Chapter One: When Donnie Called.

The First Time the Universe Spoke to Me

*This is the first of four times the Universe spoke to me. Not as poetry, not as hindsight dressed up as wisdom — but as something unmistakable, immediate, and personal. And before this book is done I will tell you about all four times the universe spoke to me along this journey.

Our good friend Donnie was a radiologist. A real one—the kind you trust because he doesn’t dramatize anything. He simply tells you what the images say. For us that was immediate always. Brenda and I had spent our lives orbiting around medicine—her through more than a decade in mental health, me through a family legacy of physicians and a stint in private equity analyzing reimbursement strategies and clinical labs. We knew the shorthand, the cadence, and the difference between something and nothing.

So when Brenda started having neck pain at 58, about to turn 59, neither of us blinked. She looked great. She felt fine except for the stiffness. It was supposed to be simple. A nerve. A vertebra a little out of place. Maybe some physical therapy, maybe a minor procedure down the road. She scheduled the MRI with Donnie and went on her own. That’s how routine it felt.

I was at home that afternoon. She had taken off work early and I was already back home when the phone rang.

It was Donnie.

And this is the first time the Universe spoke to me. The very first of four moments in my life when something beyond logic, beyond training, beyond medicine made itself known. The beginning of a conversation I did not know I was in yet.

I don’t mean a metaphor. I don’t mean a spiritual epiphany crafted neatly in hindsight. I mean something primal—instantaneous—arriving in a fraction of a second before a single word was spoken. And what it means for you in the journey with your partner. Listen for the universe it will let you know what you need to know when you need to know it.

The phone rang.
I answered.
Donnie said, “Hey Richard—”

And in that half‑breath, something inside me said clearly: She has cancer.

No thunder. No divine interruption. Just a sharp, internal certainty—so clear it felt spoken aloud. The Universe, whatever you want to call it, nudged me for the first time in my life. And it didn’t whisper. It named the storm before the clouds had even formed.

Donnie continued, gently: “We found something we weren’t looking for…”

Everything after that sentence became a kind of underwater sound. Muffled. Slow. Surreal. But Brenda’s voice, when she took the phone, cut cleanly through it all.

I suppose the first of many mistakes I would make as a Caregiver started right here. I said “I’m coming there to get you, stay right there”. We assume people, because we have not experienced it, are going to be weak in these moments and that we are the strong ones. I have news for you. Of course all of us in challenge and even the most significant one of our lives will feel pressure and may feel regret or remorse or we may be in modest denial……from time to time. But the strength of your person….of mine… is more than you think. Calmly and with her first show of acceptance of the reality of the moment but the early indication that she would live life showed through as the dots I can see now looking back.

“Richard… it’s alright. I’m coming home.”

We had a humor between us—always did—but this wasn’t a moment for humor. This was something quieter. More deliberate. She came home, and I remember sitting on our back porch at Bentwood Creek. I can still feel the chair. The air. The angle of her shadow as she walked toward me.

She stood. I sat.
She wrapped her arms around my neck.
Neither of us cried. We weren’t ready for that yet.
We were simply aware.

We both understood, without speaking it aloud, that whatever Anguilla had meant to us—whatever version of life we were living up to that moment—had quietly closed its door and the 10 year hoped for plan we all think we have, for us, was gone. And somewhere in me, still stunned, I knew this was only the first time the Universe would intervene. The first signal. The first push. There would be three more universe moments before this story ended. And I will share deeply personal moments of my life that have led to the power to be me and no one else and to just live as I do saying what I say mistakes and all because I learned this day, looking back, that everything I thought mattered does not. Nor does it matter for you. I do not mean live without purpose, but I do mean live open and inviting. I learned if you are careful what you say, and I mean in just being who you are, not hurtful things deliberately, but being who you are, unguarded and free open and giving, then you are not in the moment. You are building a life that does not really matter in the big scheme of what the universe is trying to tell you and show you. Or, more importantly I learned only looking back at this day that you are forestalling the life you need to live because of artificial beliefs of what anything you are doing now means.

But to understand that moment fully, you have to go back to where it all really began.

November 9th, 2009.
A few days before yet another trip to Anguilla and months before the neck pain and that MRI.

We’d been countless times before—looking at homes, dreaming the uncomplicated dreams couples allow themselves when the future feels long. She coughed up a little blood that morning. Just a little. Enough to notice, not enough to sound alarms. And with a stuffy nose what would anyone think?

She saw a doctor the next day. X‑ray inconclusive. Again never just any doctor. This was a friend’s father. Someone I went to School with and a noted physician. We were in good hands. Given our connections, if we needed an appointment, we had one. That’s how our life worked then—access, answers, immediacy. The doctor prescribed a Z‑Pak. By Saturday, wheels up, the symptoms were gone. So we left for Anguilla.

And life—ironically, inconveniently—kept happening. It brought what would be a distraction for a few months. In looking back at the dots, probably something I needed.

My son’s mother, also now gone from cancer, called to say my son had been kicked out of school. Not suspended. Not “we’ll sort it out.” Expelled. Eleventh grade, seventeen years old, spiraling a bit. Brenda and I had raised him through most of his childhood and onward, and he was with her while we took a week off. But in that moment, there was nothing I could do. Or would do. I told her I’d handle it when we returned.

We came home to a different kind of storm—addiction struggles, school placement, the painful but necessary decisions a parent must sometimes make to save a child who hates you in the moment you’re trying to save him. Brenda guided both of us through that season. My son righted himself in fairly quick course beginning the process of realizing what a solid and capable human he was(is). College with super grades, the finding of direction, a wife and a life most would envy and yet he already like me is just a funny open person. And now at thirty‑three he stands today as one of the greatest humans I know. But that is its own long arc, his story. But the dots looking back? I probably needed the distraction this provided us. The focus of a broader life and family while the core of it for me was falling apart.

We handled the chaos in front of us and didn’t look for the shadows ahead nearly as much.

Until March 10th, 2010. She came home and we hugged, as I said, and we had our first laugh. This is tough but here it is.

Brenda was indeed a smoker for a fair share of her life and continued a bit here and there for most of our lives together. While I was not the same, I smoked a bit but not nearly as much. “Richard, I know this is probably the wrong time to do this but you and me...we are going to smoke our last cigarette” and you know what....as silly or crazy as you think that sounds and judge her not lest ye be judged, we laughed, and smoked what was indeed our last cigarette.

The day the phone rang.

The day Donnie called.