PARSIPPANY — When cancer steals, it almost always steals mercilessly. It can be a thief of physical liberty, a thief of mental acuity at any age, and, although often going unrecognized, it can be a callous thief of the patient’s caregiver—whose health may be compromised in the pursuit of caring for the ones they love.
In a heart-rending yet emotionally dynamic debut, AJ Wyman delivers a novel he never expected to write. For a book that started as a “therapeutic exercise” to deal with the repercussions of his infant daughter’s cancer diagnosis, Wyman has transmuted a collection of once-scattered musings into an evocative, full-length piece, delving into poignant themes of grief, mental turmoil, and turbulent recovery.
It all started a little over a decade ago when a couple, AJ and Lindsey Wyman, discovered that no parent ever wants to hear: Emma Marie, their daughter of barely over seven months, had been diagnosed with an aggressive undifferentiated sarcoma. The tumor, which had been spreading malignantly throughout her tiny body, was relentless—stopping her heart only thirty seconds into her first chemotherapy session and causing the young infant to go into a series of successive seizures and experience a brain-altering stroke before she had even turned one.
AJ and Lindsey, understandably, had no idea how their daughter would fare with her cancer treatment in the coming months. The life they had fought so hard to give Emma was now placed in immediate jeopardy, and the heat of that crossfire was too intense for AJ Wyman to bear.
“I didn’t initially cope well with everything,” Wyman tells the Focus. “My wife, Lindsey, she’s a bit more methodical. She talks things out. But during the experience, I was guarded, closed off, clammed up, and angry. So when I eventually had downtime, I wasn’t being healthy with it.”
As detailed in The Grace to Carry On, Wyman’s debut novel, forthcoming on September 1st, his bad habits slowly progressed into a seemingly inescapable substance addiction. For Wyman, after months of struggling with near-fatal drug abuse, being caught in the act was the only way out. “The novel’s a cautionary tale, really,” Wyman reveals. “You still have to care for yourself even when caring for others.”
Now, a decade removed from the experience and clean, Wyman has been able to reflect on his feelings more profoundly. While Emma has been cancer-free since February of 2016, it has taken AJ Wyman a little longer to process and unpack the agitation that had built up inside of him during that fateful summer. His memoir, thus, is the culmination of his newfound angle on his cancer-parent experience—Wyman’s way of releasing pent-up feelings and advising others on how not to repeat his mistakes.
“Writing this novel took a huge weight off my shoulders,” Wyman tells the Parsippany Focus. “I got a lot out there that I had never gotten out before, and it felt like a big sigh of relief.”
The roughly 85,000-word project, which is entirely written from Wyman’s perspective, is just as much a recounting of his daughter’s cancer experience as it is a vulnerable tale of a father’s foggy, disoriented lens. Wyman doesn’t shy away from the taboo—in fact, he embraces it, or rather, lets you feel it as unfiltered as he did. It’s raw, honest, and “intentionally open.”
“The goal is to get [the novel] in the hands of someone who could use it—like a social worker, oncologist, caregiver, or even a cancer patient,” Wyman elaborates. “I want to show the importance of communication, open dialogues, and not letting things get bottled up. In other words: ‘This is what happened to us. Don’t let it happen to you.’”
Although the experience has left its indelible marks—such as routine check-up visits for Emma to monitor her cancer remission status and addiction rehabilitation on AJ’s part—Wyman feels “lucky to be around and relatively unscathed.” Now, Emma’s Angels, a makeshift community Facebook group that formed around Emma following her life-threatening chemotherapy treatment, serves as a vessel to inform supporters about other families’ journeys with cancer.
“Lindsey and I are both very open to talking to those going through similar journeys, whether it be addiction, cancer, or any other hardships,” Wyman adds. Understanding the weight a cancer diagnosis has for everyone in the family, the couple is “always happy to help individuals in need.”
For more information regarding The Grace to Carry On, click the attached link to the publisher’s (Open Books) page. Once the book is launched on September 1st, it will be available online on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s websites. You can pre-order The Grace to Carry On by scanning the QR code on the cover.
