Cancer Was Eating Him Up (Remembering J***)

The cancer was eating him up. Making breakfast, lunch and dinner of him, and, if the doctors could be believed, was about to make him it’s midnight snack. There was no point in considering surgery. Almost everything vital would have had to go. Even chemo would have to be a shotgun blast in the hope (faint) that some one or two scattershot orbs might land efficaciously; and the side effects would be massive. Only six months – a year at most – no matter what.

We all know, or should, that we’re always living with a death sentence. It’s not “if,” but “when.” And whenever, it will be soon in the great scheme of things. Most of the time most of us somehow muster the moxie to look the other way, pretend we don’t know, that it isn’t true. But as the years turn into decades, as the obituaries fill up with those we know, or don’t know, but whose first year of the final parens is so close to our own, or so much after, pretending is harder and harder.

He'd reached that stage. It wasn’t acceptance, especially at 2 am, with his husband sleeping (how soundly or lightly he didn’t know) in the bedroom down the hall – sleeping there by mutual decision, since now he seldom lost 2 am, or 3 or 4, to sleep. They both needed for one of them at least to be somewhat rested if they were to make it through another day.

He wasn’t terrified of death, now that they said it was so close, now that he couldn’t pretend (except sometimes when he couldn’t stand not pretending, at least for a little while). The being dead? Yes, that might have it’s unknown terrors, but there was no room left in his mind just now even to grapple with it. That was a different realm, a land beyond, which no one could know until they got there, no matter what the hope-merchants offered.

It was the getting to death that terrified him now. He knew enough about it from what he’d witnessed to be fearful to his core about that. Was he up to it? Did he have the strength? Alone, as he was, even with the love of his husband, alone as we all are, and as we will all be, through that part of the journey, anyway – until we actually reached that unknown realm.

He did realize that part didn’t have to be long. Maybe the unknowable part, the after-death part, did last for eternity, as some said. Or maybe it wouldn’t be there at all. No one could know – never mind those who pretended that they did. But the part before, the part that left him cowering in tears at the prospect and the perils (tears he tried to keep to the solitary AM hours) – that part could be as short as he had the courage to make it – or as long as the courage and cancer combined would allow.

As it was, if he hadn’t known, if the doctors hadn’t told him, he might have pretended for at least a while longer, that there was nothing devouring him, aside from the usual doubts and regrets and ego (accompanying those joys he might allow and acknowledge) he’d known for a lifetime – part of a lifetime, more precisely, since long or short, there was still some of his lifetime left.

But they had told him; he had heard them; he did know. The prospects were slim that he could now not know, even for an instant. And yet he still, somehow, had to live while he still did.

He’d rejected the chemo, opting (hoping) for quality over quantity for his remaining life. What would be the point if he let terror devour the time, as cancer was, the body? But how could he tame the terror, keep it at bay for the short life he had left – “make the most” of that short time, whatever “the most” might mean?

They were questions he’d grappled with obliquely (grappled as we all must) for as long as he’d had an inkling of how short it all was, really, even for those lucky enough to grow old. They were questions he hadn’t been able to answer (has anyone been able to?), even while he still had “all the time in the world” – what a deceitful phrase, even for those nearer the beginning than the end. How unpardonable, since we are all, so soon, inevitably  death’s midnight snack.

Perhaps the baffling thing was that no one had figured it all out by now, not really, even as so many billion lives – whether they were long or short –  have come and gone. Still, we’re no closer to answering the questions, still mostly lost in navel gazing them, all knowing, though we pretend desperately not to, that “all the time in the world,” our clutched fragment of it, anyway, will be short indeed.

It wouldn’t be long now till the dawn would break on another day. It looked as though he’d be starting it along with all the others for whom there was to be another day. Whether he’d finish it or not (whether any of them would), who could know? He dried the tears. They had their place, just as the terror did, and the fear, but his time was short, so the doctors said, and the cancer hungry. He said the prayer – he’d call it the courage prayer now – “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Serenity would be a comfort, courage a necessity, wisdom, if it came, a bonus. The cancer, the life, would have their meal – and he was it. It was just the way life was. He’d known it all along (we all have).

For what it was worth – which wasn’t much, it appeared, when it came down to it – he wasn’t ready for it to be over. He thought of the Andante movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, and, even though daylight was coming, his tears began to flow – whether it was because he knew that, all too soon, he’d never hear the beautiful music again – or because it was all so short – for him, so short – he didn’t know. Either way, he didn’t try to stop the tears, even though it was daylight now. This time, at least, he decided it was OK to let them flow – while they still could.