Chapter 19: Trouble Strikes

Everything you will ever need to know about why you walk the Camino de Santiago and what will happen while you're on it.

I’ve been skirting around it and putting it off, but there is something I haven’t told you about this year in France my family is taking, and what this trip is about, and why Melanie and I are here plowing through our savings.

*

It is a year before we move to France.

We have lived through months of a health scare, and we have finally arrived at something tangible. We have waited a harrowing three days for an appointment with a neurologist in Seattle. He will discuss my wife’s scan results.

We have kept everything secret. We’ve agreed that we will not tell the children anything until we know firmly what is going on. We’ve coached each other to be calm. We’ve tried hard to stay cool, to avoid exaggerated emotion, to downplay speculation anywhere it might pop up. There was no luxury in indulging a single grim thought. Don’t dance with the devil. We were on an emotional high wire, focusing on what we needed to do next and only that thing. Both of us.

I still went to work. Melanie still got t…