Though I know the quote is from "The Tempest," I am taking it from Eliot, because I take everything from Eliot. The Waste Land, Part I: The Burial of the Dead.
But the line was born as a goodbye to a father, full five fathoms deep. Which is where I wanted to start.
Fathers Day.
But first, let me get my medical crap out of the way. It has been an annoyance to me, and so mayhap I can get through it for your sake quickly.
I apologize for being out of touch through and beyond a Thursday, but I was shuffling through a bit of a nightmare in nothing but underwear and soccer sandals: whaddaya gonna do?
Thursday morning found us at a different hospital--Mount Sinai--which was even further up on the east side, if that is at all possible. We were there for our 9/11 interviews.
During the first phases of the diagnosis, when we were still unaffected by everyone telling us that the 'how' didn't matter as long as we fixed it, it came to our attention that some people found it of interest that N and I both worked on the pile that had been the World Trade Center. We were there form 9/12 to 9/14 actually working, hauling stuff, handing out water, eye-wash, respirator masks, etc. And N also worked for FEMA at the Missing Person's desk.
And we live just a couple miles upwind, less than two blocks from where the cut-off zone of danger stopped.
When we mentioned this to Drs they said 'yeah, sure, that could have a connection to his leukemia. Inhaling heavy metals, poison dust. Sure'
We delegated research into this angle to a pair of caring west-coast ex-UC librarians who happen to also be family. So five or six seconds later we had the appointments at Mt. Sinai, which is the hospital coordinating the care ad research of 9/11-connected (or not) illness.
Frankly I am glad we went because they paid as much if not more attention to N's sinus issues and GERD since than they did my disease. All their questionnaires are geared toward bad breathing, bad stomachs, or shell-shock (George Carlin and I refuse to call it Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, because "maybe if they'd still called it shell-shock our servicemen and women might get the help they deserve).
So, anyway, poked and prodded by new and different Drs and now we're on their list as well.
Then rush down to our regularly scheduled hospital for the second part of the second Phase of the protocol: the glorious return of Vinchristine and Peg-A. Plus more methatrexate to the spine.
Except my Numbers were too low. My platelets were 172 last week, and 12 Thursday morning: wheeeee!
So I got my Peg and Vin, and then time was up so it was home for the night.
Thursday night I got a nosebleed. Before I got my platelets. Not, in medical terms, good. Not a gusher, but still a melding of 'nose' and 'bleed' that we could have done without. One annoying call to our NP's home phone, and two or three annoying calls to N's dad (more on him anon), and we at least got to sleep. A note: using an entire athletic ice-pack to chill one nostril doesn't work really at all well. N didn't sleep much, watching me all night to make sure not too much blood gushed out.
Friday morning: two bags of platelets then safely into the LIVE! DIRECT FORM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP!
This was the best Tap so far (of course now that I have said that, they are going to try and do next week's with a turkey baster). The Dr--a new one for me-hurt me more with the numbing needle, but I didn't feel the spinal puncture at all. Though I was worried enough abut it for the nurse to ask after the fact "Was there a minute or two in there when you got the better of yourself?" Apparently, the heart monitor went for a bit of a sprint right when he started lining up the needle.
Then back upstairs for two bags of blood, as my hemoglobin was cascading as well.
All to be expected: it is the Drs intent to keep lowering my numbers whenever they have the temerity to go up on their own. But it also gets in the way of the work they are doing poisoning me, so we get to play teeter-totter with my system, but only for seven more months or so.
So that was two straight twelve-hour days.
Saturday and today have been taken up mainly with Vinchristine and Peg-A showing us that they were really hurt that the Devil got all the press last month. Vinchristine wanted us to know for certain that they, too, are seriously bad-ass. Suffice to say I haven't gone far, haven't eaten much, have slept fitfully but for a day and a half straight, and would rather have my teeth removed with a cordless reciprocating saw than go through the last 36 hours again any time soon. Were it not for N, well...I don't wanna think about that. Imagine a sequoia shopping, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, folding, and caring for the driveling mess on the couch all at the same time: that's at least a sense of it.
OK, so that was my weekend, but it is Father's day. On to greater things.
My father is dead. Cancer.
There's a simplicity in saying it that way. Just say it, because it is that simply true. The vacuum left by his passing and the pain of his loss are not less real by stating it simply. When I miss him the pain is like the shock wave from one of the Howitzers he commanded in the Corps between Korea and Vietnam: this shocking whump of truth--a permanence shattering the silence--that you cannot avoid and cannot ever be truly ready for.
You want paradox? Or the swirls of reality that make up a childhood? On the day my father taught me how to kill a man by driving the bones of his nose into his brain with the heel of your hand, we had spent the afternoon tiering off our backyard in a Baltimore spring and tilling the soft black soil for a garden. My father did not believe in starting fights. He believed in ending them. A history professor from the South with a liberal streak a mile wide. If I had to distill it to one lesson, one thing that, through these tears, I will carry with me above all else, it would be this: my father would look at a situation and he would try and understand what a Truly Good Man would do. Then he would do that. I don't know if I can, but I will try.
But there it is. Get used to it; he'll be dead for a long time. Hugh Davis Graham. Dad. Christ I miss you.
And life, while never replacing or usurping a father, has other fathers in it.
My father-in-law, a man who has traveled further to have a life here in NY than I can even imagine, really. A man who has been on call as a Dr for us from the opening seconds of this battle, who has driven scrounged stethoscopes and quickly-bought thermometers into the city on ten minutes notice. A man who has known when his 'I'm a Dr, you're fine' will save me from the shrieking of my own psyche. And the man who equally knows the value of not making contact until cried for.
Hell of a man. For whom I am thankful.
And my step-father. Lawrence, Long Island's James Arthur Gordon, whose mother is captured on video recalling with a sunburst of love that her boy had 'problems with deportment.' You have to imagine that quote in a fluid, New York, Jewish accent; it makes her devotion and caring even more vivid.
Jim has known me for most of my life. I fought his entrance into our world, because I had a dad, and because that's what spoiled brats do. I will carry the shame for my behavior toward him for the rest of my life, and equally will I use that shame to make sure that I am a better man for it; to him, to others. We have found our place, and it is a good place, and it is mostly because of his capacity for endurance of my asinine antics that we are still good. For irony: the day he taught me how to throw a lacrosse ball I beaned him dead-on in the face. He didn't blame me, or get mad, or take it out on me. Just walked home with one hand cupping his battered nose, and the other carrying his lacrosse stick, and mine.
I always feel a little bad saying 'step' before 'father.' To not add it would be to deny my father and refuse my name. But to add it always creates this space. I cannot reconcile myself to it. But I hope, and suspect, that he knows that I say it with pride.
And Jim has been through some of this lovely chemo crap. Different specifics, but achingly similar moments throughout the treatment. When he first saw on the schedule that I would be getting Cytoxan, he carefully and lovingly kept his mouth shut so as not to scare me. When I emerged from that shit-storm of a weekend getting acquainted with Cytoxan, we looked at each other the way veterans do, and it made me feel better.
It has been his admonishments that have kept me as close to 'in the moment' as I can be. His internet searches that have replaced the electric-razor cord I left in Stefan's room (And I'll be fucked by a sow-shovel before I go back there). His equally fervent love of Scandinavian mysteries that has given me someone to race. His support of my mother upon seeing her boy wasting away that allows me to know she has someone to hold her, as do I.
And N. She's fathering me, mothering me. Hell, she's dog-sitting me some of the time. So she gets credit in here when men tend to dominate. If this weekend is anything to go by--and it is--then I can safely say that I do not have the imaginative ability to see where I might be right now without all these fathers, and without her. I don't want to think about it.
But I just did, and it brings me back to the thought of people less lucky than I. people fighting cancer alone: no advocate, no driver, no hero, no lover.
If you have the time and the dime, please give to
The Red Devils
so those people can have as much to be thankful for on a stupid-ass, corporate, bullshit, Hallmark Holiday as I do.
Thanks.
