After a routine exam, Dr. Phillips met with me in his office. There was sweat on his bald, pinkish head. His large eyes behind thick lenses were filled with worry.

“I suspect you have two kinds of ovarian cancer, Sarcoma and Carcinoma. Both are very aggressive.”

Driving home, I spiraled.

“Really? Just like that? Is my life over before I had a chance to live it? All this time, I have been waiting, running, school, work and children, the revolution, the bombs, the anti Semitic discriminations, the journey out, building a new life in America, never stopping, not even retired yet, and boom? Done?”

When I got home, my husband Sammy was in the den watching TV. I said hello, and walked by him, into the kitchen. I did not tell him about the doctor’s suspicion. The doctor took a biopsy, but I did not yet have the lab results. He did not notice that I was upset.

Ever since we were married forty-seven years earlier, our life had been like this. Sammy was a man of few words, mostly possessed with his job and family responsibilities. At first, I was intrigued by the challenge of getting him to talk to me, but as time passed, I just let him be. We lived parallel lives. We were calm, respectful, and cooperative. Making time for fun and closer communication had to wait.

A week later, Dr. Phillips called.

“I need to see you and your husband in my office.”

“Why does he want to see me?” Sammy asked.

To discuss some test results,. No big deal.”

When we met with Dr. Phillips, he explained the biopsy to Sammy and said that the test results were positive.

“We will know about the stage of the cancer after the surgery.”

“The stage?”

“Yes. The degree of metastasis of cancerous cells to other organs.”

Dr. Phillips called my son, colleague, and gave him the diagnoses, and the lengthy medical choices. My son asked if I was there with him, and how I was.

“Yes,” Dr. Phillips said, “She is here. She is stoic.”

The description was more than accurate. All my life, I had been stoic, as a woman, and a Jew living in Iran under the Islamic rule, I had learned to be silent and stoic.

When we got home. I sat on the couch with Sammy. We held hands. He started to cry. I had never seen him cry, not even when his father died.

“No. No. Don’t cry. Let’s go for a walk and ice cream.”

We walked to the creamery holding hands, and ate in silence.

An hour later, my son called to inform me of all the arrangements. The earliest date he could get for surgery was a month later.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know how I could ever live without you.”

“No, honey this is the way it has always been. Parents are meant to go before their children. No living creature has ever lived forever. Not even Moses.”

“If this is so common, why does it hurt so much?”

The same conversation repeated with our daughter and younger son.

I told them, “You can keep me alive in your hearts, with the warmth of memories of love and fun.”

Hanging up, I was sure they had a lot of memories of love and caring for them, but I wasn’t sure about fun.

As a young girl I loved to dance, giggle, swim, read and be happy. I stopped dancing after getting married to Sammy. Whenever I got up to dance, he’d say, “Come sit with me.”

He did not like dancing. He was a serious man and found it embarrassing for us to move and shake our bodies in front of others. And then, after the onset of the Islamic Republic, dancing got legally forbidden, punishable by law.

A week before the surgery, we were invited to a party at a friend’s home. They did not know about my diagnosis, and I did not tell them. This was now in Los Angeles, and there was music and dancing.

That night, at the party, Sammy and I sat and watched as others danced the Western style slow dances. Then the music turned to a Persian traditional piece, Char Mezrab. The dance floor was suddenly empty.

Char Mezrab starts with the moaning melody of sitar and reed pipe. I had heard the piece many times before, but in this place, at this time, I found myself strangely moved.

In slow motion, I saw myself stand and walk to the center of the dance floor. I sat on the floor, buried my head between my knees, and held them as tight as I could with my arms. In that moment, I saw that moaning as a a part of me, inside of me, in the depths of my soul.

The music began to change, and my body followed, opening, like a lotus flower.

As the tempo took off with the jovial and rhythmic sounds of tombac and drum, I went with the flow, turning and twirling.

The moaning never stopped. It was always there in the background, behind that jubilant rhythmic sound. My body responded to both. I went back and forth between slow, constrained motions and joyful, passionate freedom.

With this dance — if you call it that — I became, for the first time, aware of how angry I had been, for so long. All those years I had felt nothing.

The music stopped. I walked back to my seat. I looked around; other guests avoided my eyes. When I got to our table, Sammy sat quietly with his head lowered, his eyes fixed on the rug.

On the day of the surgery, we reported to the hospital early in the morning. Sammy and I were quiet and resolved.

As soon as I came to, I asked Dr. Phillips, “What stage is it? When do I start the chemo?”

“There is no staging. We could remove all cancerous cells.

Soon after my release from the hospital, I retired, started writing and doing yoga. I changed my hair color and cut. I put away the conservative clothes I had to wear at work, and bought bolder colors and styles. My body was shedding weight, along with the heaviness of emotions.

I liked the new me.

A month later, Sammy and I went on a cruise with our friends. On the second night, in our room, we were resting in bed. Sammy was watching TV; I was reading a book.

I put down my book.

“I want to talk to you about something important.”

Sammy turned off the TV and turned to me.

“You realize that we have been given a gift. My life is a gift. I feel as if a genie has granted me a wish, and now it is up to us to decide how to use it.”

“We are on a cruise. Aren’t you having fun?”

“I am. But we have missed a lot and I want to start anew.”

“In what way?”

“To begin with, our marriage started wrong. You never really proposed to me. Your brother-in-law asked my father.”

“That was the respectable way then. Everyone was like that.”

“Yes, but I want you to propose to me.”

“Okay. Will you marry me?”

“Not like this. Do it right. You have to say that you love me.”

“Okay. I love you. Will you marry me?”

“You have to kneel first.”

He gave me a look of desperation. At 80, it was hard for him to kneel.

“I know your knees hurt and you cannot kneel. Just sit on the edge of the bed, and I will stand in front of you. It will look like kneeling.”

Smiling, Sammy sat on the edge of the bed. He looked up at me.

“Now,” I said. “Say it.”

And, he said the words.

The next night, at dinner with friends, I told them, “Sammy and I are engaged. He proposed to me last night.”

Our friends played along and cheered. We ordered champagne.
After dinner, there was music in the plaza. The band was playing rock and roll, my favorite. I started dancing by myself. When a man approached to dance with me, I dodged him, and found a young woman dancing with her daughter, and joined them. We laughed and danced with sweat on our foreheads, cheeks red from excitement.

They played a waltz, and I danced solo, turning and wheeling freely. One with life, I was like a flower, dancing in the wind, like the silvery clouds moving in the sky, like the planets orbiting the sun.

After the dance, I walked to Sammy, snuggled next to him, and put my head against his chest. He held me close. I looked up and mumbled. “I was worried you might get upset with my dance. But I just couldn’t stop myself.”

He smiled and looked into my eyes. “You were beautiful out there.”