My Wife Was Slowly Dying of Cancer. Each Night I Turned to the Same American Ritual to Cope.
The early months of the 2026 Major League Baseball season marked the beginning of what might become the greatest season ever played by the greatest baseball player—and my favorite player—who has ever lived.
For years, I have watched Shohei Ohtani with the kind of devotion only baseball invites: daily, statistically, ritually, and sometimes irrationally. I followed him as a teenage pitching and hitting phenom in Japan. I tracked his 2018 arrival in the United States, where he has spent the better part of a decade rewriting what we thought possible in a modern ballplayer. I watched his rise with the Los Angeles Angels, years in which, despite setbacks and surgeries, he won two American League MVPs and emerged as the first true two-way superstar in a century. I followed him across town to the Dodgers, with whom he has won back-to-back National League MVPs and World Series championships. With his throwing arm fully recovered from a second Tommy John surgery and his bat as dangerous as ever, this season promised to be his best yet.
In mid-February, around the time pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, Anna, my wife of nearly 17 years, and the mother of our two young daughters, began experiencing what doctors first thought was pneumonia. But it wasn’t pneumonia. It was the return of the late-stage breast cancer she had first faced in 2020, now spread to her lungs. As spring ball unfolded in Florida and Arizona, our family entered another season of scans, hospital stays and releases, obsessive oxygen checks, and late-night searches for obscure medication side effects—all part of the terrible education by which we relearned the vocabulary of terminal illness.
During the baseball season’s first months, Ohtani surpassed even the wildest expectations of his fans and the sports-talk world, racking up an ERA below 1 and regularly hitting leadoff home runs. At the same time, Anna got worse. As the terror—and then the reality—of losing her came into focus, my fandom became something stranger and more necessary. Each night, after returning from the hospital or coming upstairs from the makeshift hospital suite in our basement, I turned on the television—or, more often, YouTube—to watch Ohtani do the impossible.
By late May, Anna was gone. She was dead at 44. Worse still, she died not of the cancer but of a reaction to the medication that was supposed to extend her life. She leaves behind me, a shattered husband, and our two daughters, ages 7 and 11.
This spring, I lived inside this juxtaposition of impossibilities. In one, each night, I watched Ohtani rupture baseball’s categories of what a single player can do. In the other, Anna’s decline and death felt like the end of history. I do not mean that as political theory. I mean it domestically. Before she died, the creation of our own history was a project we shared. We would keep raising our girls through school drop-offs, dance and violin lessons, soccer games, bedtimes, laundry cycles, and the quiet assumption that, after the kids were asleep, there would always be more nights together, talking through the grievances and triumphs of the day. After Anna’s death, the fulfillment of that history became impossible.
And yet this is why witnessing Ohtani’s unprecedented greatness became more than a distraction. Night after night, before her death and after, Ohtani offered a counterexample to the metaphysics of loss. This season of grief arrived to our small family as an apocalypse, destroying its very existence. Ohtani’s season has shown baseball that it contains universes it never imagined. My daughters and I will not get over Anna’s death. But Ohtani has helped me glimpse that we may get through it—and that, someday, getting through it may itself become the beginning of another history.
Baseball has always been my favorite of America’s major sports. I grew up in Oneonta, New York, in territory caught between the greater fandoms of the Red Sox and Yankees. More importantly, my hometown sits on the Susquehanna, just 25 minutes downstream from that river’s headwaters in Cooperstown. Which means I grew up in the shadow of the National Baseball Hall of Fame—the sport’s shrine to its greatest players, where the game both remembers and consecrates its past. Perhaps not coincidentally, I became a historian of American religions. Which is another way of saying I have spent my adult life studying how Americans make meaning through mythologies, rituals, bodies, sacred calendars, and reverence for the dead. You could say baseball was my first archive. Before I knew how to read footnotes, I learned to read the stats on the backs of baseball cards. Before I understood the power of liturgy, I understood the power of a pitcher touching the rosin bag, a batter stepping into the box, the umpire crouching low, and the crowd rising before a pitch is thrown.
History and ritual are bound together in baseball. The sport reinvents itself each season while treating its resistance to change as one of its most sacred attributes. That continuity allows every living player to enter into an argument with the dead. Who has done this before? Whose record might he break? Which era does this resemble? Every pitch and swing is placed inside that history. Every season becomes a commentary on past ones. Baseball reassures itself through these comparisons.
Shohei Ohtani breaks that reassurance.
He does not merely play baseball exceedingly well. Baseball knows what to do with greatness. Between 1 and 2 percent of players who have ever appeared in the major leagues—which itself is an infinitesimal fraction of those who have played the game competitively—become members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
What makes Ohtani feel almost impossible is that he has overcome the professional game’s most basic dividing line: the line between pitcher and hitter. He has collapsed the distance between those who spend years refining their bodies and minds to make their livings from the mound and those who do so from the batter’s box. Ohtani reforges these two bodies into one 6-foot-4-inch frame. He is both Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole, with Elly De La Cruz–like speed and presence on the basepaths.
And yet Ohtani does not reject baseball’s basic conceits. He reaffirms them. He invites those of us who watch him to return to our childhood beginnings with the game. All baseball players at least try to hit, pitch, and run in Little League. And the pubescent heroes from our hometowns—whose names most of us can still remember decades later—excelled at all three. Nor does Ohtani reject baseball history. He returns us to its glory days. After all, the consensus greatest player before Ohtani, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, was both a great pitcher and a great hitter, though Ruth did both at the highest level for only one season. And in Ohtani’s wake, professional baseball’s future will be marked by his pitching-and-hitting imitators.
But for me, bearing witness to Ohtani’s time-collapsing and history-remaking season has become something like a sacred ritual. Ohtani does not console me, nor does he make me optimistic about the future. Certainly, the sacrality I have ascribed to his actions does not suggest the obscene idea that Anna’s suffering and death have any inherent, divine meaning. Instead, Ohtani provides evidence that the world is not as closed as it feels now, in this season of her decline, death, and permanent departure from my family’s lives.
Ohtani suggests, indirectly to be sure, that the inherited structures of grief—the pain and suffering that my girls, Anna’s friends and family, and I feel so deeply in our bodies and minds—can break toward possibility rather than only toward loss and absence.
There are other reasons Ohtani has become part of my season of grief. In some ways—and I hesitate to press this too hard—he reminds me of my wife. Anna was half Japanese. Ohtani’s arrival on the American baseball scene also coincided roughly with the beginning of Anna’s yearslong battle with cancer.
Anna and Ohtani share other qualities. Like my wife, Ohtani is unfailingly polite. He is diligent to an almost absurd degree. He is reliable in the old-fashioned sense: not merely talented, but disciplined, prepared, exacting. And yet he is also aloof, not only because he uses an interpreter but because he appears to reserve some essential interior part of himself from public consumption. He is fiercely competitive too. Anna was like that. She was loving, funny, and devoted, but she could also be inscrutable, even to those of us who loved her best. In marriage, this could frustrate me. In death, it feels sacred. It feels quintessentially Anna. And just like Ohtani, Anna was fiercely competitive. Anna hated to lose at games—especially to me, and especially at Scrabble and tennis, which she approached with intense preparation and absolute confidence that she would beat me. She almost always did.
Ohtani is not Anna. Baseball is not grief therapy. The Dodgers are not quite a theology. And yet rituals have never required exact equivalence. Rituals work by contact, repetition, and return. This season of watching Ohtani surpass even his own previous greatness has given me, Anna’s spouse living with unbearable loss, somewhere to go with my grief. It has given me, the remaining parent of Anna’s children forced to do the impossible each day, a way to do just that.
The overlap of these two seasons is almost too precise not to find meaning in it. As talk of Ohtani’s full-strength return as both pitcher and hitter began in earnest in February, Anna’s cancer, now metastasized, was rediscovered. Soon after, in March, while the World Baseball Classic was unfolding, we took our last trip as a family, to Puerto Rico, where part of the tournament was being played. It was a trip long delayed by COVID and by Anna’s first bout with cancer. In Tokyo, Ohtani opened Japan’s title defense against Chinese Taipei by doubling on the first pitch of the game. In the second inning, he hit a grand slam. Japan won 13–0.
Soon after, we returned to Nebraska, and Anna began the treatment that we now know cost her time rather than added to it. On March 31, Ohtani made his 2026 pitching debut against the Cleveland Guardians. That day, Anna was back in the hospital for a procedure to relieve fluid building up in her lungs. Ohtani threw six scoreless innings, allowed one hit, struck out six, walked three, and reached base three times. The Dodgers won 4–1.
For the month of April, Anna was in and out of the hospital. During her stays, she would send me home at night to look after the girls and get some sleep. Friends offered to stay with the girls at our home so I could sit vigil in the uncomfortable recliner beside Anna’s bed. We told them thank you, but no. Privately, we laughed off their generosity as overly sentimental. We weren’t one of those couples who needed to spend every sleeping moment together. But we also didn’t yet know how numbered her days were.
Before I left the hospital, or during the increasingly rare evenings when Anna was home and still in our bed, we had our ritualized talks—or what remained of them. For much of the past two decades, Anna and I had ended the day by “downloading”: children, careers, money, gossip, logistics, grievances. We repeated the little inside jokes that bind couples together so intimately that you recognize the knots only after one of you is gone forever.
As her breathing worsened, those talks became shorter. Anna often said she just wanted to sleep. With our voices quieted, our room would fill with the excruciating sound of her struggling to pull oxygen into her failing lungs. In response, I would shove my AirPods deep into my ears and open YouTube to watch highlights of that day’s Dodgers game. Or, failing that, I searched for commentary proclaiming Ohtani’s unprecedented greatness. I had no patience for half-speak. I did not want to hear him compared to Babe Ruth, as he had been for years. I needed everyone to agree that Ohtani is not the next Ruth. Nor the next Jordan, LeBron, Tiger, or Messi. I needed everyone to proclaim that Ohtani is himself, alone. For me—a reluctant agnostic—if Ohtani is singular in all of (sports) history, then my reverence for what he has accomplished would surpass mere fandom and move upward, towards the transcendent.
By early May, Anna still wasn’t getting better. But she seemed stable enough to make a long-planned weekend trip to Vermont to celebrate my stepdad’s 80th birthday with my loving, unorthodox, sometimes wild extended family. Ever the diligent and practical employee, after she sent me and the girls home to Lincoln, Anna drove herself to her company’s home office in Connecticut for its weeklong annual gathering. But when she flew back to Nebraska at the end of the week, she had to be wheeled between gates at O’Hare to catch her connection home. Soon after, she was back in the hospital.
The last week of her life unfolded like a Greek epic, then tragedy. It began with an early-morning return to the hospital, grim visits from pulmonologists, final “come to Jesus” admissions from her oncologists about the cause of her decline, frantic calls to her closest family and mine to get here fast, a Hail Mary infusion of another drug to reverse the cancer medication that had scarred her lungs so badly, and, finally, her brief trip to hospice. During this time, I was by Anna’s side, except when I was preparing the girls for their mother’s death. I did not watch Ohtani, though he had some of his greatest performances of the season. On May 20, against the San Diego Padres, he hit a first-pitch leadoff home run, then pitched five scoreless innings, earned the win, and lowered his ERA to 0.73. On May 27, the evening after Anna died, Ohtani led off against the Colorado Rockies with another home run. Then he threw six hitless innings. The Rockies managed to score a run without a hit. The Dodgers won 4–1.
For the first few nights after Anna’s death, after getting my girls settled into bed, I could not turn to baseball. Instead, for hours, I roamed the streets of our neighborhood, completing what I came to call my “werewolf walks.” Back stooped, hands and fingers spread into claws, barefoot, tears streaming down my face, I walked past neighbors’ houses lit by the soft blue glow of ordinary evenings. Somewhere behind those windows were nightly broadcasts, maybe even Ohtani’s latest feats. But I was outside, howling at the moon.
On June 4, I remember coming home before sunrise to make sure the girls would not miss me when they woke. I fell into bed and, for the first time since Anna’s death, went searching for Ohtani. The previous night, he had put up perhaps the most preposterous stat line of his career. Against the Diamondbacks, he threw six scoreless innings, struck out six, allowed only two hits and a walk, and reached base five times. I shook my head and cracked perhaps my first smile in weeks. I experienced the unearthly heights of his performance as a baseball inverse to the depths of my own grief.
On June 6, for the first time in months, I sat and watched a game live. That night, against Ohtani’s former team, the Angels, the Dodgers scored nine runs in the first inning. Ohtani capped it off with a two-run homer, his 11th of the season. That was all the Dodgers would score, but it was enough. They won 9–2.
Afterward, I fell asleep in a way that almost felt normal. I had not taken any of the sleep aids doctors had prescribed or concerned friends had given me on the sly. Nor had I collapsed from exhaustion after walking the streets like an animal. I simply slept. For a few hours, perhaps baseball, and a little time, had given me enough form to enter the night like a human being.
Then I woke as if a gunshot had gone off beside my head. I bolted upright in full panic. My body knew before my mind could narrate it. Something was wrong. Someone was missing. Anna was gone. I raced around the house looking for her, as if she had simply moved to another room. I screamed, “Where are you? Where are you?”
I have since learned that such a panicked quest, and the question at the heart of it, comes from neurobiology as much as metaphysics. Mary-Frances O’Connor, in The Grieving Brain, argues that grief is fundamentally the work of adapting the mind to a radically altered reality. The brain builds an internal map of the people we love—their location in our lives, their routines, their expected presence. When someone dies, that map does not immediately update. As O’Connor writes, “A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time.” In that waking panic, I was not losing my mind. My brain was following the map it had relied on for years, searching frantically for my person, who was no longer there.
And here we reach the limit of rituals, even those as potent as the one I created from bearing witness to Ohtani’s greatness. A ritual can hold you for an inning, a night, sometimes even long enough to fall asleep. Rituals cannot resurrect the dead.
Still, rituals provide more than consolation, more than the suggestion that “things will be OK.” Things will not and cannot be OK, because Anna is gone forever. But the power of my Ohtani ritual started smaller and stranger than consolation. My grief says: The world is over. Ohtani has shown: The world is more mysterious than its own presumed laws and limits. My grief says: The future is only the continuation of absence. Ohtani has shown: Even the oldest rituals can become sites of the extraordinary.
Every game is new and not new. Every pitch has happened before and has never happened before. The ritual repeats until, suddenly, the world opens to something unprecedented.
That is what Ohtani embodies. He is not outside baseball history. He is impossibly inside it. He has learned its forms so completely that he breaks them without abandoning them. He shows that history is not only precedent. It is rupture. It is not only inheritance. It is possibility.
Shohei Ohtani is not healing me. That would be too dismissive of grief’s hold over me. It would also be too much to ask of a baseball player, even one as great as he is, and one I do not really know. But in my nightly witness of his history-breaking greatness, he helps give my grief a new form.
After Anna, nothing seems possible.
Then Ohtani steps into the batter’s box. Then Ohtani takes the mound. Then the old game becomes new. Then history, which had seemed sealed and fated, breaks open again.
