This beautiful, scary journey

Today marks the end of my 29th year of marriage to Rebecca Diana Wiley. This 29th anniversary also declares the beginning of our 30th year together. Putting up with me for this long is a supreme achievement on Becky's part. I was raised in a family of intelligent, determined women. They do not mark their successes by their men, nor should any woman. I found one exactly like my role models. Becky is smart, creative and driven, but with an unexplanable bad taste in men.

Twenty-nine years is a journey. Times are good and they are bad. We've dreamed big and struggled with debt when the dreams didn't work quite as planned, but we remain determined. We live a shared life on our own terms.

We have faced challenges, from learning having children was not in our capabilities, from me battling a form of Graves Disease so rare that it promised to leave me blind unless doctors designed a treatment specifically for a middle-aged man, something that appeared to be undocumented prior to my diagnosis.

Dr. Thomas Whitaker and his team at KU Eye, the optometry wing of the University of Kansas Medical School, succeeded. They designed a treatment that blunted my disease's progression, and then a very talented surgeon performed "socket decompression" surgery, which is a polite way of saying they carved out bigger eye sockets to relieve my non-stop eye pressure and daily headaches.

It all worked. It was trying and terrifying, but life did indeed move on. I tried to not let the years-long battle distract me from my career as a sports journalist and small business owner, but how could it not? Daily headaches, double vision, sometimes torturous pain and looming fear can paralyze the strongest.

We overcame, a proposition that was only possible because of the unyielding strength displayed by my wife, my sidekick in this beautiful, scary journey.

Life lurched forward. We settled into normalcy, enjoying work on our home, crafting the gardens in our yard, loving our ever-changing lineup of dogs — they leave us much too soon, but are truly angels on Earth during their time in our lives — and pursuing our professional careers. I do so in public view, much more so than I ever imagined when I chose this journalist's life more than 30 years ago, and Becky quietly impacts the lives of others on a daily basis as the development director for a remarkable local retirement community.

But, she continues to impact my life the most. She was the first in our house to learn my PSA — Prostate Specific Antigen — was too high. The letter arrived from the insurance company while I was in Atlanta covering the 2018 NCAA Tournament's South Regional. She knew I would be distracted by the news, only because there was little to be done from Atlanta. Then the agent called me as I sat in my hotel room.

I am not a person who remembers his past. I may be odd in that way, but I am in other ways, too.

Some remember entire days, citing conversations from grade school. My brain is wired differently. I remember specific vignettes, but not many. Burying a time capsule in sixth grade to celebrate the nation's bicentennial. The smell of cinnamon rolls filling the halls of my junior high. Discovering my joy for journalism in a high school classroom that wreaked of ink and glue. The day I chose the fraternity that made me a man and gave me lifelong friends. The moment I walked off a plane in Portland, Maine, and was told I would not be hired as the newspaper's new sports columnist because management just announced looming layoffs. And I remember the day a former boss told me "I wasn't smart enough" to run my own company. (He later sued us, trying to enforce an unsigned employee agreement, lying on the record in court about facts and using his wealth and knowledge of the law to drag on the case for 10 years, until the Kansas Supreme Court finally told him no more. We won, fighting a war that cost $300,000, but the struggle also was the only alternative to capitulation. My father raised to me to fight for what is right. We were right.)

I also remember the day I said "I do" to Rebecca Wiley and we spilled hot wax together on her hand while lighting a unity candle. And I clearly remember that day in an Omni Hotel in downtown Atlanta, when a concerned man in Orlando called with the news that my blood test offered a strong indication of prostate cancer.

I am not sure if my memories from that day forward are more clear simply because they are recent or because my brain finally decided that this shit is important. All of it.

The smiles, the laughs, the tears. Every emotion. Every day. Life's clock still clicks and this new life with cancer slips forward. It's been more than a year since that call. July 3 is the anniversary of my prostatectomy, and July 4 is the day my incredible doctor informed me that my cancer was not gone. Its evil tentacles visibly reached up and into my bladder. I remember all of the moments as that clock ticks loudly in the background.

Through is all Becky has tried to stay strong, but I know this scares her maybe more than me. I've found a strange peace in my diagnosis. A focus. A need to do something with this unwanted disruption. That has always been my nature. I deal with sudden change. I cope. I fight for what is right, and I often do so with humor. I am distractingly self-deprecating.

We laugh together daily. We smile. We get grumpy at times, but Becky always feeds me the truth. She offers me sympathy at opportune times. She gives me strength when it's not sympathy I need. She doesn't hit every note perfectly, but she continues to sing as the loudest voice in my choir of support.

Next month we will spend 12 days in Hawaii. She has long wanted to go. I, being nearly 6-foot-4 and weighing more than 300 pounds, dread long flights more than a colonoscopy. Suddenly taking that trip with Becky seems more important than the personal inconvenience.

Maybe on that trip she will finally realize that Timothy George Fitzgerald is really not worth all of this trouble, but I doubt it. I'm fairly certain that this steady, beautiful, sometimes terrifying and ever-changing journey will continue through this 30th year. It will continue until it ends, and my ashes are scattered by my closest buddies on a faraway beach.

But Becky and I have further to travel on this journey between now and then. We have memories to not only make, but ones to hold tight. In good and bad. Just as we were promised on the day of the great wax spilling.