A recurring theme on this blog is the interruption of my bicycling dreams by the realities of life. In some cases, I could explain this fully on the blog. In others, I could not. For example, when my Dad's health began to fail and I had to interrupt my cycling to fly to California to help care for him, I described that in great detail. However, when other things happened, privacy concerns forbade me doing so. Instead, I repeatedly referred to a cryptic post which only said that my cycling was being impacted by something about which I could not blog. Sadly, I now can. In April of 2015, my wife Agi, had her ovarian cancer recur. Ovarian cancer, when it initially occurs, is rarely curable; only 20% or so of women with ovarian cancer are cured. Recurrent ovarian cancer is never curable, so from that date forward, we knew what was coming, but I could not blog about it. Why not? Well, if you know you are going to die, then you have to decide how you are going to live the years or months or days that you have left. Agi, being the brilliant, brave, and practical person that she was, decided that ignoring her cancer was the only rational response, and to do that, the fewer people who knew about it, the better. Thus the title of that cryptic blog post was "I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream." But now that Agi has finally lost her eight year fight against cancer, there is no longer anything to stop the screaming.
The picture at the top of the post was my wife's commuter bike. Back in 2012, we went through a long process of trying to buy her a commuter, defined very specific criteria for the commuter we wanted, and then never bought anything. (There may have been some cause and effect there.) Whether it was the many cycles of harsh treatment or progression of the cancer itself, by the summer of 2016, she was finding it more and more difficult to commute to work on her road bike, mostly because swinging her leg over the frame was becoming a challenge. At about the same time, Public Bikes had a sale on a very attractive looking commuter, one with a step-through frame which promised to solve that problem. Although we have previously said we would not buy a commuter that Agi could not test-ride first, we abandoned that principle and had them send us one. Agi loved that bike and was able to bike to work a few months longer because of it. In brief, I cannot recommend Public Bikes more highly.
And so, life goes on. For me, but not for Agi. Does this mean a return to regular blogging? Honestly, I don't know. What I do know is that is very much what Agi would want, so I will try with everything I've got. Stay tuned.
Thank you for sharing. I imagine it has been a very difficult period. I am a cancer survivor and cyclist and I have always found your blog posts interesting. As difficult as this post is to read and must have also been to write, it is also what life is all about. - Mark. Thank you for all of your posts.
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