Chapter Ten: The Second Last Four Days | My Andy

Have Hope, and Take Care of Someone

There are moments that only reveal what they were years later.

This was one of them.

Brenda was in hospice, but not yet there. Not withdrawn. Not lost. Not diminished. She was still herself — fully present, sharp, aware, opinionated, and very much in the room. Hospice, at that stage, was not an ending. It was a pause. A narrowing of options, yes, but not of mind or spirit.

That day, she wanted to go outside.

Not metaphorically. Literally. She wanted fresh air, sunlight, something other than fluorescent ceilings and the soft mechanical rhythm of medical care. So we did what caregivers do without thinking twice. I helped her into the wheelchair. I checked the footrests. I made sure the tubing was clear. And I wheeled her out.

She took it all in — the air, the movement, the normalcy of being somewhere else, even if only for a few minutes. She was in what I later came to understand as rally mode. That strange, generous window where energy returns, appetite reappears, and laughter feels possible again.

Wendy’s Frosties showed up. Kentucky Fried Chicken made an appearance. Visitors came and went. There was joy in it — not denial, not fantasy — but a kind of grounded happiness. She was still living inside the day she had.

In the background, there was still hope of another kind.

We were waiting. Watching. Tracking eligibility for what would eventually become Keytruda. She wanted access to the clinical trial. There were criteria. There are always criteria. One of them was deceptively simple on paper and brutally difficult in practice: she needed to be able to ambulate roughly one hundred feet.

We were working on it.

Every day, in small ways. Encouraging movement. Measuring strength. Trying without pushing. Hoping without pretending. Neither of us was naïve. But neither of us had surrendered. And even today when times are good or bad I always remember. As people are lost in the ego of accomplishment and things, they seldom remember the little things. Things like being able to walk 100 feet.

That afternoon, we were holding hands.

And she said something that, at the time, I heard — but did not yet understand.

She spoke calmly. Practically. Like Brenda always did when she was saying something that mattered.

She talked about trying. About working toward getting out of there. About how, if she did, we might be able to have fun again. Travel a little. Be us again, in some version that still made sense.

And then she paused. And in that pause was the truth she was really offering. She didn’t dramatize it. She didn’t soften it either.

She said, in her way, that she might not get out of there. That she wanted me to know she loved me. That she had loved our life together — the fun, the travel, the laughter, the arguments, the texture of a real marriage lived fully.

And then she said the thing that took me more than a decade to truly understand.

She told me it was okay for me to go on. To find a new life. To have fun again.

She didn’t say it as resignation. She said it as instruction.

At the time, I thought she was being generous. Or brave. Or simply realistic. I thought it was love trying to protect me from future pain.

Only years later did I see it clearly.

In that moment, she became Andy.

Not because she was leaving right then. But because she was giving me hope — real hope — before I knew I would need it. Not the false hope of more time together.

But the harder, rarer hope: that I would live on intact. That I would not freeze inside loss. That I would eventually walk out of the prison I didn’t yet know I was about to inhabit.

She didn’t promise Zihuatanejo. But she gave me permission to believe it existed. Something more.

She told me, without ever using the language, that my life did not end with hers. That loving her fully did not require dying with her. That my job — after she was gone — would be to live. To have more joy. To move forward.

And then, with the same clarity she had always brought to the important moments, she distilled it all down to something that I interpret now as simple.

Have hope. And take care of someone.

I heard the words she said then. I learned what they really meant much later.

I had not yet given myself permission to have more joy and a new life that could be even better than before. That was hard to imagine, but I learned, looking back, she said it was what I was to do. Live fully and have more joy and life. Be Red, Not Brooks. Be Red.

Still, as uncomfortable as it may seem for me to say, there is a time when you might think Brooks has the right answer. Getting to Zihuatanejo would not be an easy journey.