The official diagnosis came quickly after that night on the seventh floor. Stage 1B pancreatic cancer. Confined to the pancreas. Early-stage.
Technically, we were supposed to feel relieved. The doctors spoke carefully, trying to frame the news in the most hopeful way possible. It had been found relatively early, they explained. Surgery might still be possible. There were treatment options.
But the problem with pancreatic cancer is that even the “good” news still sounds terrifying.
We sat there trying to process it while pretending not to notice the weight of the statistics hanging unspoken in the room. Of course we Googled it. Everyone says not to, but people Google because they are desperate to regain some sense of control over something uncontrollable. And what we found terrified us.
Five years. Maybe… The word “maybe” suddenly became the most frightening word in the English language.
Afterward, we had to start telling people. Neither of us was ready for that part. John had always been intensely private, especially about personal struggles. But people already knew something wasn’t right. Friends had noticed he had disappeared. Family members could hear the exhaustion in our voices. Concern had started quietly building around us long before we had answers.
So we began making the calls… Each conversation felt like reliving the diagnosis all over again.
We eventually decided to create a CaringBridge page because the alternative was emotionally impossible. Updating everyone individually meant repeatedly saying the words out loud, over and over again, until they stopped sounding real and started sounding like someone else’s life.
When we told Weston, it shattered him. We had called Jackie beforehand because we knew he would need his mom when he heard the news. There are some moments in life where old family dynamics stop mattering and love is the only thing left standing. This was one of those moments.
Dylan handled it differently. The same day we told him, he had come home glowing after his first real day of work at this first ever job. He was excited about adulthood, independence, paychecks, all the ordinary milestones young people are supposed to be focused on at his age. He knew cancer was serious, of course. Everyone does. But he was still young enough to not fully understand the particular brutality of pancreatic cancer.
At least not yet…
That night, after John went to bed, Dylan stayed up with me talking until nearly two in the morning. Neither of us wanted to say aloud what we were both thinking. So instead we sat together in the quiet, circling around fear without directly touching it.
Soon the medications started piling up. Strong medications for pain. Anti-nausea medications. Prescriptions with long names and terrifying side effects. Suddenly our kitchen counters and bathroom shelves looked less like a home and more like a pharmacy.
At the same time, we started replaying the previous months in our minds, searching desperately for clues we had somehow missed. The heartburn. The exhaustion. The vague complaints that never seemed serious enough to sound alarms.
Who worries about occasional heartburn? Half the world has heartburn. John thought it was from taking too much ibuprofen because the plantar fasciitis in his feet had become unbearable. Looking back now, every symptom felt sinister. Every small complaint suddenly carried meaning.
It turned out the tumor had been pressing against his stomach all along, forcing stomach acid into places it was never supposed to go. The cancer had literally been running out of room inside him.
That sentence still haunts me…Running out of room…
As August went on, our lives became divided into good days and bad days. On the good days, John looked almost like himself. Those were the days we clung to. The days that tricked us into believing maybe we still had more time than we feared.
But even during the good days, grief had already started quietly moving into our house.
John began preparing for a future he was terrified he might not be part of.
One afternoon, during a stretch where he was feeling decent, he came home with a new weed eater and leaf blower that both used the same battery system. I remember standing there listening to him explain why it made sense for me to have equipment that was lighter, easier, and interchangeable.
Then he said it. “I’m trying to make things easier for you when I’m gone.” The words hit me like a punch to the chest.
I didn’t want battery systems and lawn equipment. I wanted him. I wanted our normal life back. I wanted to go back to the version of us that argued about ordinary things instead of quietly discussing how I might someday maintain the yard without him.
I think that was one of the cruelest parts of cancer in those early days. Even before it physically takes someone from you, it begins stealing pieces of your future together. Suddenly every practical conversation feels loaded with grief. Every small household decision starts sounding like preparation for loss.
On the bad days, he couldn’t get out of bed. The nausea would become so violent that he couldn’t keep medications down long enough for them to work. Every four hours I would climb into bed beside him, rub his back, hum softly, and try to calm him enough to keep the medicine in his body for thirty minutes so the medicine would be absorbed in his body. Thirty minutes…that was the goal.
Sometimes love looks heroic… but sometimes it just looks like sitting in a dark bedroom at three in the morning, praying anti-nausea medication stays down long enough to work. Oddly enough, it usually helped. Somehow, I could relax him enough that the cycle would stop, at least temporarily. Then the next day we MIGHT get a glimpse of normal again.
Weston started flying home from Nashville whenever he could. Every visit came with the same silent prayer: Please let this be one of the good days. And sometimes it was… Somehow, despite everything, they still managed to golf together. I look back on those golf outings now and realize they were far more important than any of us understood at the time.
The first oncology appointment arrived on one of the bad days. By then, John was so weak I had to push him through the hospital in a wheelchair. My driving skills with the wheelchair, unfortunately, turned out to be no better than my actual driving skills. I kept bumping into walls while he groaned dramatically beside me, which under different circumstances probably would have made us laugh much harder. (Humor became survival that month. Without it, I honestly don’t know how we would have made it through.)
The oncology consult appointment itself felt cold and overwhelming. Treatment plans. Statistics. Chemotherapy. Risks. Percentages. It all felt strangely clinical for conversations that were dismantling our lives in real time. The oncologist was nice, but I didn’t like him… and I REALLY didn’t like his nurse. Initially I gave them the benefit of the doubt because they were working with us on stuff we didn’t like…
John immediately hated the idea of chemotherapy. He called it “poison,” and honestly, watching them describe what it would do to his body, it was hard to argue with him.
Instead, he wanted to meet with the surgeon first to see whether the tumor could simply be removed before chemo ever started.
And then suddenly everything accelerated… Surgeon consultations. Brain scans. PET scans. Ultrasounds. Genetic counseling. Pain management appointments. Our entire lives became calendars, phone calls, waiting rooms, and scan results.
Then, in the middle of all of it, I received a call after my own routine mammogram. They had found a suspicious lump. I remember just staring at the phone in disbelief, feeling almost numb. It honestly felt cruel. Like life had stopped even pretending to play fair. How could one family survive this much fear at the same time? I didn’t need this! I needed to hold my family together.
Meanwhile, every other day, John was still vomiting blood and unable to eat. I hated leaving the house even briefly to bring Dylan to work. Every minute away from John made me anxious. But at the same time, I found myself grateful that Dylan wasn’t witnessing the worst moments firsthand.
By the end of August, surgery had finally been scheduled for September 3rd. We learned there were only two surgeons in Minnesota considered specialists for this particular operation, and somehow one of them happened to be right there in Duluth. For the first time in weeks, that felt like a miracle we could hold onto.
But pancreatic cancer rarely allows hope to exist unchallenged.
The PET scan showed a suspicious spot on the liver. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn’t.
The surgeon explained the plan carefully. On surgery day, they would first biopsy the liver while John was already under anesthesia. The tissue would immediately be sent to the lab. If the liver was clear, they would proceed with removing the tail of the pancreas and the spleen. If the liver showed cancer, they would close him back up because he would no longer be a candidate for the surgery. No surgery. No cure. It would no longer be considered early-stage. It will be stage 4!
Just like that, everything came down to a single spot on a scan.
On the morning of September 3rd, the surgeon explained it all to us again before taking John back to the operating room. I remember telling him one thing before they wheeled John away:
“Please don’t come back too soon.” Because if he came back quickly, it meant the news was bad.
Then the doors closed behind them.
And we waited. Friends waited. Family waited. Phones stayed silent in people’s hands across multiple states while everyone held their breath waiting for our update.
But inside that waiting room, time itself felt cruel. Every minute stretched impossibly long.
And all I could think was this:
Our entire future is sitting in a laboratory somewhere under a microscope.
Current Note from Becki:
One thing I feel important to say as I share these summarized old journal entries is that John was an incredibly private person. During his illness, many people reached out, stopped by, offered support, and wanted to see him. More often than not, he chose not to have visitors, and I know that hurt some feelings…especially among the people who genuinely loved and cared about him.
Please know it was never because he didn’t appreciate the love surrounding him!
The reality is that what many people saw publicly…including on CaringBridge…was only a very small piece of what life actually looked like inside our home. I tried hard to keep updates hopeful and positive because at the time, we were all desperately trying to hold onto hope ourselves. But behind closed doors, there were many difficult days filled with fear, pain, exhaustion, and vulnerability that John simply did not want others to witness.
My hope in sharing these stories now is not to rewrite the past, but to gently open the door into what those months were really like for us. And for the people who truly knew John…his pride, his stubbornness, his sense of dignity, and the way he protected the people he loved…I think you’ll understand why he handled things the way he did.
Hardest Chapter 