Cancer

Mary Loeb’s cancer casts a shadow over the final months of her life without reducing them to illness alone: she endures daylong chemotherapy, continues to seek pleasure and connection, and keeps her despair largely hidden from her family. The diagnosis is described as hopeless, but the account leaves its type unspecified and sets the disease beside, rather than equating it with, her eventual suicide.

Diagnosis and Treatment

Mary Loeb had received an ominous, effectively hopeless diagnosis about six months before the September 1995 events recounted in the book. She underwent daylong chemotherapy sessions, during which she continued to crack jokes. The account gives no cancer type, stage, or detailed treatment regimen, so the illness is defined chiefly through the prognosis and the demands of treatment rather than through medical particulars.

The diagnosis becomes the background against which her remaining time is measured. A week before she took her own life, she walked with Judah Loeb around the pond in Central Park. She was limping, though the narrative does not explicitly attribute the limp to cancer. Their outing takes place in the heat of Manhattan in September, and Mary Loeb hums songs from Camelot, laughs at Judah Loeb’s teasing, urges him to walk faster, and admires the city. Her illness is present in the scene, but it does not erase her appetite for company or beauty.

Life Amid Illness

The book emphasizes the contrast between the hopeless diagnosis and Mary Loeb’s energetic manner. She took up tennis and the ukulele, swung Hannah Loeb around the room before bed, and seemed to enjoy sex more than ever. Friends found her increasingly outgoing and generous with compliments. Her good spirits were not straightforward evidence that she expected to recover: Judah Loeb later understands that he mistook her apparent cheerfulness for a determination to fight for every minute of life. He concludes that she had concealed what she was feeling, though he remains unsure what her sunny behavior meant to her.

Cancer also frames an intimate conversation about the past. As Mary Loeb and Judah Loeb walk together, she asks him to elaborate on his former relationship with Michal, not merely for details but for the place that history occupies in the arc of his life. Judah Loeb connects the discussion to the Lerners and to Chaim Lerner’s death, a subject he had never described to Mary Loeb in a way that challenged the accepted account of suicide. In retrospect, he believes she was steering them toward the subject because she herself had suicide on her mind. The diagnosis thus accompanies not only physical treatment but a growing, belated effort to talk about death.

The Wish for More Time

Later that night, while lying beside Mary Loeb and unable to sleep, Judah Loeb recalls Chaim Lerner’s prayer experiment and tries it again. He first wishes for health and happiness for Hannah Loeb, for Ilana and his parents, for a more fulfilling career, and for the courage to become a better husband to Mary Loeb for however much time they have left. He then asks for a cure, more time, and a longer life for the person he loves. The fifth petition overwhelms the others so completely that he says he would surrender even his hopes for his daughter to gain more time with Mary Loeb.

The prayer does not produce the hoped-for cure. Judah Loeb instead experiences the outcome as a catastrophic reversal: rather than more time, he gets dramatically less. He considers several explanations, including the possibility that God is mocking or punishing him, that the exercise warns against concentrating every hope in one request, or that the whole practice is meaningless. The passage leaves those possibilities unresolved. Cancer remains the condition that makes the desire for a cure urgent, while the failure of the prayer makes the limits of Judah Loeb’s control painfully explicit.