Stupid Cancer had the chance to chat with Olivia, 38, & Ben, 40, who are in the process of navigating all of the ins and outs of Ben’s brain tumor diagnosis. The couple decided to get married while Ben was undergoing treatment after he had an emergency brain surgery to remove the tumor. This is a snapshot story of their love, their resilience, and their bond.

Stupid Cancer
I would love to hear a little bit about how you met.

Ben
I think it’s a little bit more fun from Olivia’s perspective, but the short gist is that we met at a party. She was still in college and I had just graduated.

Olivia
We both went to Cornell University and I’m two years younger than Ben. We were at this end-of-year release party for a student publication. I didn’t really know a lot of people there, but when I went outside and saw my friend Alan I was like, “Yes, okay, I know someone here.” I went over and Ben was there, talking with Alan, and that’s how we met. It turned out Ben was going to be in Ithaca for the summer while I was taking classes, so I asked him if he wanted to hang out. 

Ben
I think maybe a week or two after that, I went for a run and it was by Olivia’s house. I saw her on the porch and we talked for a bit. Then I invited her to come over because I was going to make guacamole. I made good guacamole, I guess!

Olivia
Yeah, his famous guacamole dip!

Stupid Cancer
I know that your wedding is a really important piece of your story. I would love to hear more about the decision to get married and what your wedding meant to you both. 

Ben
After I got sick, we discussed how things were going to go because, at that point, I was looking at a solid year of treatment. I was going to have to go back to New York for, potentially, the entire time. We were talking about what we were going to do and how we were going to support each other. What can we do to make sure that we’re prioritizing our relationship during all of this? We talked about it one night and it was probably a nine-hour conversation. The decision ended up just being that we just needed to get married. In the legal and the medical sense, we needed those protections. We needed to know that at any time, Oliva could walk into a room and anything could be shared with her. When you have cancer, so much of the time you’re planning for a potential catastrophe. And it’s not fun, but you do need to do it. So having something else, a wedding, to plan that was just purely for joy was a remarkable treat to have.  

Olivia
It allowed us to keep generating joy in our lives. It was really an organic expression of our love that we got to invite all the people in our lives to share. Ben and I got to work together and live in Hawaii during the pandemic for a couple of years before he got sick. We developed a special connection with Hawaii, which is why we wanted to have our ceremony there.

Ben
We liked the idea of getting married so much, we did three different ceremonies! 

Olivia
We ended up having the first event in New York City. It was in the form of a traditional Cantonese wedding banquet in Chinatown where I was born. It was primarily held for all the friends and family in the early parts of our lives. The second event was in Los Angeles, where we live now. It was a casual picnic at Griffith Park. It was to celebrate my queer family, because I identify as bi, and it was also to celebrate all the friends that we have made in LA for the last 13 years.

The third event we had in Hawaii and it was our actual ceremony. It was really intimate with 10 people. It was this amazing dream come true. My songwriter friend officiated the wedding and sang a song during the ceremony. My two designer friends designed all three of our outfits. It was very high fashion. It was very couture. 

We ended up with these three events and basically took our love on tour coast to coast. But it really was a way for us to not just go through treatment, but keep insisting on being ourselves and prioritizing our joy, insisting on the celebrations that we wanted and doing whatever it took. 

Ben
And in doing all of that, the cancer stopped. The morning after our event in New York City, I was flying to get an MRI. We just had to do them both; the cancer and the wedding.

Stupid Cancer
What advice would you share with other AYA couples who are also navigating cancer?  

Ben
It’s going to be hard. You have to be ready for how challenging it will be. You have to be ready to adjust and adapt to things that you couldn’t have planned for, or that maybe you did plan for but you really hoped wouldn’t come to pass. Outside of that, everyone’s cancer experience is so granular. It’s hard to say, “If you do A, and do B, you’ll be fine at C.” 

Being clear and open about where you’re at, sometimes day to day, sometimes not day to day and being honest about how you’re feeling in every regard – emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, anything – is important.  

Olivia
It is definitely going to be hard. Something we’ve learned from the monthly Stupid Cancer Discussion Series we attend is that there’s just so much more grief and trauma that we’ve gone through because of cancer. It’s grief over loss of identity, loss of livelihood, over all the dreams and aspirations that we’ve made or had for the rest of our lives. A lot of it is anticipatory grief for what’s to come. 

One thing that we learned while going through treatment was that there was going to be an emotional reckoning once you hit post-treatment survivorship. During treatment, you’re actively fighting, trying to deal with the cancer and keep it at bay. You don’t really have the time to consider and process all the emotions and the trauma. And then afterward is when it just kind of comes rushing in. 

I think that the grief and the trauma are already hard enough on their own for any patient or caregiver, but being in a relationship together, the decision to get married after his surgery, and being married have really helped us face this together. Every day isn’t roses, but it has helped us. In closing, I would say don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. People can’t read your mind. People want to help, but you have to be very specific and direct about what you need. And more often than not, we found that people want to be there for us.