Fate: ∞; Human Condition: 0
In writing about cancer, I could expect to discover that things can always be worse.
Not my situation, which all things being equal has been pretty good. Sure, my Rock and my Pop has a wee touch of the crud, but it hasn’t sapped him of either silliness or his mordant wit. He’s been compromised, I’m now the Leader of the Free Dad (although my brother, when I handed him the documents which stated the rules of office suggested we might co-lead–a suggestion for which I thanked him profusely), but it could be worse. It can always be worse.
A friend called to tell me that she hadn’t been able to read these words yet, due to another dear friend of hers coming to the end of her show. With what? Cancer. How soon? Now. And what damages were wreaked upon her life? Her young children and husband will abruptly be orphaned to this Mephistopheles.
It’s unfathomable. I try to put myself in their position, but it is so unthinkable that I literally can’t do it. Horrible things happen all the time to all kinds of wonderful people and I can’t make sense of it. It’s too unreal, though I suppose there is nothing more real on this earth than the capriciousness of life itself. It might (though I’m no sociologist, so what do I know?) explain the popularity of crime procedural dramas: we’re all desperately trying to make sense of dying, and if it makes no sense in real life, maybe it will make a little sense on television, at least when they find the culprit of whatever heinous crime has been committed (“These are their stories,” BUM BUM).
But if it doesn’t make any sense to me (only one thing makes sense, and that is that very little of this makes any sense. I don’t think I actually know what cancer is, even after all those tests), there is one person acutely aware of the devastation it imparts in one’s life. And that is my husband.
All of this swirling hullabaloo has focused on Dad, and, to a lesser extent, my brother and I. But we’re not the only players, and sometimes I forget through the haze of my own suffering or confusion that this is just as hard on my husband–perhaps harder because he’s living through a looking-glass version of what has gone before in his own life.
I won’t go into the details; it’s enough to say that when I told him of the friend of a friend who is now waving the white flag of surrender (and leaving behind two kids and a husband), a look of such utter suffering crossed his face that I couldn’t believe my cruelty. It was as though after all his tireless support and kindness towards me during this confusing and chaotic period, despite his own past, I rewarded such devotion with salt in his exposed tender bits.
You can appreciate the impulse on my part. I’m cutting through my own wilderness, trying to make the meaningless meaningful, and sharing it with my husband because, well, that’s what I do. And for the most part it’s a reasonable thing. But there was an edge of complete thoughtlessness, a piece of willful ignorance on my part. I felt ashamed of myself when I saw my husband’s face crumple and he said, “I can’t hear anymore.” It is enough that he has supported me through my own and my family’s problems, but it is too much to expect him to swallow someone else’s grief whom he doesn’t even know when it is a grief too similar to his own past.
And that’s what I mean by, “It can always be worse.” I don’t relish the fact that others are worse off; I try, in a hopelessly human and flawed way, to cherish the fact that I’ve been honored with a certain lack of capriciousness until now, that despite all the chaos and senselessness of cancer (and life, for that matter), that I have grown up with my father into adulthood, that my brother and I (and two wives!) got to know and love him as deeply as we did; that he taught acres of students for over a third of a century (!) and was rewarded with the love and respect that I know he deserved.
But my husband was not so lucky in his childhood, nor is my friend’s friend, nor my friend’s friend’s children. And I am trying to understand, though I don’t.
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