Couple Find Love Amid Pain of Cancer

On this special day, the specter of illness can be forgotten, if only for a few fleeting hours. Claire Chasles and Joe Kelly are getting married. It is a steamy Sunday afternoon, and the home they share is filled with family and friends. The groom has a fresh haircut and, in a rare departure, is wearing a suit. The bride looks lovely in a dress of soft mint green, appliqued at the neck in a scalloped border of pink roses.

For a few seconds, it is almost possible to imagine that the crown of fresh summer flowers she wears is resting on her own hair, and not on the wig that hides her near-baldness--the result of the ravages of chemotherapy.

Claire, who will be 43 this month, is battling advanced lung cancer, the result of smoking that started when she was a teenager.

Claire’s cancer was first diagnosed more than two years ago. But after surgery and radiation, she had a series of clean checkups, and she and Joe figured the cancer was gone. They began planning their life together.

But lung cancer is a vicious and unforgiving adversary. It came back, as it so often does.

Claire told Joe, who had never been married, that he was free to leave. She wouldn’t blame him if he did. She knew instinctively what experts have found over and over again: that even the most solid of relationships can be strained by an unforeseen tragedy such as a life-threatening illness.

“Sometimes these kinds of situations can be very frightening to people,” says Jerilyn Ross, a Washington psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety disorders.

“They fear the unknown and what’s going to happen,” Ross says. “Some people don’t want to face it, they find it too depressing. But when you really love somebody for who they are--not just the physical person, but the whole person--then you take the good and the bad.”

Fear of Flight

Claire and Joe have known each other for nearly 25 years, since before the first of Claire’s two marriages, and have been together since 1991. But since the cancer came back last fall, she has worried that Joe, who has never been married, might leave.

She needn’t have.

Joe has endured sleepless nights, tending to Claire when she would awaken struggling to catch her breath. He has missed numerous days of work so that he could take her to hospital and doctor appointments.

He has nursed her, carrying her to the bathroom when she couldn’t walk herself, changing the dressing on the slow-healing wound in her side (from an earlier procedure) without flinching.

“I was a medic in Vietnam,” he says, shrugging. “I’ve seen worse.”

He is also dealing with the roller-coaster emotions that accompany raising a daughter on the cusp of adolescence. Jessica, 12, the product of an earlier relationship, lives with Claire and Joe.

But Joe, a man of few words, has hung in there. Matter-of-factly, without any boasting, he dismisses any suggestion that he might have done otherwise.

“It’s part of the deal,” he says. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

Claire’s 21-year-old daughter, Christine Schulze--who is almost eight months pregnant, still smoking and unable to quit--is grateful for Joe’s devotion to her mother.

“He’s always been like that since the first day I met him, even before she got sick,” Christine says. “He’s always been there for her, whether it’s been taking her to class, doing this for her, doing that. And now he’s given her a reason to fight.”

Claire’s doctors have told her there is no cure. Without predicting how much, they have also told her that chemotherapy could buy her some quality time.

Lately, for a change, the news has been upbeat.

After a months-long decline, Claire seems to be enjoying a respite. Her breathing has improved, and she is no longer tethered to a portable oxygen tank. Her appetite has come back and she has gained a few pounds. Her energy, depleted by the drugs, is gradually returning.

“The better she does, the better we all do,” Christine says.

If Claire is angry, even afraid, that tobacco has robbed her of her future--of the happiness she finally has found with Joe and the joy of her impending first grandchild--she doesn’t say so. At least not directly.

But she has said over and over again that she regrets ever having started smoking. Now that her illness has forced her to stop, she cannot understand why Christine--whose latest sonogram indicates the first boy in the family--does not try harder to quit. Joe still smokes too.

“I’m still feeling bad about it,” says Christine, who vowed early in her pregnancy to quit but never did. The baby is due Oct. 7.

“I still want to stop,” Christine says. “I’ve just got to figure out how. I don’t want it around my baby at all. It’s bad enough he will have had nine months of it.”

It took Claire all these months to decide to finally get married.

“I would always think he’d end up getting tired of it all and say, ‘See ya later,’ ” she says. “I kept telling him I didn’t want to get married while I was so sick. He said he didn’t care.

“Now I know he’s in for the long haul. If he hasn’t left now, he’s not going to. He’s been great. I don’t know that I could deal with this by myself.”

Joe and Claire know their future is uncertain; they are embracing one day at a time. In this context, their wedding vows take on a poignant, even bittersweet, meaning.

They stand in their living room, his arm supporting her, as a justice of the peace recites the familiar words:

. . . to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

Claire and Joe repeat them, their voices clear and strong, without a moment’s hesitation.

Couple’s Deep Roots

Claire first met Joe in 1972, at the time she was about to marry her first husband. Claire Bernard and John Joseph Kelly were both working at Great Oaks Center, a facility in Silver Spring, Md., for the mentally disabled.

She was a health assistant who cared for the children. He was a “mop jockey,” part of the cleaning crew.

“He worked right across the hall from me,” she recalls. “He was a friend from work. He came to my first wedding. After Christine was born, he used to come over to the house every once in a while. Then he went into the Navy and I lost touch with him.”

A smile crosses her thin face.

“I had a nice crush on him,” she says. “But he never paid any attention to me.”

“You were engaged,” he reminds her.

“So I figured, if he’s not going to pay any attention to me, I’m not going to ruin what I’ve got,” she says.

Claire married, had Christine, and later was divorced. She remarried and eventually split up with her second husband.

She met Joe again seven years ago when both ended up--by sheer coincidence--working again in the same place, this time at the University of Maryland.

“It was like it was meant to be,” Claire says.

By then, she was separated from her second husband. Joe had fathered a daughter with another woman, whom he was preparing to marry. But the mother left them.

“I kept seeing him on the loading dock, and he looked just like the Joe I used to know--except that now he had short hair and I wasn’t sure it was him,” Claire says. “The last time I’d seen him, his hair was long. I thought to myself, ‘He’s the spitting image of this guy I used to know.’ ”

One day, they bumped into each other in a hallway.

“I turned around and asked him if his name was Joe. He said, ‘No, my name is John,’ ” referring to his full name.

Embarrassed, she turned and began to walk away.

“See you later, Claire,” he said, trying to suppress his laughter.

“That just about stopped her dead in her tracks,” he remembers.

They started meeting for lunch, and the romance blossomed.

“My mom said recently that he was the one I should have married all those years ago,” Claire says. “But you never know. It might not have worked out. He had to be ready.”

The Time Has Come

On this Sunday afternoon, they are both ready. Claire has been sitting in an armchair in the living room, greeting her friends and family. She is still too weak to stand or walk for any extended period of time.

The hospital bed, which had dominated the living room in recent months so that Claire would not have to walk upstairs, has been pushed to one side and disguised with a cheerful, multicolored quilt. The dining room table has been spread with trays of meats, cheeses, breads and salads, and a large white cake waits to be cut.

Claire’s parents have come from Canada for the wedding. Her father is recovering from a stroke, but they made the drive anyway, anxious to be with the older of their two daughters. Both are from a French-speaking city in Quebec.

Claire’s mother is named Claire too.

“When I was born, they asked her what she wanted to name the baby,” Claire says. “She didn’t understand much English and thought they were asking her what her name was. She said, ‘Claire.’ And that’s how I got my name.”

Claire Bernard, a breast cancer survivor, has been delivering pep talks during her weeks-long visit.

“She’s going to make it,” she says of her daughter. “She has to put that thought in her mind and keep it there.”

Claire and Joe stand before Bert Krakosky. She is a deputy clerk in Prince George’s County and a justice of the peace, and a friend of Claire’s sister.

Claire does not walk down an aisle, because there isn’t one. She stands with Joe’s arm wrapped around her as they exchange vows.

Jessica is the maid of honor. Jack Miller, Joe’s best friend, is best man. The two men sport almost identical mustaches.

“They use the same barber,” whispered Joe’s sister. “Handlebars R Us.”

Joe slides the ring onto Claire’s finger. She has trouble with his; his knuckle is swollen.

“Use some of the wax from your mustache,” one guest suggests.

“Maybe the rings got switched,” Joe says.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, the couple toasts one another with glasses of champagne.

Claire’s mother is the first to hug her new son-in-law.

“Now I can really call you Mom,” he says.

“Be good to her,” she says.

Honeymoon Waits

The honeymoon has been delayed until Claire finishes all six cycles of her chemotherapy. She returns the Friday following her wedding to Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center for another round of drugs.

“I don’t feel half-bad,” she tells Dr. Naiyer Rizvi, her oncologist. “I’ve put on a few pounds, and I’m feeling better.”

“We’re late this morning because she insisted on having breakfast,” Joe reports.

Rizvi is pleased. Some weeks ago, he had cautioned her about expecting too much from the chemotherapy.

“Hopefully, you’re on the rebound and you’re going to prove my earlier gloom-and-doom scenario wrong,” he says.

“I intend to,” she replies.

“You ready to go?” he asks, referring to the next treatment.

“I’m ready,” she says. “I want to get this over with.”

She and Joe hope to get away soon for a week in a beach cottage in Delaware. But Claire still dreams of a trip to Switzerland. She has always longed to go there.

“That’s on hold for now,” she says. “We’ll get there at some point, as soon as I get better.”