It doesn't matter, you'll be okay

By Mark Perrino

In a leafy suburban town in Denmark, Mark and Karin buy a picturesque old house that Karin dreams of remodeling—a home for their son, Andreas, to grow up in. Then Karin falls seriously ill.
 

Weathering a brutal cycle of rekindled hopes and devastating relapses, they persevere with the renovations, bedeviled by a barrage of accidents and problems that the project throws their way. But finishing the job takes on a new and bittersweet significance as Karin exhausts conventional treatments and they are forced to seek alternatives abroad.

 

It doesn't matter, you'll be okay is a poignant story of a family undergoing an ordeal that tests the limits of their resilience and resourcefulness, about the deep human need to create something lasting amidst the precarious uncertainties of life and death—and about how, amidst the shared moments of a lifetime, we become part of one another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mariendal Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9788797274644

Mark Perrino

Mark Perrino was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in several American cities, finishing high school in Schenectady, New York. After attending four colleges and working various mundane jobs, including a stint playing cards in Las Vegas, he took a doctorate at Columbia University and completed the literary study "The Poetics of Mockery." In 1988, he wrote "Meet the Danes," a whimsical satire based on an imaginary emigration to his wife’s homeland. Six years later, they did move to Denmark, and the memoir "It doesn’t matter, you’ll be okay" tells the heart-rending story of what really happened. He has taught at Manhattan College and worked in corporate communications in New York and Copenhagen. He has an adult son and now lives in Frederiksberg, Denmark, with the psychotherapist Pia Friis. You can follow him at "The Happiest People" blog.

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Natural killers

January 2010, Bad Kreuzburg, Germany

Karin had changed into a hospital gown and sat up in the bed awaiting the first session. She wore a calm, impassive look, pursing her lips softly as Hanne, the nurse assigned to her, attached a tube to the catheter below her collarbone. It would be weeks before we even knew whether this new method might work, and by now Karin had learned it didn’t help to hope. She’d made it to the clinic in time to get the treatment—that was the important thing.

Through a snowstorm on the autobahn. It had taken us sixteen hours to drive here and find the guesthouse that Annika, Dr. Schreiber’s office manager, had recommended on a narrow, hilly road outside a small spa town. The day before, in this converted manor house beside a golf course, we had met Schreiber and his staff. He was a lanky fellow around sixty who wore a dress shirt and tie under his lab coat and had a droll, patrician manner with a slight New England accent. His assistant, a friendly young German doctor named Werner Neumann (Werner to the staff, while Schreiber was always Dr. Schreiber) interviewed Karin about her condition and history. She was an interesting case, he said. He wouldn’t have given a stage IV peritoneal carcinoma patient more than a year to live. Karin was getting tired of hearing people say they would have expected her to be dead.

A faint outline of the Austrian Alps in the fog was visible through the window behind her. Beside the bed stood a filtering instrument the size of a vending machine. At breakfast, another patient, a regular from Pittsburgh with prostate cancer who was going for cellular remission, had warned her about the apheresis process. For six hours, your blood runs through the machine, offloading natural killer cells from your immune system for enhancement and reinfusion, giving you violent chills and then a high fever. After five years of chemotherapy, operations, scans, tests, consultations, vitamin megadoses, and healers, this looked like Karin’s last resort, a novel method invented by an expat who had moved his clinic to a country where it was easier to get unconventional treatments approved.

I wondered what she was thinking about. Maybe Andreas, playing video games and watching slasher films at Daniel’s back in Nordstrup. And whether he would get into trouble at school under the influence of his mischievous pal. We’d never been away from him for more than a few days.

Are you ready? I asked.

I don’t have much choice, she said with a fleeting, acquiescent smile. It’s going to be rough, though, isn’t it?

Not as bad as Everolimus would have been. You’ve made it through everything else.

Everolimus had been the last chemo combination that the hospital in Copenhagen had to offer. Off-label, no results yet. Karin had feared she’d have to do it even though she could scarcely tolerate any more chemo. The rash on her face and other side effects were already pronounced. She’d vowed to stick to her strictest regimen: the C drip twice a week without fail, the daily powder and platefuls of supplements, a walk in the woods in the morning before she started errands and then had to fit it in later. Despite her resolve, she slept poorly, the pains increased, and her morale sank.

Then we learned of Schreiber’s clinic, and her spirits began to revive. She wanted to stay busy and take care of the household while we waited for the holidays to pass. That was her occupational therapy, an impersonation of normality. She continued until around Christmas to mind the house, do the grocery shopping, and make a variety of vegetarian dishes. Even as she languished, she was able to bargain for a tree and entice Andreas into joining the seasonal baking. Her resigned demeanor contracted into an affectionate grin as he imitated her cookie-cutting on the kitchen counter, standing on a chair beside her in an apron.

The house she had spent countless hours remodeling wasn’t even quite finished yet. She had wanted to plant rhododendrons by the sidewalk and fill out the long flowerbed before winter, the flowerbed that had dazzled her eye the first time she saw the house, the old house. . . .

1

I will make you happy

March 1997, Nordstrup, Denmark

We walked up a few steps beside the carport into a yard enclosed by trees and bushes with a long, motley flowerbed in full bloom beside the walk and a sprawling apple tree in the middle of the lawn. At the back of the lot stood a small, half-timbered house with white masonry and black woodwork. It had a bay window in the center of the façade, French doors opening onto a large deck on the right, and on the other side, a front door with a wild design of black and white diamonds nesting in one another. The low slate roof was worn to a dull gray. Beside the door stood an outbuilding attached by an arched doorway, with the same whitewashed plaster, like the wall extending to the flowerbed to complete the pastoral atmosphere.

Not bad so far, I ventured. Monochrome house.

Scanning the scene with a hint of a smile on her lips, Karin didn’t demur. It had looked distinctive and picturesque enough in the newspaper ad to intrigue us, and now the real thing hadn’t disqualified itself at her first glance like almost every other open house we’d visited. She also had a checklist of less visible things unmentioned in the notices. When we’d moved to Denmark two years before, we had looked for an apartment for months before giving up as the prices kept rising. Although the market was still going strong, after she became pregnant we started looking again, and now her due date was approaching.

In the foyer, a fanciful wooden trellis hung over the entrance to the hallway. The two front rooms had a rustic elegance, with exposed ceiling beams, a carven framework around the bay window, and leaded windows high on the side wall and beside the French doors. The place had been built by a master carpenter as a summerhouse for himself in the 1920s, we learned. The kitchen, looking into thick bushes in the back, was less prepossessing. It was dark and cramped, with brown linoleum and a door in the corner to a steep, narrow stairway that gave away the house’s origin as a vacation retreat. At the top of the stairs stood a chimney, painted white, running up through the room oddly at a slight angle. The large open space had a pitched ceiling, a wide shed dormer overlooking the front yard, and a weak shaft of light from an alcove on the north side. Behind the chimney was a bedroom with a nice view of rooftops interspersed among the trees down towards a church. The leafy street, with an unpaved sidewalk, was named Fasanvej, Pheasant Road in Danish, perhaps because the forest at the end of the next block had been a favorite hunting ground for the nobility two hundred years ago.

At this price, I’ll have to get me a shotgun too and track down our dinners, I told Karin, who smirked, maybe because she was still interested.

If you can pass the course and get a license.

We agreed that 1.8 million kroner (about $280,000 then) was high for a small house. This was the most affluent part of the country, the supposedly snobbish Whiskey Belt. Along the coast to the east lay mansions and horsey spreads owned by business executives, entertainers, and soccer stars. But Denmark was about the most egalitarian country in the world, and the street seemed like a typical middle- and upper-middle-class mixture. One neighbor was a retired janitor, and at the cul-de-sac lived a former finance minister. Nordstrup wasn’t much of a town. Like the surrounding municipalities, each with about five thousand residents, it was a district with residential enclaves clustered around a shopping center and the commuter rail station. But Fasanvej had the feeling of a small town and not a subdivision. You could walk to the commercial precinct in ten minutes. The school and sports complex were within two kilometers. The area was known for large tracts of woods like those on either side of this neighborhood, one bordering on a lake.

Although the house posed some tradeoffs, its homely charm put it in play in our imaginations. The stylish front rooms, the secluded yard, and the abundant garden outweighed the practical shortcomings and modest appearance of the rest. Even though the timbering on the two side walls was fake, just thin planks stuck onto the plaster, it was a pretty cottage in its own miniature park and an inviting neighborhood. There were no other active buyers, so we tried to chisel something off the price. A few days later, the broker persuaded the divorcing owners to accept our offer. The wife, who’d remained in the house with her teenage son after the husband had moved out, couldn’t leave until June. The baby was due July 1, so we decided to wait until August, after the first shock of parenthood.

The little creature we named Andreas arrived on schedule in fine condition. I pushed his stroller through the streets of our dull, treeless neighborhood bordering on Copenhagen, looking forward to our new surroundings and speaking to him in English so its phonics would take hold on equal terms with Danish. Even without much sleep, we had ample time to pack up our small townhouse. We fit the stereotype at our rental complex, which was known for incubating babies who propelled the new little families to larger homes in the suburbs, except that at forty-two Karin was too old to have children—or so she overheard one of the neighbors’ kids remark.

We became property owners for the first time, and the job of making our new home presentable and comfortable now seemed daunting. We were lucky Karin’s retired uncle came from Jutland to help paint the interior before we moved in. As he outlined the plan, it became plainer to me that I knew next to nothing about home maintenance. Anton had great energy and dispatch, although he was sometimes a bit hasty slapping blotches of spackling paste over rough patches in the walls. Karin guided the process between bouts of nursing the colicky baby. I unloaded a shipping container with our belongings from America and filled up the rooms with furniture that at first looked haphazard in the new setting. Our dog, Pina, who’d been raised in a Manhattan apartment, loved the yard.

We spent much of our free time in the next year setting up and fixing up the house. Karin took the standard six months’ paid maternity leave and the option of another six months in order to be with Andreas as long as possible and to arrange the house as she wanted. She threw herself into furnishing and refurbishing it whenever he napped. I was surprised at how handy she was. Her father had been a contractor, and that had given her some familiarity with the building trades in her youth. She’d also made a study of interior decorating in the many open houses we’d visited. I was safer working outdoors. The trees and bushes had been neglected since my predecessor’s departure. There was a tall beech hedge on the long south border of the lot, two small apple trees just inside the thick bushes lining the sidewalk, more bushes in the flowerbed, and a neighbor’s tall pines overhanging the back fence. After many weekend and vacation hours spent clipping and clearing, many trailer loads had to be hauled to the recycling center on the other side of the county.

The neighbors were friendly enough, although rather reserved according to Danish custom. Karin made acquaintances easily and soon found other families on the street with babies or toddlers. Nordstrup was home to many businesspeople, we learned, in contrast to nearby Birkerød, which attracted academics and might have been more congenial, although we couldn’t complain on that score since both of us former English teachers now worked as editors at banks. My commute on the train made a pleasant respite when I could read uninterrupted for twenty-five minutes. Karin took Andreas to a mothers’ group that met at the church in town, and we booked him a spot at a daycare center two kilometers away.

He got the bedroom upstairs. When the seasons changed, it became drafty and he was susceptible to colds. We moved his crib to the foot of our bed in the open room, and we caught his colds. The back room downstairs, which became an office where I worked one or two days a week, was also drafty in the winter. It was evident the place didn’t have enough insulation for comfortable year-round occupancy. I plugged the crack beneath the floor panels with rubber tubing, which didn’t help much, and put a small electric heater under my desk. We used the wood stove in the living room every evening, although it gave little heat upstairs and was a nuisance to clean in the morning before walking Pina. There was no radiator in the kitchen, so I set another heater on the wall, running the cord around the doorframe to an outlet beside the refrigerator. It looked makeshift and crude.

Although we never regretted the decision to buy the house, some other aspects became annoying as well. The roof was shabby and needed replacing. There was little storage space. The basement was only a small room with an oil furnace and an entrance from the yard, and there was no attic. The annex held a pantry and a workshop, but the latter was stuffed with boxes and useless for anything else. With the help of a retired carpenter from Karin’s hometown, I built a storage room in the carport. He and Karin joked about my apprenticeship graduation project, and I had to admit I was proud of getting the doors and their locks to fit and function.

The most vexing part of the house for Karin was the kitchen, which she found impractical and embarrassing. It had little workspace or cupboard space, with an undersized refrigerator sitting on the counter. The windows and their frame above the small stainless steel sink were oddly unpainted and matched the muddy color of the linoleum. Beside them loomed a microwave on an improvised shelf. There was scarcely room for a small table beside a bench built into one wall. On the other side, you sat in front of the door to the hallway. Karin loved to cook but didn’t enjoy being in the room.

Andreas was a demanding baby, restless and feisty, whose colic never seemed to end. We took him to a reflexologist, but the slight improvements we saw always proved to be wishful thinking. In the brief Danish summer, he played in a sandbox beside the annex and crawled around the lawn after Pina like a happy puppy until he went bipedal behind a little plastic lawnmower. He was an exuberant toddler who sometimes got too reckless for the other kids at daycare. Getting him to bed and to sleep was an ordeal. Sometimes, after Karin had tried for an hour, I was finally able to knock him out by bouncing him briskly to loud rock music. He kept us so busy we couldn’t imagine adding a sibling yet, although the other parents recommended it. When Karin slept in on the weekends, he and I had breakfast early, did a few pages of an English pre-K workbook under the guise of puzzles, and aimed the stroller toward the neighborhood playgrounds, where he climbed the jungle gym and I got to read the papers if another kid showed up. It was a bilingual home; at the dinner table he shifted easily between Danish with her and English with me. When Karin and I were both busy, his first video babysitters were the British Teletubbies, Japanese Pokémon, Disney cartoons dubbed in Danish, and original-language Looney Tunes on VHS.

Five years after we moved to Nordstrup, Karin lost her job. Her manager said they were moving the position to Oslo to centralize the editorial services at corporate headquarters, but she suspected intrigue by a British colleague. Even though she hadn’t even liked the place—she had no real interest in equity research and nothing in common with the young male analysts she worked with—she’d done her best to thrive there, going along on teambuilding trips across the Norwegian tundra and other dubious exercises. The layoff process rankled. She went to outplacement workshops, listened to boring advice about resume enhancement and interviewing tactics, and then decided she wanted to return to teaching.

Karin came from Svendborg, a pleasant harbor town on the island of Funen. Her father had run a masonry business, and her mother had been a nurse in a psychiatric ward. Her brother, five years older, took up a technical profession and left home early. At a time when few went to gymnasium, the college prep program, Karin was the bookish one in the family, and English was her favorite subject. In the early ’70s, gymnasium was more than bookish, though, with many opportunities for a pretty, sociable blonde to party and flirt, although she never went heavy on drink or drugs. After graduating, she spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz, where she found an American boyfriend. She visited him in Brooklyn and stayed to get a B.A. at Pace University. When she started grad school at Columbia, she moved to an apartment in Manhattan with another woman student.

I first got to know her in our introductory doctoral seminar. I couldn’t help noticing how freely and casually she spoke, floating observations over the table without trying to score debating points. I had always worried about having sound arguments and clear interpretations. She posed impressionistic, tangential perceptions that didn’t strive for a conclusion. It hardly mattered whether what she said was more or less right or wrong; her inquisitive manner was a captivating end in itself. That approach served her even better as a teacher, first as a TA and then as an adjunct lecturer in the City University system. She even taught music for a year at an elementary school. Her affable nature and informal style drew kids out and led to lively discussions, which she now missed after ten years in financial communications. But she couldn’t teach at a university because she hadn’t finished her Ph.D., or at a gymnasium without certification from a Danish university. She wanted to teach Danish as well as English, and qualifying for that would take years. She learned of an accelerated certificate program for teaching elementary and middle school and decided it was the best option. While she waited for the next semester to start, she did freelance translating and copyediting. She enjoyed the classes and the coursework. She had a convenient schedule that let her mix with more like-minded people a few days a week and gave her time for Andreas after school. When I came home from work, he and I played soccer in the yard while she made dinner. I’d never played before, but it was the national sport and the world’s sport. When the father of a kindergarten friend founded a club in Nordstrup, Andreas joined and I became an assistant coach.

Being around the house more often again led Karin to brood on possibilities for home improvement. She had become increasingly frustrated with the kitchen. With Andreas and his playmates running through on their way up and down the stairs, it seemed like an accidental passageway. Several neighbors were building additions and upgrading, and the lifestyle buzzword of the year was conversation-kitchen, a room commodious enough for socializing while cooking, savoring a cup of gourmet coffee or a glass of good wine with your casually-but-smartly-dressed girlfriend after a refreshing yoga session. The more the media harped on that image, the more strongly Karin felt our kitchen was a mortifying travesty.

The case for remodeling became more plausible as it became more urgent. But simply renovating it was pointless because it would still be cramped, and enlarging it was problematic. It could be expanded only two meters toward the fence in the back, adding little space and blocking the passage behind the house. All the space in the lot was in front of the house, and we couldn’t tear down the half-timbered façade and the woodwork around the bay window, the best features of the place. If we could put a dormer with another bathroom above the enlarged kitchen, that might make the project worthwhile.

Our neighbors Sonja and Jeppe were building an addition and got help from an architect friend. We asked him to flesh out our idea. His floor plan put the kitchen in another room and had no additional floor space or bathroom. We tried again with an experienced consulting engineer who exuded more credibility with his 3D software models. He returned with two designs. Both had two dormers on the back roof, and one had a new, steeper roof that would give more headspace upstairs. Neither added much new kitchen space or a second bath. The project stayed on Karin’s mind. She was always browsing for ideas in design magazines and catalogs, but it was a wicked puzzle. Simply extending the kitchen wasn’t worthwhile, and with a steeper roof, we’d have to move out during construction. The obvious alternative was to find a new house. But despite its flaws, we still liked this one, as well as the neighborhood where Andreas was starting school just around the corner.

Someone recommended another architect who had designed many homes, an older fellow who now worked part-time on selected projects. Gunnar was from Slangerup, a small town to the west, and a down-to-earth sort who struck up a good rapport with Karin. He came up with an idea to extend the back wall along most of the house. Besides a larger kitchen, it allowed a small utility room and a new bathroom and bedroom upstairs. We were intrigued. Of course, the plan would cost more than a simple extension, over a million kroner. But the house had almost doubled in value in our seven years there, giving us equity to use on improvements. We would think it over during the winter as Karin got closer to her certification. She was doing an internship with a sixth-grade class in a nearby town.

It was a daunting decision. Karin was ready to go for it, but I was wary. I didn’t know how such a large venture would fit into her exams or new teaching career, how long we would be dislocated, or how costly and risky the investment would be. We had been able to agree on most big decisions in the past. The complications came afterward, showing that our communications weren’t always as straightforward as they’d seemed.

In 1980, soon after we’d begun that first seminar together at Columbia, Karin got a haircut, a drastic one. Shorn of the wild blonde curls that gave her visage a messy aura, she noticed my surprise.

"Do you think it’s too