Preface:

I don’t recall who chose to watch a film about the Enigma code that particular Saturday night. Was it my husband or me?

Ironic, I thought much later. The Imitation Game, a film about the British cracking the German code that masked so many powerful secrets and ultimately led to the liberation of Europe, was a metaphor for the revelations about to unfold in my life.

My husband sat at a distance, engrossed in the film, while I perched on the sofa, ignoring it. My eyes were focused on a pile of unopened envelopes that held eight years of bank statements.

I discovered the paper trail when I uncovered a private account on my husband’s computer. The account was buried beneath a layer of security that erased daily searches and routinely changed passwords. I was an inexperienced sleuth, but once I learned of the bank account, I surreptitiously ordered every obtainable statement. I feared they would open Pandora’s box, and I would learn things from which there would be no return.

For days, the envelopes remained unopened, taunting me.

I recall the moment my hand reached for the top statement but recoiled. I thought: Destroy them. Toss them unopened into the fireplace that is providing the only warmth in the room this evening. Preserve your perfect life and your idyllic twenty-eight-year marriage, let those envelopes keep their secrets. Save yourself from what is likely to spill forth and char your most treasured memories.

Over the previous six weeks, something long dormant stirred and then emerged as a formidable force that demanded I take a closer look at my life. It prodded me to begin pulling at threads. Each thread I tugged revealed something incongruous with the life I thought I was living. Each thread exposed events that teased me with the knowledge that things were far different from what I believed about my husband and our long, happy marriage. The more I unraveled, the more I yearned to see it all. How could I get a clear bird’s-eye view of my life?

The answer came as I recalled a friend’s offhand comment from long ago: “When you want to know the truth about anything, follow the money.” Her voice led me to the bank account and, ultimately, to the bank statements.

I was at an inflection point from which there would be no return. My chest literally hurt. My breathing shallowed.

My intuition did not fail me. What I learned that night changed everything. Opening those envelopes obliterated thirty years of certainty. I remember thinking that my marriage was a precious crystal, and that night it shattered. So much of what I thought to be true turned out to be a myth, outwardly beautiful, but nonetheless a myth. Ultimately, the envelopes led me to a well-concealed parallel life, one woven into our story from its earliest days. They shattered the storybook illusion that held my family together.

That night I pulled back the curtain, and, like the revered Wizard of Oz, my husband turned out to be someone far different from his public persona. He was a man I no longer recognized.

Only in time would I come to see that this rupture had its genesis in lives lived long before we even met, in fault lines formed well before I entered his story, and in my own complicity: moving through the world in a way I had learned young, with an unguarded, self-assured tendency to trust what was offered, to mistake what was visible for the whole. But this reckoning of my marriage would come much later.

That evening I wasn’t thinking about the undercurrents, only the consequences. What would I, what could I, do with the information as it spilled forth? Could I walk away from the three-decade relationship at the core of my life, a source of strength and, as I long thought, love? How would this affect my two young adult children whose happiness meant everything to me? Could I dismantle a life that had given them, and me, solace and joy for decades?

There’s no question it might have been easier to stay in my marriage. But given what I’d learned, I didn’t hesitate a moment before deciding to end it on April 26, 2015. In a single instant, I confronted an avalanche of questions about my own life and about the marriage I long treasured.

That night, despite all the questions that spilled forth, there was one thing about which I had absolute, unshakable clarity: I deserved better.

The first two envelopes dealt a fatal blow to my long marriage. In the wee hours, at 2:00 a.m., I asked my husband to leave. I made a life-shattering decision to let go of someone I loved and the one person who shared my most intimate memories. In making that decision, I knew I had opened myself to emotional and financial vulnerability. I was terrified but undeterred as I opted to free-fall without a net, giving up what most people strive for: companionship, security, and love. That evening set me on a course in which I had to rebuild my entire life, one that is today unrecognizable from the one I had been living.

This wasn’t my first crucible.

The Death of Our Two Daughters Gave Us New Purpose

“We can’t change our past, but we can change someone else’s future.”

Two of Jamie and Kathy’s young daughters battled aggressive cancers. One died before they knew the truth, before they learned that Jamie carries a genetic mutation that left all three of them vulnerable to a wide range of cancers.

“For years we had been told by doctors we were just an ‘unlucky cancer family,’” Jamie recalls. His father died of a brain tumor at thirty-seven. His sister had three cancers in her twenties. Then their daughters got sick. First, twelve-year-old Kerry was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and endured brutal chemotherapy and limb reconstruction.

Seven years later, their seventeen-year-old daughter, Maureen, left for college healthy and happy, only to return home weeks later with a devastating diagnosis: adrenal cortical carcinoma, stage IV. “Our beautiful daughter died five months later,” Kathy says.

It was only after Maureen’s death that a doctor wisely suggested the family might have a hereditary cancer syndrome caused by a mutation of the TP53 gene, a critical cancer-fighting gene. Testing confirmed Kerry indeed had Li–Fraumeni Syndrome, known as LFS, making her susceptible to a wide range of cancers. Later testing confirmed Jamie, too, had inherited it.

Kerry, always determined, refused to take any chances. She took every precaution. When doctors found precancerous cells in her breast, she had a preventive double mastectomy. Kerry lived to experience the great joy of marrying and giving birth to two daughters. Due to remarkable scientific advances, the girls were born through in vitro fertilization and a process called PGD, pregenetic diagnostic testing, that ensures the embryos implanted are mutation-free. For a while, they thought Kerry had outrun her fate.

But when pregnant with her second daughter, Kerry felt a lump in her breast. Her doctors said it couldn’t be cancer because she had no breast tissue left. “But it was,” Kathy says. “By the time they took it seriously, it had spread everywhere.”

Kerry died in 2014, leaving behind two small children who are the light of Jamie and Kathy’s lives.

Months after Kerry’s death, Jamie felt a lump under his arm. A local doctor misdiagnosed it as a cyst. He soon learned that he had a soft tissue sarcoma for which he was successfully treated.

This was a family grappling with cancer. It had robbed them of two of their daughters, and it now threatened Jamie. Jamie and Kathy, deeply grieving, decided to turn their fate into purpose.

“People always ask how we survived all this,” Kathy says. “The truth? We had no choice. But we both knew we didn’t want other families to experience such devastating loss.”

For years after learning about LFS, they were utterly alone.

“We had never met another family with LFS. We had no community to turn to for guidance. That’s why she and Jamie flew to Ohio when Kathy found a Li–Fraumeni Syndrome Association, or LFSA, conference in 2016.

“We sat in a room with people who actually understood, who had the same fears, the same impossible choices. At the time, I wasn’t comfortable with public speaking, but I was inspired,” Kathy recalls. “I stood up and said, ‘I want to help. Give me something to do.’”

Since then, Jamie and Kathy have dedicated themselves to ensuring the public knows about inherited cancers, LFS, and the lifesaving impact early diagnosis can have in treating and curing cancer. They want to make sure other families never have to navigate LFS alone.

Kathy today is on the board of LFSA and deeply involved in advocacy and education, connecting newly diagnosed families with specialists, educating doctors, and pushing for better screening protocols. “So many people don’t know about LFS,” she says. “We are changing that.”

Jamie is also active in spreading the word. “I do my part, too. I talk to people one-on-one, share our story, and make sure they get the right care. I’m more of a day-of volunteer,” he jokes. “But I show up.”

They remind families: Knowledge is power. If you don’t know, you can’t protect yourself. They advocate for genetic testing to enable early diagnosis and ensure those with LFS understand that radiation therapy may not always be the best treatment option.

The mission: Knowing if you have LFS is just the first battle. The second? Making sure doctors take you seriously, and you get the surveillance and treatments you need.

In addition to Jamie’s early misdiagnosis, there was more. “I was being treated for prostate cancer when a urologist brushed me off and said, ‘What do you want me to do, operate? You want to walk around in diapers for the next twelve years?’” Jamie recalls. “I told him I had LFS, but it didn’t make a difference. I immediately saw another doctor who understood my risk.”

“If you don’t open your mouth, if you don’t do your own research, you won’t get what you need,” Jamie says. “Just because someone has an MD after their name doesn’t mean they know what’s best for you.”

Kathy, in her advocacy work around the country, sees this all the time: patients dismissed, misdiagnosed, or given outdated advice. That’s why she connects families to LFS experts who understand proactive screening and the importance of early detection. “We don’t want others to hear ‘it’s just bad luck’ and believe it,” she says. “We want them to get the right care before it’s too late.”

When they reflect on their own resilience in the face of overwhelming loss, Kathy describes it as a force that pushes you through life’s challenges, no matter how daunting they may be.

For Jamie, he says, “I’m resilient because, quite simply, I have no other choice. Giving up is not an option.”