The Best of Us

At age 59, after more than two decades as a divorced single mother, memoirist Joyce Maynard married Jim, an attorney and the first true partner she had ever known, on a New Hampshire hillside on Fourth of July weekend. Not long after their one-year anniversary, Jim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nineteen months later, Maynard lay beside him as he took his last breath. She reflects that she discovered the full meaning of marriage only as hers was drawing to a close.

Maynard traces her troubled history with love back to her parents, whose passionate courtship collapsed almost immediately after their wedding. They remained together for 25 years in bitterness, sleeping in separate bedrooms. At 23, Maynard married her first husband, Steve, a man whose silences she mistook for mystery. They divorced when she was 35, and she spent the next two decades raising three children largely alone, becoming what she calls a "solo operator" (2) and growing reluctant to try marriage again.

In 2011, Maynard noticed Jim's profile on Match.com. He wrote to her, and they talked on the phone for four and a half hours. Unlike typical online-dating exchanges, Jim shared difficult truths: his childhood under a bullying father in Southern California, his first marriage in a fundamentalist Christian faith, and the guilt that consumed him after leaving that marriage for Patrice, a woman who became his law partner. Maynard recognized something different in him: fundamental decency rather than the bravado she had typically pursued.

On their first in-person date, Maynard told Jim the most devastating story of her recent life. Driven by a longing to parent again, she had adopted two Ethiopian sisters she calls Layla and Adenach. The older girl carried deep grief and anger, and Maynard recognized she could not provide what the girls needed. She found them a new family: Rachel and Henry, a couple she had met at the orphanage in Ethiopia. Jim listened without condemnation. "That's not how I see it," he told her (58).

Their early months revealed both deep connection and Maynard's resistance to partnership. She declared a thirty-day rule against sex, continued leaving for writing retreats, and struggled to share domestic space. Jim, patient and steady, stayed. They attended the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park, where Maynard wove through crowds and Jim kept pace behind her. Watching him, she realized she loved him. "I'm your guard dog," he told her (69). They traveled to Paris for her book tour and began building a shared life. Jim proposed with a diamond ring hidden beneath an oyster, and they married on Fourth of July weekend 2013, all six of their children present. Maynard's son Willy toasted: "My mom has had a lot of boyfriends . . . I mean, really a lot . . . Jim is the best" (111).

They bought a house in Hunsaker Canyon in Lafayette, California, on seven acres with live oaks and a barn. It was the first home Maynard had ever purchased with a partner. Jim began playing bass in a rock band called Storkzilla, fulfilling a dream his father had crushed 50 years earlier by forcing him to quit music as a teenager.

In November 2014, Jim's urine turned amber and his skin yellowish. A scan revealed a 2.5-centimeter tumor in his pancreas, wrapped around a crucial vein. Without a Whipple procedure, a complex surgery involving removal of parts of the pancreas, stomach, and intestine, Jim was likely to die within months. Even with the surgery, only 20 to 25 percent of patients survive five years.

Maynard threw herself into research, rising before dawn to contact medical facilities across the country. They pursued a controversial oncologist she calls "Dr. Miracle," a Chinese medicine practitioner, and a strict macrobiotic diet that left Jim at 108 pounds. After growing disillusioned with alternative approaches, they chose Dr. James Moser at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who declared with confidence that he could remove the tumor.

Jim began a demanding chemotherapy regimen called Folfirinox, and his tumor shrank by 50 percent. The surgery lasted 14 hours. Moser removed the tumor along with parts of several organs and 38 lymph nodes, harvesting Jim's jugular vein to replace one the tumor had encircled. The pathology report brought mixed results: Only two of the 38 lymph nodes contained cancer. Maynard reflects that those two cancerous nodes were the real story, a likely death sentence they chose not to hear.

Back in California, follow-up chemotherapy was derailed twice by C. difficile infection. A fecal transplant resolved the illness, but the interrupted treatments allowed Jim's body to develop drug resistance. His oncologists agreed: There would be no more chemotherapy, then or ever.

Jim's decline accelerated. His muscles wasted and he could no longer digest food without enzyme pills. In early 2016, after a violent fever in Mexico, he was admitted to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) hospital for a six-week stay. His oncologist, Dr. Katie Kelley, pulled Maynard into the hallway to deliver the news Jim had asked her to share only with his wife: The cancer had returned. Tumors were blocking his biliary ducts and causing abscesses in his liver. This was Stage 4 metastatic cancer, incurable. Kelley estimated Jim had a couple of months. He missed his daughter Jane's wedding, joining by video call from his hospital bed.

After discharge, Maynard administered Jim's antibiotic infusions at home. They chose hospice care, agreeing to no more hospitals or extraordinary measures. Against medical advice, Jim drove Maynard to the Eastern Sierra for a final road trip, antibiotics in a cooler and an IV pole in the back seat, the Beatles playing the whole way. At his father's barren land in the Olancha wilderness, he taught her to shoot, placing five shots dead center.

On Jim's 64th birthday, they attended a Bob Dylan concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Jim's eyes began to close before the show and he rocked in his seat; onsite medical staff let him rest on a cot before he insisted on returning. When Dylan played "Tangled Up in Blue" (410), Jim demanded to stand. It took Maynard 45 minutes to get him to bed afterward. He never left it again.

Their children visited separately to say good-bye. Jim distributed his guitars, cameras, and possessions. On one of his last conscious days, he told a friend, "I'm a lucky man. I have been known" (415). One night near the end, Maynard gave Jim three syringes of morphine instead of one. He survived, and hospice reported her to the police, restricting her morphine access.

Jim died in the middle of a June night, four days after his birthday, 19 months after diagnosis, three weeks before their third wedding anniversary. Maynard stayed beside him for an hour, her hand on his belly as she used to place it every night before the illness. In the predawn hours, she made one cup of coffee instead of two, sat at the kitchen table, opened her laptop, and began to write their story.

In the weeks that followed, she received a message from Layla, her older Ethiopian daughter, now a teenager: "Many people think you were a bad person to let us go. But Adenach and I don't. You did the best thing for us" (394). That summer, Maynard traveled to the lake cottage in New Hampshire she had bought sight unseen during Jim's final months. She spent the season writing in the boathouse and swimming each morning, alone on the water, listening to a loon's mournful cry and the answering call from the far shore.