Home Before Dark: A Family Portrait of Cancer and Healing

Through alternating chapters, the members ot he Treadway family recount their lives and how they coped during the year following the diagnosis of David Treadway's cancer.

Psychologist David Treadway reacted with shock when diagnostics revealed his stage 4 lymphoma; he was “riddled with cancer.” But the journey “in two parallel worlds”—of medicine and marriage—that his wife Kate, a doctor in the hospital treating him, underwent most distinguishes their account of catastrophic illness initially written, at David’s urging, by Kate and their sons Michael and Sam in 2006, the first anniversary of David’s diagnosis, when recurrence and bone marrow treatment likely loomed. Struggling with seeing David “thin, tired and hairless,” nerves frayed, but healthy new beginnings came, too. As the family responded to the ongoing crisis, Kate came to see that David’s “ability to detach,” about which she complained in the past, “has gotten him through . . . and allowed him to be there for me”; Sam found inner fortitude to face his fear of loss; Michael marked it as his “true entrance into adulthood”; and David realized “we are all fighting a great battle.” Many others—readers—will take strength and solace from their account. --Whitney Scott