The Best of Us by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Perhaps he was quietly suggesting that it might be wiser to get a good year or two in, without surgery—as his father had, eating in a manner that could slow down the growth of cancer for as long as possible, with the hope that Jim might actually manage to feel good for a significant portion of that time.

If he had said this to us at the time, I could not have accepted his words. In our innocence and desperation, we had chosen to view “getting the Whipple” as akin to reaching the promised land. Ron Weiss, who had no doubt seen plenty of patients in the aftermath of that eviscerating procedure, knew better—as we would too, one day.

When the week in New Jersey was over, we flew home, but for some time we kept to the diet Ron and Asha had given us. Because pomegranates were a crucial part of the program they’d designed for Jim—and pomegranate season was ending—we made a trip to the Berkeley Bowl and bought up every single pomegranate they had in the store—over a hundred of them—that we stored in the backup refrigerator we had, whose function we had initially envisioned as keeping beer cold for parties.

Now when you opened the door of that refrigerator, all you could see were pomegranates.

I lost fifteen pounds that month. Jim, who had nothing to lose, lost twenty.

As for the rest: Jim’s tumor markers did go down a little on the Ron Weiss diet, though not as dramatically as we’d hoped. It is definitely true that we both felt surprisingly good after a month of eating this way, though we also missed the pleasure of food as something more than pure sustenance.

But at the end of six weeks of living on the diet, Jim threw in the towel. “If I keep living on these salads I’ll fade away,” he said. His weight was down to 108.

That night we grilled him a steak and made a Caesar salad with Parmesan cheese, egg yolks, anchovies. I shared in the meal, along with a bottle of cabernet, and after, we ate pie.

We still tried to keep up with the pomegranates. But we couldn’t get through them fast enough. We’d open one up, and instead of beautiful little red jewel seeds, we’d find the fruit rotten.

So one night we carried what was left of the pomegranates outside into the same field behind our house where I had thrown away the seafood I’d bought for the paella party that never happened. One by one, whooping and laughing, Jim and I flung what was left of our pomegranate stores into the woods.

The animals in our part of the canyon ate well that season, even if we didn’t.

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