Drop Dead Healthy

Epilogue

ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN September, a few months after my project ended, I was strolling on my treadmill desk, finishing final revisions on my book, when my father called my cell phone. My aunt Marti had fainted.

I wasn’t too concerned, and neither was Marti. She probably had an excess of Brazil nuts in her diet and not enough hemp seeds. Or vice versa. In no time, she’d be up and about and railing against factory farms or horizontal hydrofracking, as always.

On the insistence of her holistic doctor, Marti reluctantly went to see a regular old western-style, test-giving, pharmaceutical-prescribing doctor.

Two days later the results came back. I was wrong. It wasn’t a lack of hemp seeds. It was cancer. Acute myeloid leukemia, a particularly nasty bully of a cancer that causes the bone marrow to pump out so many white blood cells that they choke the system.

Marti didn’t believe in God. If anything, she believed in a vague, benevolent Earth Mother–type goddess. But it was clear that whatever divine or nondivine force driving these events had a particularly cruel sense of irony.

This is Marti—eater of kale, avoider of toxins, disparager of microwaves and cell phones, a woman who ate organic food and slept on organic bedsheets. And she is the one who ends up with cancer?

Though disinclined, she agreed to a short course of chemo at Cornell Medical Center in New York at the family’s urging. She called it “warfare medicine.” She was so committed to her peaceful worldview, she hated the metaphor of “battling cancer.” The chemo didn’t work. She’d need another round.

I visited her. She looked surprisingly good—thinner, yes, but still with all her hair, still wearing her purple scarf. And her mood was oddly buoyant. We talked about Tina Fey’s book and Andrea Bocelli. She told me about her friend who illustrated the children’s classic Walter the Farting Dog, whom she thought my kids might want to meet. During one visit, we walked to Central Park and lay on the grass—a practice she called “earthing.”

We traded e-mails every day about nothing of great consequence. My son wanted to know her favorite animal, and she replied “elephant, since they are matriarchal, mourn the loss of their own kind, and are vegetarian.” She scolded me for wearing my sunglasses all day long when my glasses were broken (it’d throw off my circadian rhythm). She asked me if I knew whether Paul McCartney’s new wife was vegetarian. (I didn’t.) She signed the e-mails all the same way, “Your eccentric aunt Marti.”

One day in late October she wrote me that she had made a decision: No second round of chemo. She never wrote, “I have chosen to die,” but that’s what I read. I showed the e-mail to Julie, who read it holding my hand tight, her chin crinkling.

I hated Marti’s decision, but understood it. Even if the second round of chemo succeeded, there was still only a 10 percent chance she’d survive five more years.

She said she would give alternative therapies a try. And man, did Marti know from alternative therapies. She moved to Connecticut (nearer a holistic doctor) and juiced and supplemented with abandon. She bought a machine that gave her mild electric (and allegedly cancer-fighting) shocks. A friend of hers from California gave her “healing didgeridoo therapy,” where the vibrations of the ancient aboriginal instrument played over Marti’s body were supposed to help drive out the bad cells.

To my surprise, her alternative therapy seemed to be working. Her white blood cell count dropped steeply. She was feeling stronger than ever, full of optimism and plans for future books about animal rights.

I was all set to visit her on a Thursday in November, but cancelled at the last minute because I had a cold and didn’t want to infect her. She e-mailed me to try oregano and garlic. “Enemas would probably knock the cold out right away, but I suspect that you don’t want to go there.” She suspected right.

The next day my father called again. Marti had fallen in the bathroom and hit her head. Within hours, she had died at the age of sixty-three.

We took her ashes to the cemetery and buried them next to my grandfather’s still-unmarked grave. There was some concern that Marti would want to be out in nature, not under a toxin-filled cemetery lawn, so half of the ashes were spread near her sister’s house in Vermont.

Over vegan tomato salad, my family told stories about Marti. About how she was the most compassionate person we knew, a lover of animals who made us say “soy cheese” when we took family photos until she decided the soy industry was corrupt, a woman so concerned with suffering she wouldn’t keep houseplants because she felt guilty about constraining the roots in a flower pot.

It’s only been two weeks since she died, and I wish I could say I have gained profound wisdom from this absurdist plot turn.

We don’t even know the basics, such as what caused the leukemia. It could have been inherited. Could have been environmental. Marti thought the latter—she believed that despite her toxin alertness, some poisons had seeped into her bone marrow.

For the first week, I spent most of my time thinking about the cynical but compelling Jim Fixx argument. No matter what you do, no matter how often you exercise, or eat organic cauliflower, or wear helmets, you still could die tomorrow. Or today. Or right after you read this sentence. So why bother?

But in the past few days, I’ve forced myself instead to embrace Marti’s optimism, even if it was delusional at times, especially at the end. This was a woman who was so optimistic she believed that we could change the world, stay healthy, and be kind to all animals (including humans, who she liked to remind me are animals, too). In the name of Marti’s optimism, I’ll keep eating my plant-heavy diet and continue walking on my treadmill desk, though probably I’ll pass on didgeridoo therapy and coffee enemas.

Marti was one of my favorite people in the world, and I spill some raw almond milk in her honor.