SEVEN DAYS OF SHIVA

In this debut memoir, a man recounts the decades spent with his cherished wife and her years battling cancer.

Gellman was only 14 years old when he first laid eyes on Barbara. It was 1964, and their Jewish families spent summers near the beach at the Rockaways in Queens. He wasn’t immediately smitten, as Barbara was two years younger, but he felt a connection by that summer’s end. The two were soon a couple, and the first obstacle to the pair’s romance was a New York City commute—he lived in Brooklyn, she in Jackson Heights, Queens. They made it work and by college age were engaged to be married. Then tragedy struck; in a sad precursor to what the couple would later endure, Barbara lost her mother to breast cancer. Gellman and Barbara tied the knot in 1971 and started their own family. Not long after their third child was born, Barbara felt a lump in her breast that turned out to be cancer. She called it “Mr. C,” which became a constant menace in the Gellmans’ lives. Barbara underwent chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and surgery, but Mr. C kept coming back until the disease spread to other parts of her body. The ever supportive Gellman loved making his wife laugh with sometimes off-color jokes; Barbara’s favorite name for him was Silly. She kept her sense of humor as well as her strength through countless rounds of treatments but finally lost her 30-year fight in 2011. The book’s later chapters describe how the family managed to persevere after Barbara’s death.

Gellman structures his engrossing memoir after shiva, the Jewish seven-day period of mourning. He divides the book into eight parts, representing each day of shiva and the post-mourning phase, when he hoped to work through his grief with stories of Barbara. He writes openly about what the couple went through, from painful diagnoses and treatments to close friends who essentially ignored Barbara during her late-’90s chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer. But it’s not all gloom, as Gellman revels in happier memories of the woman he adored—fondly reminiscing about her wit and refreshing frankness. The author, for example, insisted he wouldn’t be able to carry newlywed Barbara through their apartment’s front door. “You better start working out,” she said. “Because that’s what you’re going to do.” Meanwhile, his “silliness,” rather than pervading the narrative, generally surfaces in things he would utter to Barbara, which don’t often rise above sex and fart jokes. Still, Gellman’s humor is indicative of the couple’s perpetual optimism, an infectious attitude destined to inspire others facing similar challenges. The mostly linear autobiographical tale follows the couple’s life from their first house in New Jersey to their apartment in South Florida. Though the vibrant story understandably centers on Barbara, Gellman could have placed the spotlight more on himself. He periodically notes his lifelong OCD without fully expressing its impact on his life. The author rounds out his book with copious photographs of the couple, correspondence (including people’s affectionate thoughts about Barbara), and, best of all, snippets from his wife’s journal from a trip to Italy, filled with vivid, family-centric writings.

An indelible, loving tribute and a superb life story of struggling with disease.