Cancer is a strange building block in a relationship. But for Vera Golosker and Mark Rafael Gilfix, it would become a cornerstone.
The two, both attorneys, met in 2013 during a poolside fundraiser in Los Angeles. A first date followed, which Mr. Gilfix found promising. A second date, however, lacked luster. Then he said, “She just haunted me.”
A few years later, he tried to ask her out again, as they stayed connected on social media. She didn’t respond.
Ms. Golosker, now 35 and an associate principal counsel at the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California, described their early lack of romantic progress as a blessing in disguise.
“If we had gotten together then, we would have blown it,” said Ms. Golosker, who is a graduate of the University of Southern California and holds a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
In December 2019, Mr. Gilfix, now 43 and a partner at Gilfix & La Poll Associates, a law firm in Palo Alto, California, saw photos on social media of Ms. Golosker hiking Mount Rainier. While living in San Francisco, he planned a Rainier trip of his own, asking her for advice in the hopes that he could turn his contact into another chance to court Miss Golosker, who lived in Los Angeles.
“This girl had stayed on my mind all these years,” said Mr. Gilfix, who is a Stanford graduate and holds a law degree from Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University.
Her response to his outreach, he said, was practically businesslike, “like she was my travel agent.”
He offered to take her out in exchange for her help. But she didn’t read beyond “thanks” in the subject line. “She gave me another ghost,” he said.
Since Mr. Gilfix was still complaining about the situation a few days later, a friend told me it wouldn’t hurt to try again. He soon sent another message.
“In the meantime, I’d seen pictures of him appearing on my feed,” said Ms Golosker, taking a closer look at the man she’d recently reconnected with. “He was so handsome, so out-of-the-ordinary, and I thought, is that him?”
While visiting friends in Los Angeles, he met her for drinks in West Hollywood, California, before returning to her apartment where the two shared a first kiss. More dates, including New Year’s Eve, followed before returning to San Francisco.
By Valentine’s Day in 2020, they were in love and shortly thereafter found the arrival of the coronavirus an unlucky opportunity to spend weeks at a time.
Months later, in May 2020, Ms. Golosker discovered a lump that turned out to be metaplastic carcinoma, an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer.
Not entirely happy—but fortunately, as things turned out—Mr. Gilfix had had his own cancer attack a year earlier. A lump in his leg turned out to be malignant, a liposarcoma. He was told his chances of survival could be as low as 50-50.
“In my mind I was like, ‘I’m a goer,'” said Mr. Gilfix. “Fortunately, it turned out that I just had to have surgery.” So when Ms. Golosker got her diagnosis, he remembered thinking, “Wow, this was meant to be.”
Mr. Gilfix drew on his own experience of pampering Mrs. Golosker and turned her predicament into something very romantic, she said, as both were attuned to life’s fragility.
“He made me feel completely feminine and accepted and loved even though I lost all my hair,” she said. When her doctors suggested that cancer treatment could affect her fertility, she asked Mr. Gilfix if he would be willing to create embryos with her for possible future use.
His response: “This is real, and I’m all in,” said Mr Gilfix, who proposed in May 2021. “This is the right choice.”
The two, who lived together in her Los Angeles home and his in San Francisco, are now in remission. They were married on April 30 at Loma Vista Gardens in Big Sur, California, for Rabbi John Fishman. Wary of Covid, they staged a full outdoor event and asked their 125 guests to take tests before arriving.
After Ms Golosker’s diagnosis, Mr Gilfix said he calculated the probability that two relatively young people would develop life-threatening cancers within a year of each other.
“One in 10 million,” he said. “It’s been quite a journey.”