly upright like I had been doing most of the weekend. I threw off the blanket and sprang up from the couch, and the dogs sprang up with me. They always matched my energy when I moved like that. Maybe someone was at the door. Maybe food was coming. Maybe we were going outside. Whatever was happening, they wanted in.
I started toward the kitchen. I was six-foot-four, with long legs, and I had always loved the physical feeling of walking. I liked stretching into a stride and feeling the muscles in my legs tighten and release. I loved hiking. Walking had never been something I needed to consider. My brain asked my legs to move and they moved.
From the sectional, it only took a few steps to reach the kitchen. The floor changed to tile and, as usual, I started to glide. Lacey had always laughed about the way I moved across that kitchen. If I was barefoot or wearing socks, I tended to slide my feet rather than lift them completely, almost like some lazy little dance I had invented for myself.
THE COUCH
A FEW STEPS
THE KITCHEN TILE
A GLIDE
THE REFRIGERATOR
THE LAST STEPS I WOULD EVER TAKE
I slid forward and opened the cupboard, took down a regular drinking glass, then glided past the long counter and the stove toward the refrigerator at the far end of the kitchen. The pantry sat directly behind where I would stand, leaving barely enough space for the refrigerator door to open comfortably. I turned toward the fridge, opened the door with my right hand, then opened the freezer above it, dropped some ice into my glass and closed the freezer again. I balanced the glass on the narrow ledge along the open refrigerator door.
For a moment, I looked at the food inside. It looked good. I could recognize that I should have been hungry, but my body had no interest in cooperating. Everything inside me still felt poisoned by sickness. I bent down and pulled out a two-liter bottle of Barq's root beer. The cap loosened with that familiar hiss of carbonation escaping.
Then I coughed. My chest folded as the wet rattle tore upward through my lungs, and the sore muscles wrapped around my ribs screamed under the strain. The spots returned, little bursts of light floating across my vision. Another cough followed, and the flashes multiplied until they began swallowing the kitchen around me, bright white neon blooming across almost everything I could see.
I knew this feeling. I had been here before. The tingling, the strange pressure in my head, the whitening field of vision. I remember thinking, very practically, Brace yourself. You're about to pass out.
There wasn't enough time or space for panic. I figured I might fall backward and knock the pantry door off its hinges. Maybe I would collapse sideways into the refrigerator and send bottles of mustard and ketchup flying. It would hurt. It would make a mess. I would wake up embarrassed and annoyed. I reached for the refrigerator shelf, knowing I needed something to hold me upright. At six-foot-four and roughly 265 pounds, I was asking a thin piece of refrigerator plastic to do a job it had never been designed to do.
I coughed one more time. The kitchen vanished beneath a field of white, and somewhere inside the darkness I heard a sound like a stalk of celery snapping in half.
Then everything went black.