Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given one thousand days to live, they'd start counting. They would not be able to enjoy school friends, their teams for birthday parties. They'd be watching too closely. How she looked, moved, acted eight or didn't. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children, unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday. We threw everything at her, disease lectures, research, involvement in cancer organizations, yoga, meditation, teas and soups. She even went to a storefront hewer who lit incense, read her palm, and led her in prayer. He declared her a badass because of her restorative powers. It was a nickname that I promoted with all of her doctors and nurses because it was not only hopeful but true. She didn't just buy time, She cheated it, squeezed months and years out of it. Marla was a statistical freak, innaboration, an outlier. One thousand days landed firmly in our rear view mirror. That's John Melman. John is a New York City based real estate executive. And this is a story of a devoted husband and wife making a painful choice to keep a shared secret from their children, a complex and challenging decision made in the name of love. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. We grew up in washing d c. And this is now nineteen and I have a recollection of My father was a rabbi, and he was a somewhat of an avant garde rabbi at that juncture in that uh he only wanted to be a rabbi in metropolitan areas, not in a suburb, so really inner city. And so the first synagogue that he was at actually was at a church that shared Friday night and Saturday with the synagogue. And they took the cross out of the room, and they brought the carson, and they brought the arcs in and back and forth, unusual for those days, very unusual. So there were many politicians and others in the Jewish community that migrated to the synagogue, and before you knew it, he had five families. But even though John's father's congregation was growing in leaps and bounds, there weren't schools nearby that were academically strong enough, so John commuted each to a Jewish day school in Silver Spring, Maryland. This meant he didn't have a real childhood in the neighborhood because there weren't really any other kids. So John grows up a rabbi's kid with his own set of parameters and expectations. The community keeps an eye on the rabbis kids. There are proper ways to behave an image to uphold, and then in John's dad's big opportunity comes. He's the last candidate of over fifty rabbis to be interviewed at the largest synagogue in Boston. He got the job. He got the job, and what was interesting there was that my mother grew up in Brooklyne, Massachusetts, so it was really a coming home party because the synagogue, al though is in Boston proper, it was a seven or eight minute walk to our home in Brooklyne. So I ended up going to the same high school that my mother did, and my grandparents lived about two miles away where the house that she grew up in was there that feeling too of the rabbis family needs to comport themselves in a certain by that time, Yes, And now all of a sudden, we were the folks in that community had a higher standard than a small little synagogue in washing d C. So we've had the higher expectations. We went on every Friday night, I went on every Saturday. This seems important, maybe even integral to John's story and what comes later. His being a rabbi's son, a family held to a certain standard displayed on view for the whole community to see that. And also John grew up knowing that his father, the rabbi, was a keeper of confidences, of secrets. It was his pastoral duty keeping secrets. Taking on another person's burden also meant preserving integrity. So John goes off to college. He wants to get as far away from home as he possibly can, and his father tells him he can't cross the Mason Dixon line or the Mississippi, so he winds up at the University of Michigan. He meets his future wife, Marla, when he's a senior and she's a junior. There with a group of mutual friends who were all playing a game of intramural co ed football. For the first couple of games, um, I just kind of bost her around, like you need to do this, you need to cover there, you need to do this, and every really didn't have relationship with her. And then we went out as a group to a a bar pizza place after one of the games and I got to know her and she was actually dating or seeing one of the other guys on the team, and his name was Evan, and um I called up Evan because we were pretty friendly, and I said, Evan, I think I connected with Marla. I understand you may be seeing her or I'm not sure you're dating her or whatever it's going on, but do you mind if I asked her on a date? He said, sure, we're just friends. It's no big deal, no problem. I have no problem. Appreciate you asking and have fun. I think that was a Tuesday, I was, I think November four. The Thursday, November six, I called her and then I said, what are you doing tomorrow night? We went on on a date and that was thirty one years together. After that date, I just knew that there was something about Marla that I wasn't letting go of John graduates then finds a job very quickly in the real estate business in Chicago. He and Marla commute back and forth, and after she graduates, she joins him in Chicago, where she begins working as a graphic designer. They get two apartments because their parents don't approve of a twenty one and twenty two year old moving in together, and they keep up that charade for a year and a half. Then John decides to go to business school. He's ambitious and needs another degree, and the two of them head down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but not before Marla's dad corners John and asks the fatherly question, what are your intentions? John's intentions, it seems from the moment he first meets Marla, or to spend his life with her. They get engaged on Marla's birthday, so we got married. We went to a honeymoon, and I started work two weeks later because I had no money, and she found a job pretty quickly as well in the traffic design business. She was pretty talented, and we started our lives. I was a lowly associate at Bankers Trust in the real estate investment banking group, calling on clients and doing pitch books and raising money, and that's what we did. We stayed in New York for about six years, and then we moved out to the suburbs in the right one our second just before a second was going to be born. So your firstborn was born in the city. They were all born in the city. Were all born in the city. Yes, three daughters, three daughters. So we moved to Scarsdale, which is a bedroom community, which is about a thirty five minute train ride from midtown. You're now a father of three, and is Marla still working at this point. No, Marls stopped working shortly after Sarah was born. So what were those early years like of this young family living in Scarsdale and you commuting into the city. Once you you know you're you're in the nursery school or preschool, with the synagogue or with the elementary school. Then you all of a sudden you have like these these automatic play groups and friend groups and adult groups. I may not have been the best father early on because I was working really hard. We're going to take a short break. I was working really hard, and I was never around. I was on the road three or four days a week. I was worked very very late, often on weekends and going back on the city on weekends. Or I worked in an office and in my house. But I was quite dedicated to my career at that juncture, and there were high expectations on that. I worked exceedingly hard for my clients. So John and Marla live a traditional, lovely family life in suburban Westchester. He's ambitious, competitive in his work. He loves the deal, the game. They have a vibrant social world filled with other families and John's clients. The girls are little. He's a devoted dad, though he also describes himself as distracted, not quite as present as he wishes he had been. Now that he reviews history, his phone is never far away. Still, he's always at their daughter's recitals and sporting events. He and Marla are in the thick of abundant, busy, burgeoning lives. There are a couple who would seem blessed, golden, like nothing dark or terrible could ever touch them. We had enormous fun hiking and bike riding and a skiing and all sorts of family excursions that included some form of outdoor experience. And having three daughters, they just saw this woman that could do anything. I was a pretty good athlete, but I wasn't anywhere close. So was this big joke that how good she was, and you know, versus me. So the girls gravitated to her and her athleticism and her her creativity. And she was this designer and she could cook, and she could she could art some crafts, and she put herself together with these incredible outfits. So she had this incredible design, athletic and persona that was. She had this stunning quality to her. Marla is diligent, very diligent about her health. She takes care of herself, sees her doctors, makes sure she stays on top of annual testing. Sure enough, in two thousand and nine, she went for her regular test. I think it was on a Thursday. She went to test and she usually heard by the end of the day what the results were. And I was traveling and I came home on that Friday afternoon and she said to me, I'm not sure what's going on here. Doesn't do something doesn't feel right, something doesn't feel right. This is taken too long. And she had a premonition and that at four thirty or five o'clock the night before that. This was an hour or two before we had to go to this first initiation for bought Mitzvah's from my oldest and we found out that, you know, there was something we weren't really sure, but it was something, and that they thought it was the early stage of breast cancer. And this was in March thirty one to two thousand and nine that we got that in Zinger, and that really rocked us. We weren't really sure where it came from and who got how how it existed, and so forth and so on, and before you know that, we spent the next few weeks interviewing doctors, surgeons, all sorts of experts in the city. We were pretty well connected and we were able to find the right people pretty quickly, and and we started finding out that the type of cancer that she had was more severe from Ussell than most others. Even though it was early stage. We knew that it was something that we needed to contend with, that, you know, we need to keep our eye on this one. And then we found out after some further blood tests, that there is a cancer and linkage or a determinant potential determinant of breast cancer in women from the Jewish faith that do have a link to a mutation called the b r C a mutation, and it turned out that when Marrol took the blood test, she had it. If we had known this maybe five or seven years previous, we probably may have had kids sooner, and we would have been more proactive than reactive to certain things that you can do under precautionary circumstances. You would have probably have done a bilader on vasectomy before you were thirty or thirty five, and that ZIP code, and you probably would have had your ovaries taken out by your time you were forty. She was forty one. So this was all happening, and so the all this news was coming at us pretty rapidly, and we decided to do all that at once, and because we wanted to be extra certain at that time that we we're hopeful of zapping the cancer. She decided to do eight rounds of chemo right after that, so she did a bilateral mess actomy, she had an ovaries remove, she did eight rounds of chemo. We had a six month period where she was really you know, taking it in it, in it, in it, And during that period of time, your daughters were eight and eleven, and they were aware that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer at that time, and they knew that they knew that she was gonna lose her hair, they knew that she was going to be going through what I just described. But Marla took a very different approach to that. It's more mind over body and refused to change her lifestyle for this diagnosis. And despite the fact that she couldn't run for a few weeks because of what was going on with some of the surgeries, she was walking tremendously, and then even during chemo she wasn't supposed to run, she ran four or five six days a week between during these periods times at very long distances, and this was her way of telling cancer that so fast. So this showed the kids most importantly that she wasn't going to succumb to any of the rumors or expectations of what toxicities would do. So everybody was telling her or you're gonna be really, you're gonna be drowsy, you're gonna be nauseous, You're not gonna have any energy. She was up at six six every morning running, just refused, refused to listen to any of these whispers and just her body told her you can do this, you can do this, And a couple of times she rested and she didn't feel it. But for the most part, she was defying anything that was told to her or risks that were told her. So the kids saw her living normally. She was involved in the school, she was wearing a wig, a wig came off, she had short hair, it grew back. The kids didn't care. So would you say at that time for your kids, this was like a speed bump, but not speed bump right. In fact, the entire time it was a speed bump because she never let it control her lifestyle. We went on trips, we were active in the community, We were socially active, we were physically active. They didn't know that, but I'm just saying this. Our lifestyle did not change, and they didn't see any difference to a normal family that may not have been dealing with a cancer situation. Did the community, you know, your community, the school community, the temple community. Did they know that? The first time we told everybody, and Marlo didn't like that. It's plenty, too many Lasagnas and too many castle roles, and too many people coming to the house and wondering and wanting and gossiping, and they were all scared for themselves, so they wanted to know what it was like. And she didn't like being the center of attention. She didn't like the pity. She didn't like any of that aspect of it. So fast forwarding, when it came back a couple of years later, she refused it to anybody except for blood, except for the children. So, just in terms of clarity, her cancer after the chemo, after the surgeries, went into remission. Yes, and the hope was, we're done with this a chapter, nothing more. We're finished. We're finished. And for that next year and a half you would never have known. She felt good about her body. She liked the newly improved. That was important to her in terms of her body. She wanted to feel good about it, and she felt that she licked it. And she was very involved. And at this time now we're involved in a big side of our community with the bar and bought Mitzvah's and so that was big part of Scarsdale, and and and the kids there was relatively i would say, of the community is Jewish. And our kids were now going through it every other year. So we had many, many of those, So that part of and Marla loved to dance and she loved to celebrate other people and herself. That was a big part of it. So she found, i would say, an ability to celebrate more after she had this, you know, first scare, you would never seen. Oh my god, she's incredible. I've never I've never seen anything like it, because she just blocked it away and and put her elbow into it and just threw it off. And the doctors were amazed. And every three and six months she got Queen Bill of Health. We're all always was touching herself, always feeling, always feeling, and she was always doing her own little probing in areas and her lymph nodes and her ears and her cheeks and her anywhere. But this area here and her this the clavital area she was always focused on, always focused on. And she felt a little p. And this is a couple of years after the first diagnosis, almost to the day. We always we didn't like March. We didn't like March. March. March was bad for us. So she found a little p the size of a p on her clavical We went back to slown cattering. I'll never forget. The doctor said, you've got menesthetic breast cancer is back. He said, how can the p She's doing great, she feels great, he said to me, if it's not Hodgkins lymphoma kissed the floor that we're on. The chemo didn't work, he said, because it didn't get everything, so sometimes it leaks upwards into this area. So this is a normal type of breast cancer cell that was not sapped. Marla's doctor knew even before the pathology was done. He was an expert. He had seen this many times before. Of course, the pathology confirmed his worst fears. Conventional chemotherapy had done what it could and ultimately had failed. Now it was time for specialized clinical trials. The best of these for Marla was being conducted at Dana Farber in Boston. Their daughters at this point are now almost fourteen, almost twelve, and just ten. Marla and John make a decision not to tell them that their mother's cancer has returned. We were told a thousand days early on. They were not happy giving me that number. I pressed, because no doctor wants to be on the spit churning around with a date, A date certain His line was, you know, it's a round a thousand days, but go live your life as well as you can. Marla did not want to tell anybody. And then we got on to this process and she felt good, and the trial was working and working and working, and all her accounts and all her numbers were below before where she was previously. So she said, I feel good. I'm just now running up here to do my scans and so forth, and coming up here. Maybe I said of three or four times a month, it was two times a month. Once in a while, it was one time a month. But she wasn't blinking. She wasn't changing her lifestyle, and she was still playing tennis, and she was still running, and she was still running under the kids all over to their sports and all their activities, and she was still hosting birthday parties and whatever the case. So she's like, okay, this is just the way my chronic disease is going to enveloped my life. So the longer that she went, the longer she felt like, I don't have to tell anybody because I feel fine. I have two questions. One is I mean, I think I really understand this um and I think I in many ways would feel the same way. But the feeling of I don't want people to know, I don't want people to talk, I don't want the casseroles. Was that do you think was it? Is that pride or is that privacy? I think it was important that she did not want her kids lives tickled or affected or or bothered or any type of noise associated with her to link and make them worry or wonder. It was very simple. I want my kids to live a normalized lifestyle as if I was healthy, and I'm going to preserve that for whatever I can. And she did that for nine years, nine years, many more than a thousand days. So that leads me to my second question, which is the parents that were still living new or maybe siblings knew, but most people in your life had no idea that this was going on. Was what was that like for you? Was that isolating for you at all? Or did you just I'm I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing everybody's delts hands in life. We gotta crab sandwich and we had to deal with it. We're going to take a quick break. We gotta crab sandwich and we had to deal with it. We never looked back and what was me? Why us? We never said that to each other. We never wondered, like, you know, I wish it had it just we just accepted it. But we tried to accept it in a manner that we fought it as fiercely as humanly possible. We used every access point that we possibly could, from a relationship standpoint, from an involvement standpoint, from traveling around two different hospitals to meet different doctors, to learn and to educate ourselves. So um, but there was nothing we can do. This is not hey, I broke my leg and it's gonna mend. We thought the first time that we'd get it. We knew this. Statistics were against us. Um and then even the second time, she out performed and pushed the boundaries, you know, three and a half times more than somebody else should have, and enabled our kids two go through their puberty, their adolescent teenage years, their high school years, you know, tough times for girls, not easy time for any girl. Saw them get into their colleges of their dreams. They all were academically very strong students. They were also incredible athletes, and they all played at a Division one level, which for Scarsdale Jewish girls was rare, so they were able to stay on track at a very very high level. That is probably only because of Marla that I saw this fierceness in her to fight the early days and the way that she lived her life knowing that she always had potentially had this cancer that was lingering. So it worked for us, It's not for everybody. It was uneasy fibbing. Could you describe that a little bit? For instance, we'd go on a vacation, but marl we always had to schedule our vacations on scans or treatments, and they were all being done in Boston. So we would leave from New York the day after she had her scan in Boston. She literally run back and then get on a plane. We go away. But then we go back and we come back to New York and Marlo go back to Boston. Why is mommy going back to Boston? Oh, she asked to you know, she's part of this trial. Yes, she was true, she was part of a trial. The piece of the truth, the piece of the truth. It wasn't like it wasn't as though this trial is keeping her alive. Kids. We never said that, And that was the truth. We called it the loving choice, to provide them enough information that they knew what was going on, but not every detail. So Marla really was fine, totally fine for years. She's fine years in which she requires a tremendous amount of medical attention. Sometimes she wears a wig, but otherwise you really wouldn't suspect that she's dealing with a terminal illness. No one knows. But then, with her girls now all highly competent young adults, Marla starts running out of options. She's turned through every possible clinical trial and conventional medicine. She begins to develop tumors around her clavical again, and these are pinching her vocal cords. She has radiation and a port is put in. This, of course, becomes harder and harder to keep hidden. She has to change the way she dresses. No more summary outfits, nothing low cut or sleeveless. She wears scarves around her neck. I just thought, because she had this ability to regenerate, even when the trial that they didn't think of trial was gonna work, it would work for six or nine months, and which was unheard of. Most trials really work eight or sixteen weeks. I just figured we'd get through this holiday season. We have two graduations this year, one of which we had already. We have one in a month. I just figured she would plow through this and make it because the red letter days for her were so important to her. She lived for those, She lived for those days. I just figured she'd do it. But Marla in September and October could see that we were headed down a trickier place, and she decided, I'm done keeping this secret. I can't do it anymore. The guilt was was writing, and she wasn't sure what the timeline was. When you say guilt, was it because at that point she was facing her own mortality. Facing her mortality, she didn't want to walk around the house covering the port or the fact that she had different red spots because of the radiation. She just didn't want to hide anymore. She was certain she wanted to do in October, when the kids were home for the fall break and she felt then she felt better. She said, Okay, I'll just wait till Thanksgiving. Then she doesn't bad news in November that really there wasn't much left in terms of the even the conventional medicines, and there was one last Jefferd but the doctors were saying, you need to start to get ready here. But I just figured she would do it for another six or eight months and to be a crappy summer of nineteen. I thought the summer nineteen would be really grappy. They're older, two daughters are away in college, and the youngest is a high school senior, and John and Marla set them down over Thanksgiving to break some of the news to them, not all of the news. So we told the kids and Thanksgiving that we were concerned, not worried, but we were concerned that mom had taken a turn and some things had occurred that we did not expect, and that we were working through them, but that we were basically flashing a yellow light not to worry, and we had a script that we had come in our mind, and it went really well. And then Marla pushed the envelope a little bit in the conversation, and we had the girls in a pretty good place, because I don't think that they were totally surprised by all of this, that there was something going on, because the little one was at home and I'm sure she was telling the sisters that, you know, my mom has been running around a little bit more. And she said in this conversation, and we had talked about this line, which was, you know, there's the likelihood that I'm gonna make it to a d is very low, and then she said head and I was shocked by and I did a turn with my neck on't forget, she said, and it's unlikely that I'm gonna make it to sixty. And that's when we had a little bit of bed limb in the house. The girls were not expecting that, and that sort of changed the vibe and the rhythm to the conversation. But she had had enough of the gamesmanship that she had and the brinksmanship that she had. John how old was Marla, So she January she would have been fifty two. And then just a couple of weeks later, Marla takes a turn. She's feeling extremely parched, an unusual symptom, and asks John to take her to the hospital so she can get ivy fluids. It's there at the hospital that it's discovered Marla is hours away from septic shock. There was a hole in her stomach that a tumor had perforated. And then two weeks later, this, we had a hard right turn, and the girls knew that it was a hard right turn. And I will say that during those times in the hospital, which were incredible to see her mind work, they were incredibly thankful that Marrow it shows the way to play this out and to wait it out and not linking and not telling them. That was comforting to Marlow that her decision, which was in their best interests, which she always wondered about, was the right one. And in the aftermath of Marla's death, has that feeling continued. I think so. I think so. We know we're dealing with different levels of grief in terms of denial and anger and super sadness. I call it. Different kids have different moods. I wish I could get everybody on the same page to have a bad day the same day, but that doesn't happen to me. Especially Nevertheless, there are some friends that we're in a different predicament of theirs that knew about their parents illness and they were miserable knowing about it, worrying about it. What happened to the doctor's appointment? What did the doctors say, what what did the tests say? What does this mean? How can can we are, we are we going to be normal? We're not. And that had an effect on everybody, on these children, and that they told the kids how lucky they were for not knowing. And I think that that resonated with the girls, and I think that that comforted them that in retrospect they probably saw signs that they were they could have been more picked up on. And they were snoopy too, And I'm sure they looked at emails and texts and so forth and so on, but they we never really talked about it until Thanksgiving. Now it's December. There's no question now as to what's happening to Marla. She's dying and everyone knows it. The time for secrecy and all the protections it offers has passed. Marla has been dealt. How did John put it earlier, A crap sandwich. But within that crap sandwich is incredible intentionality. She's going to mother her girls her way, right up until the very end. She told me to get the kids and bring him in, and she needed to tell them a few things each what I called her the hopes and dreams, as in her hopes and dreams for them and dreams for them, and so the three kids were in there, and we each have a parent that's alive, so they were there, and one of Marlo's brothers were there, and we had a family friend who was our housekeeper who was also a caregiver to Marlow as well, and so she was there. So we had this experience where we all finally got everybody to gather because we have tried level and people were in different places and so forth. So we got everybody together and Marrow had a script in her head, but she didn't tell me what she was going to say. I kind of knew what she was gonna say, but I didn't know exactly how elegant and eloquent and articulate she'd be. This is a person now, who is you know, seven seven days away from passing, six days away from passing, and I didn't know that it will be six days or sixteen days or one day. We propped her up on the bed and she closed her eyes and she just spoke as though she was reading a tele prompt her. It was just the most amazing thing that she would It was like as though she rehearsed it, and it's not like you and I are talking now and we're just doing it off the cuff. This was incredibly rehearsed and and laid out in a precise outline for every person. Six days later, Marl passed away on December. John estimates that between eight and fifty nine people attended her funeral. But on this day, with her family gathered around her, she shares her hopes and dreams for her daughters as if laying out a series of life plans. Her extraordinary parting gift. And then we had a popsical party, a popsical party, had a popsic party. Then we played this game Cars Wants Humanity and she was a judge, and we had lots of hooting and laughing, and she had this very tart sense of humor and she was, you know, she was in full force. Many thanks to John Melman for sharing his family's story with us. You can find his essay My wife was dying and we didn't tell our children on the Atlantic dot com. Families Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer and a very special thanks to Tristan McNeil for his soundscaping work on this episode. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given one thousand days to live, they'd start counting. They would not be able to enjoy school friends, their teams for birthday parties. They'd be watching too closely. How she looked, moved, acted eight or didn't. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children, unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday. We threw everything at her, disease lectures, research, involvement in cancer organizations, yoga, meditation, teas and soups. She even went to a storefront hewer who lit incense, read her palm, and led her in prayer. He declared her a badass because of her restorative powers. It was a nickname that I promoted with all of her doctors and nurses because it was not only hopeful but true. She didn't just buy time, She cheated it, squeezed months and years out of it. Marla was a statistical freak, innaboration, an outlier. One thousand days landed firmly in our rear view mirror. That's John Melman. John is a New York City based real estate executive. And this is a story of a devoted husband and wife making a painful choice to keep a shared secret from their children, a complex and challenging decision made in the name of love. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. We grew up in washing d c. And this is now nineteen and I have a recollection of My father was a rabbi, and he was a somewhat of an avant garde rabbi at that juncture in that uh he only wanted to be a rabbi in metropolitan areas, not in a suburb, so really inner city. And so the first synagogue that he was at actually was at a church that shared Friday night and Saturday with the synagogue. And they took the cross out of the room, and they brought the carson, and they brought the arcs in and back and forth, unusual for those days, very unusual. So there were many politicians and others in the Jewish community that migrated to the synagogue, and before you knew it, he had five families. But even though John's father's congregation was growing in leaps and bounds, there weren't schools nearby that were academically strong enough, so John commuted each to a Jewish day school in Silver Spring, Maryland. This meant he didn't have a real childhood in the neighborhood because there weren't really any other kids. So John grows up a rabbi's kid with his own set of parameters and expectations. The community keeps an eye on the rabbis kids. There are proper ways to behave an image to uphold, and then in John's dad's big opportunity comes. He's the last candidate of over fifty rabbis to be interviewed at the largest synagogue in Boston. He got the job. He got the job, and what was interesting there was that my mother grew up in Brooklyne, Massachusetts, so it was really a coming home party because the synagogue, al though is in Boston proper, it was a seven or eight minute walk to our home in Brooklyne. So I ended up going to the same high school that my mother did, and my grandparents lived about two miles away where the house that she grew up in was there that feeling too of the rabbis family needs to comport themselves in a certain by that time, Yes, And now all of a sudden, we were the folks in that community had a higher standard than a small little synagogue in washing d C. So we've had the higher expectations. We went on every Friday night, I went on every Saturday. This seems important, maybe even integral to John's story and what comes later. His being a rabbi's son, a family held to a certain standard displayed on view for the whole community to see that. And also John grew up knowing that his father, the rabbi, was a keeper of confidences, of secrets. It was his pastoral duty keeping secrets. Taking on another person's burden also meant preserving integrity. So John goes off to college. He wants to get as far away from home as he possibly can, and his father tells him he can't cross the Mason Dixon line or the Mississippi, so he winds up at the University of Michigan. He meets his future wife, Marla, when he's a senior and she's a junior. There with a group of mutual friends who were all playing a game of intramural co ed football. For the first couple of games, um, I just kind of bost her around, like you need to do this, you need to cover there, you need to do this, and every really didn't have relationship with her. And then we went out as a group to a a bar pizza place after one of the games and I got to know her and she was actually dating or seeing one of the other guys on the team, and his name was Evan, and um I called up Evan because we were pretty friendly, and I said, Evan, I think I connected with Marla. I understand you may be seeing her or I'm not sure you're dating her or whatever it's going on, but do you mind if I asked her on a date? He said, sure, we're just friends. It's no big deal, no problem. I have no problem. Appreciate you asking and have fun. I think that was a Tuesday, I was, I think November four. The Thursday, November six, I called her and then I said, what are you doing tomorrow night? We went on on a date and that was thirty one years together. After that date, I just knew that there was something about Marla that I wasn't letting go of John graduates then finds a job very quickly in the real estate business in Chicago. He and Marla commute back and forth, and after she graduates, she joins him in Chicago, where she begins working as a graphic designer. They get two apartments because their parents don't approve of a twenty one and twenty two year old moving in together, and they keep up that charade for a year and a half. Then John decides to go to business school. He's ambitious and needs another degree, and the two of them head down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but not before Marla's dad corners John and asks the fatherly question, what are your intentions? John's intentions, it seems from the moment he first meets Marla, or to spend his life with her. They get engaged on Marla's birthday, so we got married. We went to a honeymoon, and I started work two weeks later because I had no money, and she found a job pretty quickly as well in the traffic design business. She was pretty talented, and we started our lives. I was a lowly associate at Bankers Trust in the real estate investment banking group, calling on clients and doing pitch books and raising money, and that's what we did. We stayed in New York for about six years, and then we moved out to the suburbs in the right one our second just before a second was going to be born. So your firstborn was born in the city. They were all born in the city. Were all born in the city. Yes, three daughters, three daughters. So we moved to Scarsdale, which is a bedroom community, which is about a thirty five minute train ride from midtown. You're now a father of three, and is Marla still working at this point. No, Marls stopped working shortly after Sarah was born. So what were those early years like of this young family living in Scarsdale and you commuting into the city. Once you you know you're you're in the nursery school or preschool, with the synagogue or with the elementary school. Then you all of a sudden you have like these these automatic play groups and friend groups and adult groups. I may not have been the best father early on because I was working really hard. We're going to take a short break. I was working really hard, and I was never around. I was on the road three or four days a week. I was worked very very late, often on weekends and going back on the city on weekends. Or I worked in an office and in my house. But I was quite dedicated to my career at that juncture, and there were high expectations on that. I worked exceedingly hard for my clients. So John and Marla live a traditional, lovely family life in suburban Westchester. He's ambitious, competitive in his work. He loves the deal, the game. They have a vibrant social world filled with other families and John's clients. The girls are little. He's a devoted dad, though he also describes himself as distracted, not quite as present as he wishes he had been. Now that he reviews history, his phone is never far away. Still, he's always at their daughter's recitals and sporting events. He and Marla are in the thick of abundant, busy, burgeoning lives. There are a couple who would seem blessed, golden, like nothing dark or terrible could ever touch them. We had enormous fun hiking and bike riding and a skiing and all sorts of family excursions that included some form of outdoor experience. And having three daughters, they just saw this woman that could do anything. I was a pretty good athlete, but I wasn't anywhere close. So was this big joke that how good she was, and you know, versus me. So the girls gravitated to her and her athleticism and her her creativity. And she was this designer and she could cook, and she could she could art some crafts, and she put herself together with these incredible outfits. So she had this incredible design, athletic and persona that was. She had this stunning quality to her. Marla is diligent, very diligent about her health. She takes care of herself, sees her doctors, makes sure she stays on top of annual testing. Sure enough, in two thousand and nine, she went for her regular test. I think it was on a Thursday. She went to test and she usually heard by the end of the day what the results were. And I was traveling and I came home on that Friday afternoon and she said to me, I'm not sure what's going on here. Doesn't do something doesn't feel right, something doesn't feel right. This is taken too long. And she had a premonition and that at four thirty or five o'clock the night before that. This was an hour or two before we had to go to this first initiation for bought Mitzvah's from my oldest and we found out that, you know, there was something we weren't really sure, but it was something, and that they thought it was the early stage of breast cancer. And this was in March thirty one to two thousand and nine that we got that in Zinger, and that really rocked us. We weren't really sure where it came from and who got how how it existed, and so forth and so on, and before you know that, we spent the next few weeks interviewing doctors, surgeons, all sorts of experts in the city. We were pretty well connected and we were able to find the right people pretty quickly, and and we started finding out that the type of cancer that she had was more severe from Ussell than most others. Even though it was early stage. We knew that it was something that we needed to contend with, that, you know, we need to keep our eye on this one. And then we found out after some further blood tests, that there is a cancer and linkage or a determinant potential determinant of breast cancer in women from the Jewish faith that do have a link to a mutation called the b r C a mutation, and it turned out that when Marrol took the blood test, she had it. If we had known this maybe five or seven years previous, we probably may have had kids sooner, and we would have been more proactive than reactive to certain things that you can do under precautionary circumstances. You would have probably have done a bilader on vasectomy before you were thirty or thirty five, and that ZIP code, and you probably would have had your ovaries taken out by your time you were forty. She was forty one. So this was all happening, and so the all this news was coming at us pretty rapidly, and we decided to do all that at once, and because we wanted to be extra certain at that time that we we're hopeful of zapping the cancer. She decided to do eight rounds of chemo right after that, so she did a bilateral mess actomy, she had an ovaries remove, she did eight rounds of chemo. We had a six month period where she was really you know, taking it in it, in it, in it, And during that period of time, your daughters were eight and eleven, and they were aware that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer at that time, and they knew that they knew that she was gonna lose her hair, they knew that she was going to be going through what I just described. But Marla took a very different approach to that. It's more mind over body and refused to change her lifestyle for this diagnosis. And despite the fact that she couldn't run for a few weeks because of what was going on with some of the surgeries, she was walking tremendously, and then even during chemo she wasn't supposed to run, she ran four or five six days a week between during these periods times at very long distances, and this was her way of telling cancer that so fast. So this showed the kids most importantly that she wasn't going to succumb to any of the rumors or expectations of what toxicities would do. So everybody was telling her or you're gonna be really, you're gonna be drowsy, you're gonna be nauseous, You're not gonna have any energy. She was up at six six every morning running, just refused, refused to listen to any of these whispers and just her body told her you can do this, you can do this, And a couple of times she rested and she didn't feel it. But for the most part, she was defying anything that was told to her or risks that were told her. So the kids saw her living normally. She was involved in the school, she was wearing a wig, a wig came off, she had short hair, it grew back. The kids didn't care. So would you say at that time for your kids, this was like a speed bump, but not speed bump right. In fact, the entire time it was a speed bump because she never let it control her lifestyle. We went on trips, we were active in the community, We were socially active, we were physically active. They didn't know that, but I'm just saying this. Our lifestyle did not change, and they didn't see any difference to a normal family that may not have been dealing with a cancer situation. Did the community, you know, your community, the school community, the temple community. Did they know that? The first time we told everybody, and Marlo didn't like that. It's plenty, too many Lasagnas and too many castle roles, and too many people coming to the house and wondering and wanting and gossiping, and they were all scared for themselves, so they wanted to know what it was like. And she didn't like being the center of attention. She didn't like the pity. She didn't like any of that aspect of it. So fast forwarding, when it came back a couple of years later, she refused it to anybody except for blood, except for the children. So, just in terms of clarity, her cancer after the chemo, after the surgeries, went into remission. Yes, and the hope was, we're done with this a chapter, nothing more. We're finished. We're finished. And for that next year and a half you would never have known. She felt good about her body. She liked the newly improved. That was important to her in terms of her body. She wanted to feel good about it, and she felt that she licked it. And she was very involved. And at this time now we're involved in a big side of our community with the bar and bought Mitzvah's and so that was big part of Scarsdale, and and and the kids there was relatively i would say, of the community is Jewish. And our kids were now going through it every other year. So we had many, many of those, So that part of and Marla loved to dance and she loved to celebrate other people and herself. That was a big part of it. So she found, i would say, an ability to celebrate more after she had this, you know, first scare, you would never seen. Oh my god, she's incredible. I've never I've never seen anything like it, because she just blocked it away and and put her elbow into it and just threw it off. And the doctors were amazed. And every three and six months she got Queen Bill of Health. We're all always was touching herself, always feeling, always feeling, and she was always doing her own little probing in areas and her lymph nodes and her ears and her cheeks and her anywhere. But this area here and her this the clavital area she was always focused on, always focused on. And she felt a little p. And this is a couple of years after the first diagnosis, almost to the day. We always we didn't like March. We didn't like March. March. March was bad for us. So she found a little p the size of a p on her clavical We went back to slown cattering. I'll never forget. The doctor said, you've got menesthetic breast cancer is back. He said, how can the p She's doing great, she feels great, he said to me, if it's not Hodgkins lymphoma kissed the floor that we're on. The chemo didn't work, he said, because it didn't get everything, so sometimes it leaks upwards into this area. So this is a normal type of breast cancer cell that was not sapped. Marla's doctor knew even before the pathology was done. He was an expert. He had seen this many times before. Of course, the pathology confirmed his worst fears. Conventional chemotherapy had done what it could and ultimately had failed. Now it was time for specialized clinical trials. The best of these for Marla was being conducted at Dana Farber in Boston. Their daughters at this point are now almost fourteen, almost twelve, and just ten. Marla and John make a decision not to tell them that their mother's cancer has returned. We were told a thousand days early on. They were not happy giving me that number. I pressed, because no doctor wants to be on the spit churning around with a date, A date certain His line was, you know, it's a round a thousand days, but go live your life as well as you can. Marla did not want to tell anybody. And then we got on to this process and she felt good, and the trial was working and working and working, and all her accounts and all her numbers were below before where she was previously. So she said, I feel good. I'm just now running up here to do my scans and so forth, and coming up here. Maybe I said of three or four times a month, it was two times a month. Once in a while, it was one time a month. But she wasn't blinking. She wasn't changing her lifestyle, and she was still playing tennis, and she was still running, and she was still running under the kids all over to their sports and all their activities, and she was still hosting birthday parties and whatever the case. So she's like, okay, this is just the way my chronic disease is going to enveloped my life. So the longer that she went, the longer she felt like, I don't have to tell anybody because I feel fine. I have two questions. One is I mean, I think I really understand this um and I think I in many ways would feel the same way. But the feeling of I don't want people to know, I don't want people to talk, I don't want the casseroles. Was that do you think was it? Is that pride or is that privacy? I think it was important that she did not want her kids lives tickled or affected or or bothered or any type of noise associated with her to link and make them worry or wonder. It was very simple. I want my kids to live a normalized lifestyle as if I was healthy, and I'm going to preserve that for whatever I can. And she did that for nine years, nine years, many more than a thousand days. So that leads me to my second question, which is the parents that were still living new or maybe siblings knew, but most people in your life had no idea that this was going on. Was what was that like for you? Was that isolating for you at all? Or did you just I'm I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing everybody's delts hands in life. We gotta crab sandwich and we had to deal with it. We're going to take a quick break. We gotta crab sandwich and we had to deal with it. We never looked back and what was me? Why us? We never said that to each other. We never wondered, like, you know, I wish it had it just we just accepted it. But we tried to accept it in a manner that we fought it as fiercely as humanly possible. We used every access point that we possibly could, from a relationship standpoint, from an involvement standpoint, from traveling around two different hospitals to meet different doctors, to learn and to educate ourselves. So um, but there was nothing we can do. This is not hey, I broke my leg and it's gonna mend. We thought the first time that we'd get it. We knew this. Statistics were against us. Um and then even the second time, she out performed and pushed the boundaries, you know, three and a half times more than somebody else should have, and enabled our kids two go through their puberty, their adolescent teenage years, their high school years, you know, tough times for girls, not easy time for any girl. Saw them get into their colleges of their dreams. They all were academically very strong students. They were also incredible athletes, and they all played at a Division one level, which for Scarsdale Jewish girls was rare, so they were able to stay on track at a very very high level. That is probably only because of Marla that I saw this fierceness in her to fight the early days and the way that she lived her life knowing that she always had potentially had this cancer that was lingering. So it worked for us, It's not for everybody. It was uneasy fibbing. Could you describe that a little bit? For instance, we'd go on a vacation, but marl we always had to schedule our vacations on scans or treatments, and they were all being done in Boston. So we would leave from New York the day after she had her scan in Boston. She literally run back and then get on a plane. We go away. But then we go back and we come back to New York and Marlo go back to Boston. Why is mommy going back to Boston? Oh, she asked to you know, she's part of this trial. Yes, she was true, she was part of a trial. The piece of the truth, the piece of the truth. It wasn't like it wasn't as though this trial is keeping her alive. Kids. We never said that, And that was the truth. We called it the loving choice, to provide them enough information that they knew what was going on, but not every detail. So Marla really was fine, totally fine for years. She's fine years in which she requires a tremendous amount of medical attention. Sometimes she wears a wig, but otherwise you really wouldn't suspect that she's dealing with a terminal illness. No one knows. But then, with her girls now all highly competent young adults, Marla starts running out of options. She's turned through every possible clinical trial and conventional medicine. She begins to develop tumors around her clavical again, and these are pinching her vocal cords. She has radiation and a port is put in. This, of course, becomes harder and harder to keep hidden. She has to change the way she dresses. No more summary outfits, nothing low cut or sleeveless. She wears scarves around her neck. I just thought, because she had this ability to regenerate, even when the trial that they didn't think of trial was gonna work, it would work for six or nine months, and which was unheard of. Most trials really work eight or sixteen weeks. I just figured we'd get through this holiday season. We have two graduations this year, one of which we had already. We have one in a month. I just figured she would plow through this and make it because the red letter days for her were so important to her. She lived for those, She lived for those days. I just figured she'd do it. But Marla in September and October could see that we were headed down a trickier place, and she decided, I'm done keeping this secret. I can't do it anymore. The guilt was was writing, and she wasn't sure what the timeline was. When you say guilt, was it because at that point she was facing her own mortality. Facing her mortality, she didn't want to walk around the house covering the port or the fact that she had different red spots because of the radiation. She just didn't want to hide anymore. She was certain she wanted to do in October, when the kids were home for the fall break and she felt then she felt better. She said, Okay, I'll just wait till Thanksgiving. Then she doesn't bad news in November that really there wasn't much left in terms of the even the conventional medicines, and there was one last Jefferd but the doctors were saying, you need to start to get ready here. But I just figured she would do it for another six or eight months and to be a crappy summer of nineteen. I thought the summer nineteen would be really grappy. They're older, two daughters are away in college, and the youngest is a high school senior, and John and Marla set them down over Thanksgiving to break some of the news to them, not all of the news. So we told the kids and Thanksgiving that we were concerned, not worried, but we were concerned that mom had taken a turn and some things had occurred that we did not expect, and that we were working through them, but that we were basically flashing a yellow light not to worry, and we had a script that we had come in our mind, and it went really well. And then Marla pushed the envelope a little bit in the conversation, and we had the girls in a pretty good place, because I don't think that they were totally surprised by all of this, that there was something going on, because the little one was at home and I'm sure she was telling the sisters that, you know, my mom has been running around a little bit more. And she said in this conversation, and we had talked about this line, which was, you know, there's the likelihood that I'm gonna make it to a d is very low, and then she said head and I was shocked by and I did a turn with my neck on't forget, she said, and it's unlikely that I'm gonna make it to sixty. And that's when we had a little bit of bed limb in the house. The girls were not expecting that, and that sort of changed the vibe and the rhythm to the conversation. But she had had enough of the gamesmanship that she had and the brinksmanship that she had. John how old was Marla, So she January she would have been fifty two. And then just a couple of weeks later, Marla takes a turn. She's feeling extremely parched, an unusual symptom, and asks John to take her to the hospital so she can get ivy fluids. It's there at the hospital that it's discovered Marla is hours away from septic shock. There was a hole in her stomach that a tumor had perforated. And then two weeks later, this, we had a hard right turn, and the girls knew that it was a hard right turn. And I will say that during those times in the hospital, which were incredible to see her mind work, they were incredibly thankful that Marrow it shows the way to play this out and to wait it out and not linking and not telling them. That was comforting to Marlow that her decision, which was in their best interests, which she always wondered about, was the right one. And in the aftermath of Marla's death, has that feeling continued. I think so. I think so. We know we're dealing with different levels of grief in terms of denial and anger and super sadness. I call it. Different kids have different moods. I wish I could get everybody on the same page to have a bad day the same day, but that doesn't happen to me. Especially Nevertheless, there are some friends that we're in a different predicament of theirs that knew about their parents illness and they were miserable knowing about it, worrying about it. What happened to the doctor's appointment? What did the doctors say, what what did the tests say? What does this mean? How can can we are, we are we going to be normal? We're not. And that had an effect on everybody, on these children, and that they told the kids how lucky they were for not knowing. And I think that that resonated with the girls, and I think that that comforted them that in retrospect they probably saw signs that they were they could have been more picked up on. And they were snoopy too, And I'm sure they looked at emails and texts and so forth and so on, but they we never really talked about it until Thanksgiving. Now it's December. There's no question now as to what's happening to Marla. She's dying and everyone knows it. The time for secrecy and all the protections it offers has passed. Marla has been dealt. How did John put it earlier, A crap sandwich. But within that crap sandwich is incredible intentionality. She's going to mother her girls her way, right up until the very end. She told me to get the kids and bring him in, and she needed to tell them a few things each what I called her the hopes and dreams, as in her hopes and dreams for them and dreams for them, and so the three kids were in there, and we each have a parent that's alive, so they were there, and one of Marlo's brothers were there, and we had a family friend who was our housekeeper who was also a caregiver to Marlow as well, and so she was there. So we had this experience where we all finally got everybody to gather because we have tried level and people were in different places and so forth. So we got everybody together and Marrow had a script in her head, but she didn't tell me what she was going to say. I kind of knew what she was gonna say, but I didn't know exactly how elegant and eloquent and articulate she'd be. This is a person now, who is you know, seven seven days away from passing, six days away from passing, and I didn't know that it will be six days or sixteen days or one day. We propped her up on the bed and she closed her eyes and she just spoke as though she was reading a tele prompt her. It was just the most amazing thing that she would It was like as though she rehearsed it, and it's not like you and I are talking now and we're just doing it off the cuff. This was incredibly rehearsed and and laid out in a precise outline for every person. Six days later, Marl passed away on December. John estimates that between eight and fifty nine people attended her funeral. But on this day, with her family gathered around her, she shares her hopes and dreams for her daughters as if laying out a series of life plans. Her extraordinary parting gift. And then we had a popsical party, a popsical party, had a popsic party. Then we played this game Cars Wants Humanity and she was a judge, and we had lots of hooting and laughing, and she had this very tart sense of humor and she was, you know, she was in full force. Many thanks to John Melman for sharing his family's story with us. You can find his essay My wife was dying and we didn't tell our children on the Atlantic dot com. Families Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer and a very special thanks to Tristan McNeil for his soundscaping work on this episode. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.