And it did: in the summer of 1991. Borden was on break from the University of Chicago and they were in Bethesda visiting Laura’s mother, Elizabeth Hillenbrand, a journalist turned psychologist. Laura wanted to see the Saratoga race track in upstate New York. Car trips were very difficult for her and she knew the 10-hour ride might be trouble. But she was tired of living as an invalid.
The trip proved disastrous. They stopped halfway, at a friend’s house in New Jersey, with Laura racked by alternating chills and sweats.
“She was shaking, her teeth were chattering. She went ashen, she looked like a corpse,” Borden says. He called a hospital. “A nurse in the emergency room said it sounded liked shock and I should get her there as soon as possible.” But the hospital was far and neither Laura nor Borden thought she could make the trip. Plus, doctors hadn’t helped her in the past. “I fed her sugar and water,” Borden recalls. And then he lay down next to her.
Laura writes this in her New Yorker piece: “I lay there and trembled, whispering I love you, I love you, I love you to Borden through clenched teeth. I’m sorry, he said.”
That night, he says, is the most scared he’s ever been. “I thought she was going to die,” he says. So did she.
When she recovered they resumed their life, once again defined by the limits and uncertainties of her illness. There were times when he almost gave up.
“It seemed endless,” he says, “like our life together would mean endless misery. A few times I wondered if I should just go to escape the misery of watching her suffer.”
Why didn’t he?
“A number of things,” he says. “The first being love. And I didn’t want to leave her alone. The idea of her being by herself was horrible. I couldn’t allow her to be in that situation by herself.”
For the first 14 years, they didn’t speak of the strain the disease put on their relationship. Laura didn’t talk of her humiliation and guilt. Borden didn’t speak of his misery watching her suffer. “She’s had enough to deal with,” Borden says, “Like I’m going to complain because she’s sick?…Helplessness was a big issue for me. I just felt like a failure. Every day I couldn’t help her, it was another day of failure. A big project for me has been to learn to live with the fact that I had no control. I had to make my peace and realize my powerlessness. I’m tremendously angry at this disease, this invisible villain that’s ravaging Laura’s body.”
Yet he kept his thoughts to himself. As did Laura.
“It was very difficult for me to live with needing Borden to take care of me. I felt profoundly humiliated by it. I went from being someone he thought of as sexy and vital and alive and capable to someone who had lost control of her own body, and who was too weak to do even basic things for herself. He was immensely kind and caring, and never complained, but I was haunted by the fear of what he must really have felt. I knew it was a shattering experience for him to see someone he loved consumed by a disease, and I knew that he was hiding those feelings from me. The knowledge that he held that secret, and his pain from me, became as poisonous as the disease itself.”
Borden uses the word “corrosive” and, in fact, the silence had eaten away through the foundation of their relationship.
It was the summer of 2001. He had spent the previous year planning his wedding proposal to Laura, talking to other men about how they’d proposed, working out romantic settings for the big night. He’d even bought a ring. Then she got sick again, really sick.
“I finally had a breakdown,” he says, quietly. “I came into her office and started weeping.”
Laura steeled herself for the worst news: that he was leaving her. She couldn’t blame him if he did. “He was miserable. I thought I’d lost him.”
Fourteen years of grief, guilt, helplessness and sadness poured out of him, then her. They’d been afraid to talk, afraid of what their words might do.
“We love each other and we never wanted to hurt each other and that’s what got us into trouble,” Borden says.
“I did not think we could get through this,” Laura says.
They talked through the night and through the summer about the invisible villain and its effects on them both.
“He had to learn to say, ‘Your sickness is hard for me,’ and I had to learn to live with that guilt and not internalize it. That was our low point. We have just gotten better ever since.”
People who know Borden and Laura think they’re perfect together, even her B-CC boyfriend, Ethan Brown, 38, who lives in Vermont and owns a Great Harvest Bread bakery. “It takes a very special person to have another person love them as dearly and invest so much of themselves as Borden has in Laura’s life,” Brown says. “And at the same time, of course, Borden is getting a lot out of having someone like Laura care about him. The truth is that everybody has their hurdles in life, no one’s immune to overcoming obstacles and that’s just what they’re doing. They’re in the thick of it and they’re preserving and they’re together.”
Laura once joked she wanted Borden to propose to her either dressed as a pirate or a matador. “The theme was definitely tights,” he says. He knew better; it was too serious a matter to kid about.
On June 20, 2004, Borden rented a room at the Hay-Adams Hotel. The French doors in their room opened to a view of the White House. That night, he took her to Gerard’s Place, a French restaurant on 15th Street where they ate rockfish and something chocolate for dessert.
It was a rare good day for her, one in which she wasn’t too dizzy or too weak to walk. They reveled in the momentary freedom from her disease, strolling hand in hand to the Mall to see the Folklife Festival. Then they returned to the room where Borden had arranged a surprise that didn’t involve black tights.
“It was magical,” Borden says. “…There were strains of music in the background from the festival and there were loose rose petals around the room. There was champagne and candles by the front door.
“I went down on one knee and asked her to marry me.” They both cried as she said “Yes.”
“It was the best day of my life,” says Laura.
No wedding date has been set. Their lives are still defined by her illness. She’s waiting till she feels better. “It would be poor form for the bride not to show up for her wedding, don’t you think?”
Jody Jaffe is the author of Thief of Words and Shenandoah Summer.