Richard Doss—Joanne Doss

Richard Doss—Joanne Doss is a marriage recounted through conflicting perspectives: Richard remembers a wife whose unexplained illness made her increasingly unreachable, while Joanne’s decision to seek Eldon Mate’s help remained secret from him until after her death. Their long partnership therefore ends not with shared understanding but with a sharp division over who chose her death and what that choice meant.

Identity and Marriage

Richard and Joanne met in college and, by Richard’s account, had an ideal match. They had been married for more than twenty years when Alex Delaware met Richard; Joanne had been dead for ninety-three days. Richard described having loved her deeply, but Delaware perceived little feeling in his voice, eyes, or posture. Richard also disclosed that the couple had not made love for more than three years. His decision to mention that deprivation almost immediately, despite having resisted therapy for anyone other than his daughter, made the marriage’s intimacy and his own place in its story seem unresolved.

The couple’s public circumstances contrasted with the intimate disconnection Richard described. Joanne had earned doctorates in English and microbiology. After an appointment as a lecturer at Stanford, she changed direction, studied science while pregnant with Eric Doss, and went on to conduct research and run her own laboratory. Richard, a self-made millionaire with an undergraduate degree and an MBA from Stanford, built his fortune developing distressed properties. Yet professional success and a long marriage did not prevent the distance that Richard said had grown between them.

Joanne’s Illness and Richard’s Account

Joanne’s decline began gradually. Richard recalled fatigue in a woman who had once been energetic, athletic, and active in tennis, dance, and powerwalking. Joint pain, headaches, skin sensitivity, and increasing exhaustion followed. At first he attributed the change to an illness that would pass and tried to give her time to rest. As she became harder to reach, he described her as withdrawing from him, their children, and nearly everything else.

The retreat narrowed her life. Joanne stopped socializing, declined business dinners, and gave up tennis, golf, and the gym at the Cliffside Country Club. She went to bed earlier, rose later, and eventually stayed in bed, saying that her pain had worsened. Richard thought inactivity might be intensifying her aches, but, as he recalled it, she did not answer him. He eventually began taking her to doctors.

Her eating and weight became especially charged features of Richard’s account. He said that food was the one thing she had not withdrawn from, and recalled her eating sweets and greasy snacks while continuing to order groceries when he was at work. By his estimate, she went from 110 pounds to 210 in less than a year. He struggled to recognize the athletic woman he had married and said his feelings changed as he experienced her as a stranger. At the same time, he said he had considered restricting her food but regarded taking away what seemed to sustain her as cruel. His description reveals care, frustration, and a sense of lost marital attraction without resolving how Joanne experienced the changes herself.

Medical investigation produced no explanation. Richard said that doctors had subjected Joanne to an extensive battery of tests, including CAT scans, MRIs, toxicology and serology testing, and two lumbar punctures. Her work in a microbiology laboratory was examined as a possible source of infection or sensitivity, but she studied plant pathogens affecting crops, including broccoli, and Richard said that possibility had been investigated and ruled out. The file later reviewed by Delaware contained records from fifteen doctors, along with blood work, urinalysis, X-rays, scans, and the lumbar punctures. The repeated operative result was negative. Neither the range of testing nor the number of consultations yielded a diagnosis or established the cause of her suffering.

Secrecy, Choice, and Death

Joanne’s eventual decision to go to Eldon Mate marked the decisive breach in Richard’s understanding of their marriage. Judy Manitow told Delaware that the choice was Joanne’s, not Richard’s: Joanne did not tell her husband, disappeared one night, and was found the next morning in Lancaster. Her death was classified as suicide, and she had been one of the people Mate called Travelers. The account presented to Delaware places her choice against a year or more of deterioration and unsuccessful medical investigation, but does not supply a diagnosis that could explain it.

Richard learned what had happened when police called him. He tried to contact Eldon Mate, who did not return his calls. Richard’s anger thus contained a concrete grievance: he had been shut out of a decision about his wife and then could not obtain an explanation from the person who had helped her die. Judy suggested that this exclusion might account for some of Richard’s hatred of Mate. The secrecy leaves the marriage’s final act divided between Joanne’s assertion of agency and Richard’s experience of being denied any part in it.

Family Distance and Conflicting Interpretations

Joanne’s illness unfolded within a family whose members did not describe their closeness in the same way. Stacy Doss recalled her mother as passive even before she became ill, and remembered Richard determining family decisions such as the dinner menu. A small menu box, filled with plans Joanne had clipped from magazines, suggested to Stacy that her mother had once taken pleasure in planning meals, though Stacy did not feel that this earlier interest had been present when she was growing up. Richard and Eric Doss, she said, were the family’s dominant voices; joining their fast-moving conversations could feel like trying to jump onto a moving train.

Stacy later described the household as a place where its members existed together without connecting, and said the lack of communication predated Joanne’s illness. She could not remember a clear closeness with her mother, even when Joanne was healthy, though she did not say that Joanne had failed in the practical duties of motherhood. She also challenged the family’s tendency to blame Eldon Mate: in her view, her mother had made the decision herself. Eric, by contrast, had taken Joanne’s illness and death harder than Stacy had, according to Stacy. The children’s different responses underline how little a single family account can settle about Joanne’s inner life.

Richard offered a more categorical explanation. He called Joanne psychologically unwell and interpreted her withdrawal and eating as a decision to leave life, arguing that psychiatric treatment might have saved her. That was his judgment, not a medical conclusion: the many tests and consultations documented by the family had not established a cause. His certainty sits uneasily beside the unresolved illness and the limited evidence of what Joanne wanted or felt. The difference between a husband’s retrospective diagnosis and an undiagnosed patient’s secret choice is central to the relation’s lasting ambiguity.

Aftermath and Significance

Richard’s account of Joanne combines attachment with estrangement. He remembered an athletic, energetic partner and acknowledged loving her, yet described the later years through the loss of sexual intimacy, her transformation, and his difficulty recognizing her. Joanne’s prolonged illness made her bodily changes impossible for him to ignore, but his vivid attention to those changes does not grant access to her own explanation. The marriage is therefore rendered through an imbalance: Richard speaks at length about what he saw and felt, while Joanne’s motives remain largely inaccessible.

That imbalance shapes the conflict over forgiveness and responsibility. Richard’s resentment toward Eldon Mate follows from both his anger at the death and his exclusion from Joanne’s decision; it does not erase the fact that she chose to approach Mate without telling him. Alex Delaware later reflects that Richard had not forgiven and was paying for it, connecting the unresolved marriage to the continuing strain within the family. The relationship matters not only as the history behind Joanne’s death, but as a test of whether love, years of marriage, and a spouse’s suffering can establish a right to decide for another person. The narrative leaves that question open by setting Richard’s grief and outrage beside Joanne’s concealed choice, without turning either into a complete account of the other.