It's Okay to Cry, It's Okay to Laugh, It's Okay to Keep on Loving: Cancer - Loving Into, Through, and Beyond The Disease

By Jamie Merrill

About the Book
Jamie and Roxana Merrill lived and loved through ups and downs, joys and sorrows through their twenty-one years together, but nothing prepared them for the Roxana’s multiple myeloma cancer diagnosis. Jamie carries on Roxana’s life and legacy by telling her story, sharing with others her journey, her fight against cancer with dignity and love. With the devastating loss of his wife, Jamie learns how to accept and manage grief. It is okay to be angry. It is okay to find joy again. It is okay to feel what you feel. The most important action to take is placing your best foot forward and complete the story your loved one has begun.
For anyone struggling with a loss of a loved one or their own chronic illness, Jamie and Roxana’s story is a heart-wrenching tale, one that is filled with moments of humor and levity alongside the moments of seemingly inescapable grief. Their love story is a reminder to keep living, to keep thriving, and to carry on with your loved one inside your heart.

About the Author
Jamie Merrill is a sixty-one year old lifelong retail food service operator and consultant who celebrates his colorful past as the stepping stone to getting his life "right" and becoming the man he is today. He is a self-taught bassist and guitar player, with the high point of his performing career being part of the opening act for Pearl Bailey at the old Riverboat Lounge in the Empire State Building.
Merrill was born and raised in the Bronx and later relocated to California, where he met Roxana. Roxana has two sons from a previous marriage, and Jamie became a stepfather after their marriage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888129753

Book preview

Introduction

If you’re reading this then we’ve got at least one thing in common—we’ve each lost someone near and dear to us. What I will share here is how cancer interrupted a love story that seemed to be literally a lifetime in the making. From being so close to each other on more than one occasion and not knowing it, to finally realizing our destinies were always meant to be with each other, this is a journey that evolves out of serendipity into true devotional love and moves to total emotional devastation and, finally, to getting my mind right. At least right enough to accept what has happened and allow me to continue to survive with my grief.

What follows here is a journey. Our journey, mine and my Wife’s, as we navigate six years of our lives through the discovery that one of us is going to be widowed much sooner than we expected and could’ve wanted. Widowed. I despise that word. It’s been 367 days since my wife left us, and I’ve never once used the D word or the aforementioned W word in the same sentence as Roxana’s name or my current marital status. I am married. My wife did not leave me. My wife did not divorce me. I made a promise of forever, and I intend to keep that promise. So, when I see the choices of what my marital status is on, say, legal documents or insurance documents, I literally cringe when reading those words, and to this day I still refuse to choose W. In my mind, if ya got a problem with that, then that’s a problem that you have to live with, not me. I don’t care if you’re an individual or a large corporation with rules that you must go by. Not my duck, not my bottle, as Roxana used to say. I am now, and always will be, married.

Grieving is a process, they say. Grieving is not a cookie cutter experience and not everyone grieves the same. Depending upon what you’re reading or accessing, what you’ve heard or have talked about, there are anywhere from five to seven to 360 degrees of grief.

The Five

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

The Seven

1. Shock and Denial

2. Pain and Guilt

3. Anger and Bargaining

4. Depression, Reflection, and Loneliness

5. The Upward Turn

6. Reconstruction and Working Through

7. Acceptance and Hope

The 360

Sorry, I neither have the patience to document these nor the desire. But I hear tell that you can buy the book by the same name

I’m more or less following the Seven module.

1. I have gone through shock and denial—I’ve actually begun this process when Roxana was first diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer.

2. Pain and Guilt aren’t just 2 and done. I’m here to tell you that from what I’ve experienced alone, the pain does not go away. You basically have to learn to manage it. The Guilt? Mine comes from not getting a solid verification that I did all I can do to keep Roxana calm, comfortable, and knowing that she is fully loved and being cared for. With Roxana’s inability to communicate as she got closer to leaving, I know from recordings I’ve made that when I had to step away for seconds, Roxana was asking for things, trying to talk to me, but I wasn’t in the room. This specific type of guilt will eat you alive. I know, a year later I’m still in the midst of this.

3. I’m still angry, and that, too, will have to be managed. Roxana did so much good here in our family and, to be honest, with every life she touched as a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a teacher. From that anger came the natural bargaining—God, allow me the time to work through our probate process, then, after that, you can have me. But Roxana’s dream of buying a house without any help and making it a part of our family for generations to come must be realized first.

4. Depression—no, I can’t really say I’m depressed. But on the other hand, it’s only been 366 days, 9 hours, and 48 minutes since Roxana left us on March 25, 2021, at 2:07 a.m., so there may be some coming to me. Reflection and loneliness are constants. I’ve made multiple trips to the shore to Moonstone Beach in Cambria, California, where Roxana loved to go. I’ve taken walking trips around town here, visiting the antique shops that she loved so much. That’s when the loneliness is realized—we would banter and talk all the time, and not having that when I visit these places does contribute to my loneliness without my wife at my side.

5, 6, 7.  The Upward Turn, Reconstruction and Working Through, and Acceptance and Hope are not even in my same zip code, so anticipating that all three as the ideal end steps of grieving is only natural, I guess.

As time went on, I kind of developed my own grieving process that doesn’t work for everyone but has tied into my newfound faith. Born Jewish, I am now going through the RCIA program at my church and I’m becoming a Catholic. There are many reasons why Catholicism speaks to me, and those stories are for another time, but the process is what is important here. Never being a praying man but one who always believed in God, I started praying more and found that prayer and faith isn’t a state of mind. It’s soulful. It’s in the heart that faith is felt. It was this same logic that I put into grieving. I felt that just being conscious of my pain and knowing it exists—and in turn understanding that there are supposed to be different levels of grieving—just didn’t cut it for me. So, instead, I immersed myself in my pain. I forced myself—and still do force myself—to feel it every day. I’ll purposely put on songs and remember instances that Roxana and I experienced together. Good times and bad, happy and sad. I embraced my pain and allowed it to surround me in a way that my emotions were uncontrollably flowing out of me. Anger,