Thirty years ago this week I watched a beautiful light go out of the world. Frank Allen was not just my beloved husband. He was a friend and inspiration to so many, a deeply humane man with a huge laugh, a gift for storytelling and for listening to and truly hearing others’ stories, and a seemingly never-ending store of creative ideas for addressing injustice and buoying those who needed it most.
We met on the swimming team at Oxford University in England. He was there as a Rhodes Scholar, something that never ceased to astound him. How could this have happened to a kid who hadn’t learned to read until he was 12, when his severe dyslexia was uncovered by a standardized test, and who had concentrated more on football and swimming in high school than on his studies? To a graduate of the University of New Mexico who had gratefully taken a job as an estimator at a lumber yard, assuming that few other options were open to him? When the story ran in the Albuquerque papers that UNM had its first Rhodes Scholar in 25 years, one of his early schools called and asked, tentatively, “Are you the same Frank Allen who got solid Ds in 7thgrade?” “That would be me,” he replied, grinning.
I had come to Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, by a path that felt much more conventional. My academically-minded parents had pushed me from day one to succeed in school, and they and my teachers had given me nothing but encouragement. But it bothered me that so many Americans at Oxford seemed to take their good fortune for granted, and I was utterly charmed by Frank’s ebullient gratitude and wide-eyed enjoyment of this astonishing turn of events in his life. He carried a dog-eared pocket dictionary wherever he went, and consulted it whenever he read or heard an unfamiliar word. I still have that dictionary; it was one of the things that made me fall in love with him. The fact that Frank had the confidence to admit he didn’t know something set him far apart from the cocky culture of Rhodes super-achievers.
We returned to an America in recession and struggled, initially, to find work. I ended up with a job in Connecticut, while he pursued a degree in global food policy at Tufts in Massachusetts. On one weekend visit in the summer of 1984, we decided to get married and set a date in December. When I saw him a week later, I noticed he was walking oddly and not looking his usual robust self. Frank hated to complain, but he admitted to having a severe and persistent headache. The doctor at his health service just told him to take aspirin and get more sleep. But the following week, Frank was too dizzy and nauseous to get out of bed, and they arranged an emergency appointment with a neurologist. The next day, on my 27thbirthday, a neurosurgeon removed a large brain tumor and told me Frank had five years to live.
He was bald from radiation when we got married, but it was a wonderful, optimistic event, and friends came from around the world to celebrate. He had a couple of good years before the cancer spread to his bones, and another year of brutal chemotherapy. Somehow, his spirits never flagged, and he stayed active almost to the end. I have a picture of him, happy and sweaty from completing a 10K race, a couple of months before he died. Finally, when the chemotherapy options were exhausted, we found a doctor willing to prescribe enough pain medication to make him comfortable. I’m eternally grateful for that brave doctor and the morphine that kept Frank active in his mind long after his body could not support him. One time he gave me a sidelong look from his bed and said, “Why didn’t you kick it into the goal?” And his last words to me were, “So, what’s our plan for tomorrow?”
I had no plan for that tragic tomorrow. But Frank’s spirit of openness to the world and his courageous willingness to challenge himself have stayed with me these 30 years. I feel him beside me now.
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Frank’s type of cancer, medulloblastoma, is far more common in children than in adults. He often found himself sitting among very young cancer patients when he went in for treatment, and he would come home heartbroken. For all he went through, he counted himself lucky to have made it to adulthood. If you are moved by Frank’s story, please consider donating to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.