WASHED ASHORE

A newspaper editor describes his experience as husband to a minister and breast cancer patient.

Eville, the editor of the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard and a New Jersey native who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen (“essential to life”), spent time in the banking industry in New York City and then as a development executive in the film business. What he wanted, however, was to be a writer. While in New York, he reunited with high school classmate Cathlin, who was attending seminary at Judson Church. They fell in love, and the author admits it was an odd pairing for a man who “tended to keep my head down to avoid anything I feared might be theologically contagious.” By the early 2000s, they were married and living on the Vineyard. Cathlin became the minister of the First Congregational Church in West Tisbury, and Eville was a stay-at-home father (“the best job in the world”) to son Hardy and his little sister, Pickle. Eville eventually rose to become the Gazette’s editor, but life had a cruel twist in store: Cathlin’s diagnosis of breast cancer. In short chapters, the author chronicles the ordeal, which included chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and months of radiation before she was cancer-free. For a book about a woman’s breast cancer, it’s odd that much of the focus is on the husband rather than the wife. Most of the story is about his relationship with his children, his past, and the effect his wife’s cancer had on him. Readers learn comparatively little about Cathlin. What’s here, however, is agreeably written and contains many charming scenes, from Eville’s introducing Pickle to Springsteen by singing from Seeger Sessionswhile he toilet trained her to the children’s sweet reactions to their mother’s illness—as when Hardy drew with his crayons “a battle scene with numerous bad-guy cells and a ray gun destroying them; oddly enough, they all had mustaches.”

A sensitive portrait of one family’s struggles with illness, even if the spotlight isn’t always where it should be.