Good for You: What Makes a Happy Family?

My wife and I, both in our late thirties, have a friend named Patricia who lives by herself in a very small apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her taste is Japanese. Patricia is the mother of another good friend, a woman more or less our age—which makes Patricia more or less our parents’ age—who has lived the past several years abroad, first in Cape Town, South Africa, and then, until very recently, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she and her husband adopted a three-legged dog they named Peggy. When my wife had surgery last summer to remove cancer and reconstruct her chest, this friend returned to New York for several weeks to offer support, for instance, by cleaning our kitchen to the extent my wife likes it; on a few occasions when we asked, throughout the summer and fall, Patricia took care of our son, who was three, while we spent days at the medical center for my wife’s chemotherapy treatments.

I often think, now that I’m approaching middle age, that having older friends is a comfort in part because it reveals, concretely, how long a life can forestall death. The comfort Patricia offers is of another sort and has something to do with our similarities and not with what strikes me as one fundamental difference—that, all things being equal, I’ll outlive her. Mainly, it’s heartening to see that she still possesses youthfulness in so many of its entangled and incongruous expressions, with so much contained in a sweep of her darkened hair and a flash of her white teeth. Patricia’s independence is both fierce and occasionally sharp. She also maintains what seems like an intense curiosity that can, in moments, come off like teenage guilelessness. “I don’t understand,” she’ll say. “Explain what you mean.” And when you do explain, she’ll say again, “I still don’t understand. Explain what you mean.”

This past Mother’s Day, basically a year beyond my wife’s diagnosis and six months after her last infusion of chemotherapy, we visited Patricia with the promise of a dinner out to celebrate. We also wanted to thank her. Her own daughter was still living abroad, and this was not the only time we’d filled in for her this way, as surrogate children. I’d made reservations at a restaurant near Patricia’s home, and she invited us to her apartment before dinner for champagne and raw asparagus stems and olives. We talked easily and said goodbye to what had been a frightening and terrible year. Our son was home with the sitter.

In the process of being diagnosed, my wife endured weeks of medical tests, spending hours in waiting rooms and waiting in hospital gowns. We told doctors we’d been planning to begin to try to have another child. (A French friend has an encouraging way of describing what it means to begin to try: “You have to fuck a lot.”) Had things gone according to plan, in fact, as they had with our son, that Mother’s Day my wife would have been extremely pregnant. When it was explained to us that the treatment she was agreeing to would make it impossible for her to viably carry a child for upwards of five years—this following the previous month of breast exams, a mammogram, an MRI, a PET scan, the biopsy, the second opinion and the third—her surgeon’s suggestion of fertility treatments and egg harvesting seemed like one step too far. We shook our heads. We’d see where we were in five years. We could decide then.

This was the scenario I described to Patricia, who knows our son, has the one daughter of her own, and wondered why, after all that had gone on this past year, we were still thinking about having another child.

“It would be good for him,” I said, referring to our son.

Patricia looked at me. She smiled. “I don’t understand. Explain what you mean.”

There are studies to support the claim that...