When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, we became regulars at Chicago-area bar and restaurant trivia nights.
At the end of January 2023, the doctors told Diane that she had cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the liver bile ducts. Treatment commenced immediately, and for eight months, we ran the gantlet of chemo, radiation, immunotherapy, biopsies and scans.
During this time, we also struggled to answer questions such as: “What is the capital of South Carolina?” and “Which house won the War of the Roses?”
Diane and I had always been a bit in love with esoteric facts. When we first met 44 years ago, we would quiz each other on various bits of knowledge — the names of birds, members of the tragic 1969 Chicago Cubs team and second bananas, such as Ethel Mertz, Barney Fife and Rhoda Morgenstern, on old television shows.
Prior to Diane’s diagnosis, we’d gone with my brother and his wife to a trivia contest in the suburbs, and it was a lot of fun. Post-diagnosis, though, having fun seemed impossible. Plus, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea for Diane and her compromised immune system to be in an enclosed space with a lot of other people.
Diane, though, insisted that we play. As we segued from one chemo combination to the next, from radiation to immunotherapy, from one awful side effect to an even more awful one, we answered questions about flora and fauna, the planets and B-list celebrities.
Sometimes, the trivia night host would ask a question, and Diane and I would exchange knowing glances — recognition that it was in one of our knowledge sweet spots. Hearing a question about turkey vultures and their dihedral wings, we both were transported back to a vacation in Wisconsin’s Door County, where we watched scores of turkey vultures riding the thermals and sashaying across a brilliant blue sky. Standing on a pier in Egg Harbor, we encountered a man who seemed to be the world’s leading expert on turkey vultures; he offered insights about the upward slant of vultures’ wings. Years later, his mini-lecture helped us answer a question that no one else could answer.
My wife dived into trivia nights without even a smidgen of self-consciousness. She was not at all embarrassed by the edema in her normally slender ankles or the chemo pack that she wore like a second purse. During one trivia night at a restaurant, she asked the server to bring her some buttered noodles for dinner, saying, “I’m on chemotherapy and can’t deal with anything more than that.”
Worse than not being able to eat more than noodles is the uncertainty. Doctors aren’t sure how a given individual’s body chemistry will respond to chemo, radiation or immunotherapy. They list an almost endless series of possible side effects from treatment, but they have no idea which ones will affect you.
On trivia nights, the answers to questions are incontrovertible. Facts are facts. You may be convinced that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2017, but it was 2016. You may believe that Meryl Streep is the greatest actress of all time and has won the most Oscars, but you’d be wrong. (Katharine Hepburn won four to Streep’s three.)
Facts are a port in the cancer storm. They offer a safe harbor of certainty at a time when nothing is certain.
During highly competitive trivia contests, our team would engage in furiously whispered discussions about mythology, wars and rap artists. At times, I would steal glances at Diane to make sure that she was not feeling too sick or tired, and almost always, her eyes would be bright with knowledge.
Diane and I did well at many of the trivia contests, actually winning once or twice and receiving free desserts or gift certificates as prizes. Of course, the real prize was still being able to get out there and, through our trivia playing, say, “Screw you, cancer. You may win in the end, but right now, we’re sitting in a restaurant eating buttered noodles, and somehow, some way, remembering that Franklin Pierce was the 14th president of the United States.”
Diane knew a lot of stuff, especially about plants (she was a landscape designer), classical music (she was a piano performance major at a conservatory) and author Jane Austen. When she named the protagonist of the least of Austen’s novels (Catherine Morland of “Northanger Abbey”), I was proud — and I think she was too. We are the sum of what we know, and while cancer can take a lot away from us, it can’t rob us of who we are.
We stopped going to the contests in November when Diane’s pain and weakness became debilitating. She passed away in December.
I plan to attend a trivia contest with family members, and Diane will be there in spirit. Or perhaps as a spirit. Maybe she’ll be drawn to the contest as if she were being summoned in a seance, and when the host asks for the names of the four main parts of a flower, I’ll hear her familiar voice, authoritative and amused by my botanical ignorance, whispering, “Stamen, carpal, sepal, petal.”
Bruce Wexler is a Chicago-area book ghostwriter and editor who has worked on more than 200 books in the last 30 years. He has a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and lives in the western suburbs.
