Most people don’t understand the power of commitment. This is a story about my My Life with Gee, and how our commitment to each other affected us.
Five years ago, Easter Sunday, Gee, her parents, and I were at Maryview Hospital, where her father is on staff. We were waiting to find out what was going on—why this beautiful woman I loved was so jaundiced. She had just moved back to Northern Virginia, after a short time in Seattle. I was the reason she had decided to move back.
It all started about a week after we drove cross-country, I noticed that Gee’s color was off—something wasn’t right. As she had been planning on visiting her parents, I told her to ask her father about it. Her father is a doctor. She drove down to visit them, and when she got there she called me. I asked to speak to her father, and I told him that I thought something was wrong, as her color was off. Gee just didn’t look okay to me. Ever since I had met her, nine months before, I knew exactly what she looked like—she had become the most important person in my life, and my first priority. He said she looked fine. I said she looked jaundiced…that her color was off. He said he’d keep an eye on it.
Four days later, Monday, April 17, I got a call from Gee’s father, Dr. Kim. He told me that he was taking Gee to the hospital for some tests. During the course of the weekend, Gee had become very noticeably jaundiced, and he wanted to find out what was going on. The ultrasound showed that Gee’s bile duct was being blocked by a growth on her pancreas, causing her jaundice. The mass fairly large, about the size of a golf ball and the doctor took a biopsy of it. It turned out to be pancreatic cancer—an aggressive, nasty adenocarcinoma. It was very unusual in someone Gee’s age.
About a week later, Gee’s father came to talk to me. He asked me if I wanted to cancel our engagement—that with her illness, he would understand if I did. Apparently, in Korean society, because one of the purposes of marriage is to have children—to start a family, the discovery of a serious illness was often a reason to cancel an engagement.
I said to Dr. Kim, “Gee’s illness hasn’t changed who she is, how I feel about her, or what she has come to mean to me. And why would I abandon the woman I love, just when she needs me the most.” I went on to say that I saw no reason to cancel my engagement to Gee—that when I had asked her to marry me seven months earlier, I had made my commitment to her—for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. In our hearts and minds we were already committed to each other—to us—our upcoming marriage was just a formality, a celebration of our life together to share with our friends and family.
Later, in May, Gee told me her parents were asking her to postpone our wedding. I told her I would take care of it. I went down to visit her parents, and I spoke to Dr. Kim, my soon to be father-in-law. I told him that the wedding was the one thing that Gee had been counting on, been planning for almost eight months, and it was something she was so looking forward to. I insisted on having our wedding on time, as scheduled—it was what I wanted, it was what Gee wanted. I told him we had done too much planning to postpone the wedding, and that Gee and I wanted to have it on November 4, 2000, as we originally planned—that it wasn’t to be discussed again.
What I don’t think her father knew, but I had found through my research about pancreatic cancer, is that there was only a slim chance that Gee would make the wedding if we postponed it at all. The type of cancer she had, a pancreatic adenocarcinoma has a very low survival rate—that the overall survival rate was less than 1% at 5 years with most dying within the first year. I told Brad my fears, but asked that he not say anything.
On the Friday before she died, Gee told me, that she knew she would not have made it as far as she had if she hadn’t met me That because of our love, our commitment to each other, her life was complete—that her only regret was that she had to leave me to continue on without her. She wished that she could keep the promise she had made when we were engaged—to never let me be alone again.
Gee and I had almost 14 months together from when she was diagnosed—in many ways, Gee had beaten the odds. It was more time than I expected, but less than I had hoped for. My time with Gee, my Life with Gee will always be one of the most amazing periods in my life. It was intense, stressful, happy, joyous, sad, and heartbreaking. I am a better person for having had Gee in my life. On this Easter Sunday, I wish you all a chance to know a bit more about My Life with Gee.