October is the month of the year where many of us welcome the chance to be scared. Even for those of us that enjoy scary movies all year, the Halloween season brings cult classics and horror into the mainstream. For the horror fan, there’s a certain delight in the converting of new blood to the joys and terrors of ghosts and monsters.

October also breeds anticipation. Autumn has arrived, but the beauty of the leaves and milder temperatures will too soon give way to lonely, stark branches and unforgiving cold winds. Right now with the trees changing from green to red and orange, the ghosts slip easily in and out of our rooms, whispering our names, slithering like memories half remembered among the crisp tumble of dried, decaying leaves.

Anticipation is really the axle between fear and hope. In October, 2014, my husband and I decided to get married on our way to Crypticon – a local horror convention. Far from a hopeful romantic moment, my marriage proposal, blurted out while driving, was a practical reaction to the scary situation we had found ourselves in – a confirmed cancer sequel that no one asked for or wanted. We had been preparing ourselves for this news, but receiving a Stage IV rectal cancer diagnosis is still (pardon the pun) pretty shitty.

Maybe it’s fitting that October is associated with fear and anxiety inducing scares and gruesome creatures. The holiday we both loved, always seemed to have a trick up its sleeve. I’d like to believe that the horror we enjoyed, prepared us for the horrors that his cancer delivered to us on a regular basis. The physical transformations from surgeries and chemotherapy, some immediate, others gradual like rust consuming his old brown car, created an end result not of power, but skeletal and brittle; one that I could injure with a touch. 

As I write this, it’s October 2022 and a full year has passed without him. The Halloween stores are open again and all the decorations are out on the shelves. I can hear him excitedly asking if I want to go look at the Halloween stuff (and I definitely do). I ask him to come with me and I find myself talking to the air beside me, under my breath, while I smile and poke at decapitated rubber heads impaled with rubber hooks and rubber stakes. I feel like a crazy person. My right hand curls into itself, a wish for his hand to find mine.

The fear that you choose to allow into your lives however, is not the same as the fear that enters your home uninvited and then overstays its welcome for seven and a half years. It isn’t as simple as changing the channel on the cancer visitor – that’s where the other side of anticipation comes in – hope. Far more insidious than fear, hope is a lifeline to good news, a consumer of internet medical advice, and the builder of futures. Hope allows you to believe that the fear squatting in your life can be overcome through sheer willpower and determination. Hope is often a liar and a fool. 

Or maybe I am the fool. Because, even now, I continue to invite hope into my life. As Horse lay dying and yellow from the rectal cancer that migrated to his liver until it was more tumor than healthy tissue, I still had hope. I had hope that the new regimen sitting in an unopened mailer in the kitchen would work, hope that he would be lucid before he died, and hope that my skeptical self would someday see him again. I need hope to believe I can be the person I promised I’d be, shortly before he left me behind.

I hope I’m not a liar.