Seeing You Home

These interconnected short stories navigate love, loss, and the search for meaning in the wake of tragedy. In the first story, Clare’s husband Richard has his phone stolen from his hospital room, while he's battling cancer, and Clare embarks on a restless search, tracking its signal through the city—trying to grasp onto something tangible as everything familiar slips away. The following stories trace the threads of Clare and Richard’s relationship. From the exhilaration of their first meeting to the raw ache of his absence, Seeing You Home is an intimate portrait of devotion, grief, and the impossible task of finding a way forward.

Excerpt from the story "Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant":

Once, I think it was the first morning of a new year, early in our marriage, Rich tried to explain invisible light to me. We were lying in bed, naked, looking at the prism paperweight he'd given me for Christmas, watching the pale winter sunshine splinter like stained glass into beams of colour.

It seemed an impossible paradox. Invisible light? How can we call it light if we can't see it? I listened to his explanation the way I listened to poems in a foreign language, enjoying the rhythms and sounds of the strange words. I loved to hear Rich talk. Before he fell ill, he had a powerful voice, deep and mellow. I lay with my ear to his chest, feeling the vibrations travel through my body, though on the topic of invisible light, I understood nothing.

Twenty years after that conversation, x-rays detected a mass in Rich's left lung and tests confirmed it was cancer. Within days, we learned that the cancer had spread to his spine and to his brain. It was a lot of news in a very short time.

His doctors prescribed an emergency course of radiation to keep him alive. That's when I remembered the phrase "invisible light," because that's what radiation is. We can't see it, but it sees us. It penetrates the darkness of our bodies to look deep inside, seeking out irregularities. It was invisible light that found the metastatic cancer cells, and it was invisible light that could destroy them.

Nothing to be afraid of, the oncologist said. Radiation is natural. It's all around us every day, in different forms: sunshine, television, cosmic rays. With an ordinary Sharpie, technicians marked an x above each cancerous spot on his vertebrae. They crafted a mask of his face that they'd bolt to the table to keep his head still while they fired photon beams into his brain.

The treatments took ten days. The side effects came later and lasted longer, draining his energy. For weeks he lay on the couch, listening to music or watching baseball. He lost his appetite, eating less and less until finally the mere sight of food demoralized him. I stopped serving meals and learned to offer small items, one at a time – a cheese stick, a cracker, a plum. Sweet things worked best. Our neighbour Babs helped out by baking trays of bite-sized butter tarts and tiny lemon squares.

During all of this, I was weirdly jealous of the invisible light. It could get inside of Rich, where I could never go, see parts of him I could not see. I was also afraid of it. I didn't trust the doctors' reassurances. Radiation was not only powerful, I thought, it was alien. Then I remembered that all light is alien. Visible or invisible, it comes to us from outer space.

"You think too much," Babs often told me.

But I wanted to understand. I thought that would help.