What We Didn't Plan For
The first shock was learning that my husband was gravely ill. Then there was the lien on our mortgage and the lawsuit against his business.
Courtesy Sarah Bartlett
THE AUTHOR'S HUSBAND, architect John Petrarca, was always healthy.
Courtesy Sarah Bartlett
John with his children Emilia and Ian.
Courtesy Sarah Bartlett
John with his wife Sarah in 2001, after his diagnosis.
It all started with a cough. That dry, hacking, persistent cough you typically associate with smokers. He'd had the same cough the winter before, but the medication had made it disappear quickly. We figured it was just another bout of bronchitis.
Alas, we were wrong, as a chest X-ray he had soon thereafter sadly revealed. My 49-year-old husband, John Petrarca, had somehow gotten lung cancer, and by the time it was discovered, it had already spread to his brain and his bones. He had skipped right ahead to what the cancer world calls Stage IV, the last stop. It was like going from a standstill to 100 miles an hour in three seconds.
He was the one who was always healthy. Whenever our kids came home with colds or the flu, I was the one who succumbed. John never smoked, didn't abuse his body with drugs or alcohol, had no known exposure to asbestos, and grew up in a huge Italian family that was cancer-free. If he could get sick, in other words, no one is immune.
In addition to being a husband and a father, John ran his own business. He was a highly acclaimed architect based in lower Manhattan. For the past 10 years, he'd had a partner and they'd expanded their successful practice to more than 30 employees, working with clients as far-ranging as MTV, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, and media executive Geraldine Laybourne. But about six months before he was diagnosed, John decided he wanted to shrink back down to a staff of 10 and focus solely on developing urban townhouses. It was the kind of design challenge that made him the happiest, and he hoped that acting as a principal would prove more lucrative than his fee-based architectural practice. I was excited to see him so energized by his new business concept. Although I was only working part-time as an editor, I was not particularly worried about the financial risk it implied because I figured it couldn't be any worse than the uneven and modest stream of fee-based income that has always plagued the business of architecture.
John and his partner, Robin Guenther, set April 1, 2001, as the first day of their new, separate businesses. The date of the X-ray revealing the mass on his lung: March 30.
The first oncologist to interpret John's scans was brutally frank in his assessment, prodded on to some degree by my husband's insistent questioning. John wanted to know exactly what he was up against, and the answers given by Dr. John Cho of St. Vincent's Comprehensive Cancer Center were not encouraging. There was no cure. At best, John could hope to live 12 more months, but statistically, it was more likely closer to six. Treatment could delay the inevitable, but it would be uncomfortable. In a report he sent later to John's pulmonologist, Dr. Cho wrote, "I thank you very much for the opportunity of evaluating this pleasant but unfortunate gentleman."
We stumbled out of his office onto the street in absolute shock. In a taxi heading home, we both began to sob. We asked the taxi driver to let us out a few blocks early so we could sit on a park bench, look out over the Hudson River, and try to collect ourselves before going home to relieve the babysitter of the care of our two unsuspecting children, ages six and eight.
For several weeks, we told no one, trying to absorb the life-altering news, trying to figure out what to do about his new business venture, what to communicate to his employees, his family, our children. The news was impossible to fathom. John had been my partner in life since I was 24 years old. A wildly creative, driven man, he had always been there to challenge, counsel, and entertain me. He was an incredible father to our children, spending hours with them cross-legged on the floor building exotic structures out of Lego blocks, telling tall bedtime tales, teaching them how to use mind-blowing software. I couldn't imagine life without him. It took an act of supreme deception to make it through those first days without betraying the depths of our despair.
When an employee of a midsize or large business gets this kind of shocking news, there is at least some institutional backbone upon which to lean. A sick employee's workload can be divided up among others, giving that person time to address his or her personal crisis without worrying about work obligations. Many large companies also provide some measure of financial support in the form of health insurance, life insurance, even disability insurance. And they frequently offer some kind of plan, such as a 401(k), to stimulate retirement savings. The body blows, both emotional and financial, in other words, can be absorbed, to some degree, by the business at large.
When the owner or CEO of a small business gets sick, the financial impact is more immediate and far-reaching, both to the business and to the family. Cash flow, already often unstable, becomes unpredictable in the extreme. If there are no partners in the business, there is frequently no one senior enough to serve as a stand-in, so a health crisis can cause the entire business to be set adrift at the very moment a financial cushion is most needed. As for insurance and pension plans, they are often viewed as luxuries that cannot be afforded.
In John's case, having just severed his ties with his partner, he decided his only hope was to open himself up to his employees. He needed to have his brain tumor treated immediately with a high-tech form of targeted radiation that would leave scars on his skull and require him to be out of the office for several days. It was time to explain why there were so many mysterious doctors' appointments on his open-to-all online calendar. "We'd all been worried. He seemed tight-lipped, and he wasn't usually," said Elizabeth Houck, then his secretary. "He was going to the doctor a lot."
John called everyone into his small conference room one afternoon in May 2001 and laid it all out. "He wasn't emotional -- he was very to the point," recalls John Dooley, who had been working for my husband for three years. "He said he had cancer and that they had given him six months to live. Everyone was crying, but not him. No one had suspected anything that dire."
John's instinct was to close down his firm, Studiopetrarca, as quickly as he could. On top of everything else, our family was in the middle of moving into a new house he had designed and built for us, and he was worried about getting it completed before he died. Plus, he thought that since the business was so new, it would be a relatively simple matter to shut it down. Architecture is a long, slow process. Projects can take years to complete. No client, he figured, would ever hire him once it was known that he was terminally ill. And he felt it would be impossible not to disclose his condition, especially since he expected his physical appearance to deteriorate quickly. He had hoped to do some real estate development work himself, but how could he ever persuade a bank to finance any of his projects? The whole idea of continuing seemed hopeless. He began to make plans for setting up a desk next to mine in our new study and working as a consultant for as long as his health held out.
