My wife is dying.

The day has yet to be determined, but the causes are certain. Stage 4 metastatic pancreatic and liver cancers will allow her a few weeks more in which to say goodbye to a large circle of family and friends. She has decided not to undergo chemotherapy or radiation that at best might extend her life by a few weeks, at the cost of the quality of whatever time she has left.

So far, friends would not know she is sick, except that she involuntarily lost 22 pounds in a year. Since major surgery in December 2025, she has regained her appetite and much of her energy. A local and international circle of family and close friends are lined up on our calendar to visit in the coming weeks. We are also supported by a professional chef, oncologist, and palliative care specialist. When needed, she will have in-home hospice care. Our heat-seeking cats curl up beside us every night. And of course, she has my care and support.

Because the author is a prominent health care educator and patient advocate, we have a large circle of followers in social media. With my wife’s permission, they are sharing these weeks through me. She has always been a lady with a lively sense of humor. Thus she has remarked that due to the prayers of hundreds of people she has never met in person, the Creator might be getting a headache sorting Prayer Mail.

I have been married to this lady for 47 years. It was a second marriage for both of us. Our first marriages had been vastly different experiences. We entered our relationship from places a world apart.

I grew up as a battered child, in what amounted to an urban and family combat zone. My parents shouted and barked like rabid dogs, occasionally coming to physical blows. The neighborhood streets around us were often dangerous. So was our dining room table.

I sometimes remarked unkindly that my parents stayed together because neither of them could find a better sparring partner anywhere else. I resolved in my teens that I would be like neither of them toward any kids that I might eventually have. These days I believe I might have succeeded, despite the disaster that was my first marriage. I married two kids with my second wife. It was a package deal.

The first time around

When I married at age 23 and divorced at 29, I was carrying around a lot of baggage and emotional insecurity from childhood abuse and a lack of reliable examples for positive human relationships. The woman I married just after college was super smart and stacked like a brick outhouse. She thought of herself as a sexpot and perhaps she was, for partners who did not look deeper than her shapely figure. She was also a control crazy.

When we divorced, she took “her” six-month-old daughter from upstate New York to northern California. I departed separately for another three years of graduate school and eventually a military career. After our separation, she soon let me know in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of allowing me ever to have contact with her daughter. It would be 20 years later before my daughter and I reconnected, and her mother disowned her. My ex was expert at carrying a grudge.

The second time was the charm

When I remarried, it was to a woman who remembered being strafed by fighter aircraft in the final year of World War II. She still jokes that although she was born on the first day of that horrid war, it was not her fault.

She grew up in post-war Germany, in a stable and loving home with two parents and four siblings. She immigrated to Canada at age 18, where she soon married. The couple and their two children later immigrated to upstate New York, where I met them. Ten days after that meeting, her first husband died of an early heart attack. They had had a harmonious 19-year marriage.

My new lady was less formally educated, but far more subtly intelligent on many levels than my ex. Number Two knew things about emotions, patience, and loyalty that I had never learned, and that my first wife actively rejected.

I have never been particularly easy to live with. A lot of writers are not. We tend to be focused on our own thoughts and the external world away from home. But my present wife has still helped me to learn many things, without really trying:

• Differences may attract, but commonalities of values and views are ultimately a stronger sustaining force in all forms of ongoing close relationship.
• Sexual intimacy draws many couples into marriage, and it is great good fun. But sex alone rarely sustains a relationship for many years. Kids put pounds on a woman’s figure, and other relationship encounters may offer a temporary promise of relief from marital boredom, or intense passion.
• Not accidentally, US divorce rates are over 40 percent for first marriages, with marital infidelity topping the list of reasons. Some marriages do survive infidelity. But if this is to happen, then both partners must practice an uncommon degree of patience, humility, commitment, and self-awareness. American society does a lousy job of educating our kids to these realities.
• Liking your lover and talking with them frequently are more important in marriages that last, than screwing each other to heaven in exotic locales or phone booths.
• Marrying someone you have met only two weeks or months before is a reliable prescription for equally rapid marital disaster. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” is a fundamental truth.
• Marriages are power relationships. Two partners who have greatly different needs for power over other people will not be together for long. Two emotionally weak people are unlikely to merge into one emotionally strong love affair. We must each do our own growing up.
• When both partners believe that a win for their partner is a win for their relationship and not a loss for themselves, marriage can last. Partners who last together will cultivate and support each other not only for ourselves, but for each other.

For the two of us, these observations came into play about 15 years ago. We took our Ford F-150 truck, our boxer dog, and a 19-foot trailer from coast to coast and back across America. During five weeks we were on the road, we never ran out of something to say to each other.

Relationships between good listeners tend to last longer. Ours certainly has.

Richard A. Lawhern is a nationally recognized health care educator and patient advocate who has spent nearly three decades researching pain management and addiction policy. His extensive body of work, including over 300 published papers and interviews, reflects a deep critique of U.S. health care agencies and their approaches to chronic pain treatment. Now retired from formal academic and hospital affiliations, Richard continues to engage with professional and public audiences through platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and his contributions to KevinMD. His advocacy extends to online communities like Protect People in Pain, where he works to elevate the voices of patients navigating restrictive opioid policies. Among his many publications is a guideline on opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain, reflecting his commitment to evidence-based reform in pain medicine.