Two more different people than we would be hard to find. Uriel was a ger. Tall, good-looking, he was talented in many ways, from repairing a leaking pipe to doing automobile work. I navigate an endeavor of the mind — music theory.

Uriel was tremendously generous with his talents — the spackle patches in our kitchen stayed unfinished and the walls unpainted because he worked late every night to fix a major problem on the mikvah in Lexington.

Uriel had the intestinal condition colitis. He had told me this before we got married, and I knew that at some point the colitis could turn cancerous. But life is a gamble, and you cannot decline to live because there is a question mark hanging over what might happen. You just get on with it and work around the problem as best you can. Uriel took daily medication, and sometimes the condition gave him discomfort, but he lived a full, active life in spite of it, and no one knew, apart from his immediate work supervisor and me.

My goal as a musical theorist is to explain the multi-leveled structure of classical music, much of which I carry in my mind. At the time I was also writing my second book. Sometimes when I looked preoccupied over supper, Uriel would tease me to the kids: "Look, Mommy's hearing music in her head again." I smiled as I resurfaced — I was doing just that.

No mental performances of music on this fateful day, though. Uriel had experienced an unusual and prolonged bout of pain in his side. His doctor had seen him for a full physical only a few weeks before, and said that everything looked good. Now, concerned as we all were about the pain, he had scheduled Uriel for a battery of tests.

Under his father’s watchful eye, Avi lights the Chanukah menorah.

Biopsies were taken; a week later we came back for the results. The specialist was both sympathetic and grave. "I wish I could give you good news, Mr. Garritano, but I'm sorry, unfortunately the results of the tests were positive."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that the growth obstructing the intestine and causing the pain is malignant."

There was a long silence. Finally I asked, "What are the options?" He said carefully: "If you are agreeable, I will arrange for you to meet with a surgeon in two days' time. I feel that is by far the best option." We surmised from his tone that there was no second or third option.

The surgeon was small, rather rotund, with a high color and bright, intelligent brown eyes, and he came bouncing in, chewing gum. No question about his competence, though. As he made his examination, he momentarily stopped chewing and his jaw dropped. He looked up, expecting to make eye contact with the specialist, who had come in to observe the exam. Instead, in that naked moment, he found himself looking at me, and I looked him straight in the face. Quickly recovering, and briskly resuming chewing, he said: "We will cut out the troublesome part and reattach the two ends of the intestine." He made it sound as commonplace as a plumber fixing a pipe. Maybe he felt he had to reduce the tension and sound as if all would be under control, but a person's physical reality can't be reduced to human plumbing. No one was fooled. Uriel said nothing, so I finally spoke up: "When do you want him in?" The surgeon said, "Tomorrow."

A few days after the surgery, Uriel came home. The kids were very sweet, coming home from school and reminding each other to "Sh! Tati's resting." While I understood that Uriel had undergone major surgery, I was concerned that the pain medication did not seem to be working. I called his doctor.

Roger Platt was astute, experienced, and caring. Along with his internist practice at New England Medical Center, he was its administrative director, so I felt that Uriel would get good follow-up care with Dr. Platt. When I called and explained my concern, he said: "You know, this is a very bad cancer."

I replied, "Yes, I know that." Sensing there was more, I said: "Dr. Platt, there's something you're not telling me. I want to know the truth."

After a long moment, during which he contemplated his words with meticulous care, he said: "This is a cancer we can't cure."

"But why not?" I burst out.

"Because the cancer has spread to the liver."

"What about a liver transplant?"

"He couldn't take two major operations, even if we could find a suitable liver. But it wouldn't help, I'm afraid; it's already spread too far."

Whatever I felt at that moment, I realized how hard this was for him to say. He was such a positive doctor, so committed to healing, using all the resources of the latest technology. But sometimes even the most sophisticated technology is powerless, and you have to tell your patient's nearest family that he or she is going to die. So even in the abyss, I felt for him, and to lighten the load, I said, "I think you've spoiled my afternoon."

He gave a small laugh, because he understood that I had recognized how hard the news had been to give. He said, "I'll be in touch," and rang off. Once or twice in our lives we get a moment of intense clarity, as if we see a plan or understand a purpose. Standing in the kitchen on that early Wednesday afternoon, I recognized that what was happening was Hashem's will. He was guiding the events. I knew that He certainly had given me the tools to deal with this challenge — the ability to earn money to support our home, and somehow the strength for all of us to cope with what was going to come.

As I stood there, I made two important decisions. First, with the exception of two close friends, I would tell no one about the gravity of Uriel's condition. Second, and even harder, I decided not to tell the children the extent of the situation — not yet. The time would come, and traumatic it was when it did. In the meantime, I resolved to maintain an external appearance of normality for the next few weeks. I carried the burden virtually alone, seeing the constant deterioration as the disease devoured the man I had been married to for eleven years. If I could face this, I could face anything; I would stay the course.

Uriel was re-admitted to the hospital on Sunday, July 9th. I was with him constantly, except when I picked up the kids from day camp to visit. I don't think they really understood how ill Tati was; perhaps they thought he was just having a difficult time recovering from surgery.

One very close friend came to visit on Wednesday, July 12th. By Thursday, Uriel was mostly unconscious, regaining awareness for a few moments and slipping back again.

On Friday afternoon one of the hospital visitors brought in a pair of electric candles, because the hospital did not allow open flames with so much oxygen around. A warm and understanding woman, she handed me the candles and spontaneously hugged me. I sat by his bedside and read aloud stories from the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Wonders and Miracles. Every so often, hearing fragments of these marvelous stories float through the open door, one of the nurses would pause and smile, and in some way I felt Uriel's neshamah could hear the stories he so loved.

Staying as late as I could, I kissed him and left the book open, as if I would be back soon and continue with the next story. I drove home to look after the children for Shabbos. On motzei Shabbos came the phone call that he had passed away.

Many friends and acquaintances came to the shivah. Yet I knew that everyone has their own concerns and their own families, and that I would quickly have to take care of mine.

Uriel and the kids at Havdalah.

At first, I was jostled by all kinds of fears: What if I fall down the basement steps while taking the wash down?; What if I have an accident in the car? But I pulled myself together, saying, "Stop this! You can't live the rest of your life whatiffing! You are not going to fall down the basement steps and you're not going to crash the car." Despite my serrated nerves, I felt that I could cope, that I was going to go on with my life in a positive and purposeful way, and not just eke out a physical existence. My greatest challenge now was to reinforce and strengthen my family life and our Yiddishkeit. Hard as it was going to be, I was not going to just exist. I was going to grow.

And so I got good at asking for information, and making choices in areas I had never before tackled. Already during the shloshim (the thirty days after a close relative's death), I decided I would no longer live with spackle patches in the kitchen. I was going to paint it. After that I would refinish the hardwood floors in the living and dining rooms.

This was an ambitious undertaking, but I was determined, and there was something therapeutic about those hard, physical jobs — sanding and vacuuming, staining the floors a rich walnut with brushes and rags, and varnishing them afterwards. Emotionally the turmoil was furious, but at least I could come to grips with my physical environment and do something about improving it. I could put my house in order.

Every day I made a concerted effort to be loving and understanding to the children. I dressed smartly for work and gave good classes to my students. Two and a half months later, in October, I delivered a paper in French at an international conference at the University of Geneva.

I was now doing two people's jobs, and with the constant physical and emotional pressure to keep everything together, I was exhausted. It is very important to recognize when you need help and what kind of help it is you need; at this time I needed practical help. I needed someone to help me clean, because I could not continue to teach my courses well, support two children through their own grief, and buy and cook food as well as clean the house. A friend helped me find a splendid Russian Jewish woman, who ever since has come and cleaned for two hours a week.

In all of this I set aside time, private time to think and remember, usually when the children were asleep or when I was driving to work.

When Fran, a close friend, died a few years ago, I found myself talking to her in my mind. This was how I could be close to her although we no longer were able to talk in person. For more than a year this went on, and I knew it was my way of grieving and coming to terms with her death. One day the internal conversations stopped. I knew that although she was no longer with me in this physical existence, I would remember and love Fran forever.

I now used my drive time to talk in my mind to Uriel. Over the next few months I mentally talked through all that tangled, emotionally freighted, unfinished business — my grief, my worries, my anger, my love. And just as I looked at his ravaged face in the hospital without turning away, so I tried to face and sort out all the emotional knots of our life, one by one. Finally I felt I had come to terms with myself as well as with him, and in the end, I was able to make peace and ask forgiveness for both of us.

Uriel, Barbara, Netanya, and Avi in the mountains of New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, my children were undergoing their own ordeal. No one can comprehend what the loss of a parent means to a child, unless one has been a child who lost a parent. There is that unbearable emptiness, that pain of loneliness. My father died of a massive heart attack when I was seven, which was Avi's age when Uriel died. Both of my children had gone sledding with Uriel and played in the snow, but it was Avi who held the light while Uriel did jobs in the basement. And it was Avi who fetched tools or held the board steady while Uriel sawed a piece of wood. I now tried to encourage Avi to do woodworking, but after a couple of half-hearted tries, he stopped and said: "I don't think I'll do any more on it, Mommy."

Fortunately a more or less chance conversation with another parent brought up the topic of activities for Jewish boys, and she mentioned that her husband ran a cub scout group. Perhaps Avi would try it.

Avi took to cub scouts from the first meeting. He now also builds superbly creative models with Lego, and plays with them intently in his own imaginative world. One door closes, another opens.

For Netanya, things were both more and less difficult. While she had many more friends than Avi and started to spend additional time with them, I felt she was struggling with her own painful grief and loss. At times she was sullen, at others lethargic, and sometimes just plain cranky. One night she had been in a particularly bad mood, and at bedtime worked herself up to a screaming rage. She had been under both emotional tension and pressure from her school workload, and it was all too much. I held her in my arms until she became calm, and told her that I understood her sense of frustration at not having the time she needed.

Together we worked out a schedule to help her manage her time better, so she could do her homework and still have some time to read and play. She does have a lot of homework, but she has developed her own system for handling it. She goes regularly to friends' homes to do homework, and quite often to sleep over. She shows a new independence, and as with Avi, I am very proud of her.

At this time I understood that something essential was missing. As I said, I had been writing a book when Uriel took sick. I now tried to pick up the threads of my writing, but the threads were broken, and I had no clue how to mend them. I knew that my ability to write was connected with being able to grow, so this writing block was both a creative wasteland and symbolic of a larger impasse that somehow I had to break.

Night after night, after the children had gone to bed, I sat at my desk in front of a blank piece of paper and willed myself to write. But the unconscious lock would not turn, the ideas would not be forced, and the paper stayed blank. I felt defeated.

One Sunday afternoon, with the children at a friend's house, I started reading through an article I had written on Schubert's last song cycle, "Die Winterreise" ("The Winter's Journey"), that I was including as a chapter in the book. Both the musical work and the article carry an extraordinary story.

"Die Winterreise" concerns a young man who has been rejected by the girl he loves. Unable to bear the reminders of the town she lives in and the places where they spent time together, he wanders away on an uncharted journey into a winter's landscape. As he goes, the songs describe how the bleak setting reflects all the stages of his emotions. Experiences of anger, reminiscence of the past, and numbness mark the journey. The journey does not cease to be a physical journey, but it does transmute into an inner, psychological journey that interacts with and is mirrored in the winter landscape. "Die Winterreise" is a great work, one of profound beauty and expressive truth.

When I first wrote on "Die Winterreise," I was the same age as Schubert when he composed it — thirty-one — which was also the year of his death. At the time I was going to a class in Tanya with the renowned teacher Tali Loewenthal in London. Tali had urged me to send a copy of the article to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. "But the Rebbe is tremendously busy," I protested. "And why should he be interested in an article on music?" Tali insisted, and more to please him than anything else, I agreed.

In his reply, the Rebbe said that he had read the article with due attention, and that I had achieved insight into "Die Winterreise." He gave me a brachah for my work and encouraged me to continue with it.

Now, almost without thinking about it, I started making changes to my article, clarifying expressions and writing a richer and more satisfying ending. As I reached the last page of amendments and changes, I realized that somehow I had found the way back into my work, and not just into my work but into my inner life. I was living through my own winter's journey. If I could re-form the artistic writing about Schubert's Winterreise journey, then I could come to terms with my own winter's journey. By doing so, I could become empowered by it and ultimately re-create my own life.

I now understood the full meaning of the Rebbe's brachah, and also what I had to do. I had an agenda to fulfill on every front. I had to get supper on the table every night, work to support the home, encourage the children to bring their friends and guests into the house again for Shabbos and yom tov, buy the sneakers, pay the bills — and finish the book.

The first year was gritty. All the meals were cooked, all the classes were given, but I had bursts of misery (which I hid), spasms of shortness of breath, a choking feeling in the throat. "Tu sei morta, ed io respiro" ("You are dead and I am alive" — literally, "I breathe") is a famous line from Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo," when Orfeo hears the news of his wife's death. Orfeo could descend to the Underworld and try to bring back the spirit of Euridice, but the rest of us have to stay right here. "Breathe," I muttered to myself. "Just concentrate on breathing. Calm down."

My son Avi was miserable and lonely, and my heart went out to him as he went to the men's side in shul by himself, while all the other boys had their fathers. The men in the community helped by having Avi stand near them to daven, or by bringing him to shul on Friday night.

It was hard for me to say Kiddush. I sounded harsh as a raven, while Uriel's voice had soared in performance of a mitzvah he loved. On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, I thought the kids might say something like, "Good job, Mommy," for everything I had worked so hard to get ready. Instead Netanya said: "You forgot the fish head, Mommy." I was about to retort, "Is that all you can say?" Instead I said: "But I remembered a lot of other things, and the table looks very nice, don't you think? By the way, you're quite right, I did forget the fish head; you'll have to remind me next year." We all smiled, and the tension dissipated. We all learned about avoiding hurtful criticism and framing what you want to say more kindly.

I dreaded Pesach. Uriel had always been such a wonderful help, and I doubted whether I could handle all the preparations during the busiest time of the academic year. "Look kids," I said, "this has to be a team effort. I want you both to clean your own rooms for Pesach, lifting up the mattresses, vacuuming underneath, and vacuuming your toys. And until Pesach we eat only in the kitchen." Avi and Netanya did a great job on their rooms and helped me bring the everyday dishes up into the attic and the Pesach dishes down. They were so proud that they could be such terrific help.

On the first Seder night they were wonderful, relating everything they had learned and singing their songs. We were living through those first rites of passage together.

All this time I kept thinking about the Winterreise article. I constantly heard the work in my head, even in my dreams. It was as if there were unfinished business connected with the work. Toward the end of "Die Winterreise," beset by a numbing grief, there is a sudden flash of energy in the song "Mut" ("Courage"). Neither bravado nor digression, "Mut" is an intrinsic part of the work. I understood that even the most dire circumstances can be energized by courage and hope. I also realized that the experiential reality of love and loss in "Die Winterreise" is an unfolding part of a larger life journey. Life was going on, and I had to go on with it, not just responding to its immediate, practical demands, but taking the initiative.

I continue to make strides in this direction. Among the initiatives I undertook was to finish the book, a resolution I made in early 1997. At the time I was two-thirds through a chapter and simply had not had the time to finish it. Then Victor Rosenbaum, Director of the Longy School of Music, where I work, asked me if I would deliver a presentation as part of the school's celebration of the bicentennial of Schubert's birth. Once again, I took out the Winterreise article, and one final time, in a few places I had not seen before, I found, almost instinctively, the right words.

When these revisions were done, and the presentation written, I drew a line under the article, so to speak. It had reached its definitive version. I gave the presentation on "Die Winterreise" on my mother's birthday; I had made my own journey, through my very difficult winter, and emerged victorious.

During the next five months I continually worked on the book. Although one of the final chapters, on Mahler, was extremely complex, the last two chapters surged ahead, one idea following hard on the heels of the next.

When it was all done I arranged the chapters under their subheadings, and understood, finally and in retrospect, the underlying theme of the book and how its design had evolved through the different subheadings and chapters. It was only then that I was able to write the preface. The book is called The Philosopher's Stone: Essays in the Transformation of Musical Structure, and is scheduled for publication this year by Pendragon Press.

At this point, I have no idea what the future will bring, and whether I will get married again or not. I do know, though, that Hashem put me here for a purpose and gave me specific tasks to do. Since He gives me the strength to do these tasks, I have no right to give up, give in, or do less than my best.

I am trying to make a home for my children, a career for myself, to teach my students in the most positive way, and to give back to my community what it has given to me. Beyond Cancer is not just the trudging extension of existence, but a challenge to find new practical resources, to re-create family life, and to rethink our life's direction and meaning. It draws from us the strength to confront obstacles, and in facing our fears with determination and courage, it becomes a triumph of the spirit.

Dr. Barbara R. Barry and her family live in Brighton, MA.