Two Wives+One Name+Cancer= Desertion and Divorce

No Justice for Joy-Can we ever know how we might react in such a situation? If you have to wonder, then you already know.

(This essay is a departure from my usual topics-I’d love to hear your opinions about it.)

I have asked myself this question before but still don't have an answer. Where does a friend’s heart go when friends divorce? What do we learn by watching the way spouses treat each other in times of trouble? Do couple friends have to make a choice when there is a divorce or one member of a couple dies? These are questions everyone has to answer for themself.

Joy #2 and Bill met on J-Date in 2014 She was divorced and he was a widower. Bill was a longtime close friend of ours and he often wanted our opinion on his dates. We met her shortly after they started their relationship. She greeted us on a wide Florida beach with a broad smile and glowing cheeks. She knew we were Bill’s long-time friends and had a condo in the same south Florida building as he did, She also knew we had been friendly with his first wife, Joy #1.

Is it strange to marry twice to two separate people with the same first name? What are the odds of this happening? And does history repeat itself in retaliation for this accident of fate? Some questions are never answered.

Long, early morning walks in warm sand while the Atlantic Ocean teased our feet and forged the kind of friendship that rarely comes late in life. The recognition of kindred spirits comes infrequently as we age and we all recognize our good fortune. This experience made us feel silly and carefree again. We planned pajama parties complete with wine and dessert and sat around watching favorite television shows and movies. We bobbed in the community pool swapping stories about our earlier lives. We counseled each other on family matters. It was dormitory days with a heavy dose of adult understanding and experience.

Widowhood Comes the First Time

Joy #1 had left Bill a widower very suddenly in the summer of 2011. Her diagnosis came just a month before her death. Totally unprepared for losing his wife to lung cancer in her early fifties, Bill needed and welcomed our involvement. The doctors told them that Joy’s tumor had wrapped itself around her heart. Years later I considered that a marital metaphor for this medical description was appropriate. The news that she could leave the hospital brought no joy to Joy’s heart. Perhaps she knew what that might involve. When I told her how wonderful it was that she was going home, she stared a jagged, bloody hole right through me. I realized what a mistake my chirpy statement was. She never left the hospital and two days later, we helped Bill make funeral arrangements. I drove his teenage children home from the hospital after her passing.

We did what any good friends should do, attend the funeral and make Shiva calls (visiting the bereaved after the funeral). Later, we fielded single-dad phone calls about the challenges of parenting teenagers. He started dating a few months after her death and introduced us to some wildly inappropriate, and sometimes desperate, single women he met through J-Date. We noted how he started dating very quickly, but the tragedy of Joy #1’s quick death helped us see past judging it as “too quick.” We could not know what this behavior signified for the future. Bill’s deer-in-the-headlights approach was part of the shock of his loss. This became a pattern of behavior we would see again, realizing its full meaning after the fact.

What do we learn about people when they are faced with their significant other’s shocking and grim medical diagnosis? We all like to think that we would step up to the proverbial plate if facing this situation. We believe we would be the rock we would want for ourselves, the partner who places their loved one’s needs above their own.

More Joy for Bill

Our connection with the second Joy, we jokingly called her Joy #2, was immediate and intense. We laughed at the same things, had a light-hearted view of life, respected the same things and loved walking for sandy miles with ocean breezes ruffling our t-shirts.We vacationed together, drank bottles of wine, watched political shows together and commiserated in our shock as we watched the 2016 presidential election returns.

Joy #2 had retired from her successful career in fashion and had a sharp business sense and an appreciation of fine art. Tragedy had touched her only recently as she had lost her 20-something year old daughter in a freak accident the year before. Every butterfly Joy saw was a messenger from her daughter’s spirit. What else could it be?

When Bill told us he was thinking of breaking up with her after a few months, we told him to think it over carefully. We really liked her and she had everything going for her, good looks, good taste, a sharp brain and sense of humor. She was Jewish like Bill, and had comfortable resources. Sometimes we joked privately that we had convinced him to marry Joy, but a bit later he did tell us how much he loved her and they married the following year. Joy never knew we had essentially talked him out of breaking up with her. Sometimes I think about that time and wonder.

They married in a tasteful ceremony at a beachfront hotel not far from where we all lived and my husband signed their Ketubah, the marriage contract. This was the second time he had done so for Bill, perhaps another bizarre harbinger. We rejoiced in their love and happiness at finding companionship since it was the second time for both of them. “I have found the love of my life,” Bill told us privately.

In short, we were great friends even after we sold our Florida condo and they moved to a different building further south down the beach. They redid their new home together in beautiful taste, every renovation and finish carefully thought out and planned by the talented Joy. But after a few years, they decided to abandon their beach lifestyle and move to a single family home several miles west inside a country club community.

The Second Time

During this move, Joy became ill and the initial medical opinion was Hepatitis A. Her skin yellowed and her belly distended. Bill valiantly unpacked their belongings in their new home and hung some of Joy’s prized paintings while she directed. Not getting better, the doctors did more tests and the very worst was confirmed. Joy had bile duct cancer, a rare and incurable diagnosis. The clock started ticking.

The overriding focus was to do whatever was possible to elongate Joy’s life potentially through surgery and chemotherapy. The best place to fight this particular brand of killer was in New York City, Sloan Kettering Hospital. So, in mid-March of 2023, Bill and Joy flew to New York City via a private jet, to prevent exposure to any kind of infection, where they rented an AirBnB apartment. The doctors at Sloan Kettering set about determining the size and location of the tumor in order to decide on her suitability for surgery.

In the meantime, as a result of her fourth-stage, incurable cancer, Joy developed malignant ascites (fluid build up) which is a signal of advanced, incurable cancer and creates a continual need for paracentesis (draining). She became sicker and weaker and attempts at chemotherapy were interrupted by the need to continually perform this procedure and keep her from getting a fever. It was clear Joy did not have long to live.

This is where this story becomes bizarre. When Joy would ask for a glass of water or a pillow for her feet, Bill would respond, “Uh, ok, after I watch this replay.” When she asked to talk about selling the house they hadn't actually lived in so that she could die knowing that her son and his family would quickly have their share of the house as part of her will, Bill said, ”I'm not inclined to do this.” And “where would I go?”

Well, yes, valid question, where would he go? But the house was too large for a single person, perhaps too large for a couple, in fact. They had only lived there for barely one month and it had been purchased with the idea of plenty of room for the extended family to gather there. It also required two individual sources of income to maintain. There was no question of putting the house on the market, it was just a question of when.

After a few weeks, it became all too clear that Bill had already moved on emotionally. Was it post-traumatic stress syndrome left over from Joy #1? He complained that he did not like New York City and that he could not continue his exercise routine there. He made trips to see his children in the Washington, DC area and back to Florida for routine doctor and dentist appointments. He left Joy to fend for herself going in and out of the hospital for palliative care and in the hands of her son and daughter-in-law who both had jobs and a baby.

Out-of-town family came to help care for Joy as she became increasingly incapacitated and Bill was making other plans in other places. It did not take an overactive imagination to see where his priorities were. During one of these trips, Joy took Bill off of her medical portal. He could no longer see what her current condition was. This was just as well since, unbeknownst to her, he cut and pasted this information in extended group texts sent not only to myself and my husband, but to others who were less close to her. And some of the responses from his other friends were unfeeling and cruel.

Joy finally told Bill not to come back to New York City. They never spoke again. Joy served him with a divorce petition. Both hired lawyers and Bill was advised not to communicate directly with Joy. Exactly one week before she died, they divorced via Zoom. Twelve years to the month after losing Joy #1, he lost Joy #2. But he was not technically a widow this time.

My husband and I attended Joy’s funeral over Bill’s protests. He felt that he and his family had been excluded from this event because no one had let them know where and when it was taking place. Somehow he did not understand how his leaving her and never making an effort to return or even speak to her before she died played into the decision to exclude him. Somehow he thought we were “taking sides” by attending. He truly believed he was the wronged party. I suspected being excluded from all of this was a secret relief for him. He viewed the funeral via a streaming service and later complained no mention was made of either he nor his extended family. “They have erased us!” he groused.

Friend Dilemma

Where does the heart go when faced with the dissolution of a couple friend? At my age, I had faced this decision before, and chose based on my own set of priorities and ethics. I have lost friends and questioned my good judgment in the aftermath. I have researched and renewed some of these friends as time has passed and old judgements faded. The love we have for those who played parts in our lives should triumph over perceived disloyalty and slights. Bill had been my friend originally, so the choice could be made based on old loyalties, but I cannot rest on that comfortably.

How can we not see the true character of a friend until they are tested. Is it the same true of our own souls? Can we ever know how we might react in such a situation? If you have to wonder, then you already know. There is no room for indecision in lightening the load and providing comfort along the way to certain death for those we love.

How could he not see that his role in this situation was to make Joy’s last days less painful and more comfortable emotionally and physically?

I was picking up my granddaughter from day camp when the text from Joy’s son dinged a text on my phone that muggy July afternoon. I knew it was coming. I wept quietly into the cool steering wheel and hugged little Maggie when I saw her. I wept for the loss, the pain of cancer, and the distress of a man’s selfish love.

I am still angry and I don't know where to put it. Bill is still supposed to be a friend. He somehow does not know how he did wrong. He fought the divorce decree and technically he actually is a widower. But his heart and soul divorced Joy #2 weeks before she died. Abandoned by a selfish man who once claimed to love her, Joy died with a broken heart, a sense of betrayal and a deep desire to prevent him from calling himself a widow. The divorce was within him and she merely committed it to paper.

A few months later Bill put his profile back on J-Date where he originally met Joy. He put their house on the market, but its sad and selfish vibes turned potential buyers off. Initially there were few interested parties, but after the price was lowered, the house eventually sold.

Bill is technically a widower and puts that on his dating profile.In fact, he protested the divorce and was able to overturn it so he is legally now a widow. Joy’s last wish and purposeful act to leave this earth was divorcing him. He couldn't even give her that.

Likely he will be swarmed by the kind of women who faithfully watch “The Golden Bachelor” without irony. Some other willing woman will want to live with him. May they never know how inside his teddy bear exterior is a heart of granite.

And how should I and my husband move on now that more than a year has elapsed? We have not seen Bill since a few weeks after Joy’s diagnosis, but continue to engage in pleasantries over the phone. Perhaps as the years unwind, this relationship might become a sick and suffering body lying on a couch and asking for a glass of water. Can we then comfortably respond, “after we watch this replay?”