Moving, Together

Finding a partner that can help you through tough times is hard - often it helps if you're moving together.

Illustration by Gigi Rose Gray

It was the weekend before Christmas, 2010. I was sitting on the 4 or 5 train, one of those on the green line, making the trip from Cornell Weill Hospital on the Upper East Side back to my Crown Heights apartment. I’d spent the previous two nights sleeping at my dad and stepmom’s apartment on the Upper West Side, too tired to make the long trip home, too fragile to be far from my family.

My dad was dying. Cancer. No one had said it aloud yet, but I knew. The leaden feeling I carried in my gut was proof enough, too reminiscent of the way I felt just three years previously when my mom’s oncologist had suggested she give chemo a rest, give her body a break. It was as gentle an urging to let one’s body give out as I can imagine, though at the time it ripped me straight up the middle. It was a similar sense of dread—dread on the brink of searing pain—that I carried around that afternoon as the train rumbled south. I had decided, after two days trying to carve ou…