When I write anything at all, Dad reads it. Which is strange, since much of what I write is about him and the unspooling of his cancer misadventure through my eyes. But he’s game, and to the extent that he can, tries to remain objective if I request it of him.

Mostly I don’t bother asking. We both own this experience, we are forced to live with its peaks and valleys, and he shouldn’t have to evaluate his own disease on its literary merits. But as I entertain the notion that I might be a writer and not just writing, I’m having to evaluate my own musings through the eyes of literary merit, which can be difficult.

And as Dad’s cancer is taking the stage again, my less sober essays have fallen away and I’m writing about illness, love, depredation and sadness once more. But I also understand a certain universality in the subject matter; many of us will get cancer in our lives, all of us will die. We are all struggling with the blows life hands us, and even if they’re the most mundane blows in the world, they’re still poignant to us as individuals or families.

So when I wrote what seemed like my first illness essay in months, I asked Dad about its value as a standalone piece. And he genuinely tried to view it objectively, bless his heart. “It’s difficult to come in this late to the story without understanding all that has gone before,” he said. “It needs the context of the other pieces you’ve written. It’s a part of a greater story, a chapter of a much larger and unfinished work.”

“I don’t want you to be a work in progress!” I laughed nervously.

“I know you don’t, honey, but it is a work in progress. It’s still unfolding, and it hasn’t yet reached its conclusion.”

That’s objective, all right.

Dad is back to some level of pre-therapy discomfort. He’s perpetually sore, as he describes it, a flu-like ache without the flu. But its persistence is what’s driving him mad, not the level of pain. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s about a 4,” he explained. But it never really abates, and as a result even the naps that he loves in his Corbusier chair next to his picture window with the southern exposure have been made less enjoyable. And then there’s the rain, which makes sunny naps an impossibility.

Before he began feeling better last summer, before the hormone therapy really took root and alleviated most of his symptoms, we talked about the necessity of getting him a new bed. He’s funny about things like this; his bed is almost as old as I am, some part miserliness, some part laziness conspiring to keep him in an uncomfortable, unending relationship with a mattress which supports nothing but the air between its springs. And I think he’s a little embarrassed to buy one so late in the game, not when he suspects he might only be able to use it for a little while longer. It seems wasteful to him, an undeserved luxury.

But he’s handed me the reins to his life, so I often take the lead with such things now: we’ll get him a new mattress when he gets his tax refund. To my mind it’s a quality of life issue, and since it seems that his event horizon is getting closer we need to maximize his time however we can, even if it’s just on a mattress that doesn’t mock him and his compromised bones.

There are other signs of the hormone therapy pooping out on him. Namely, that he is pooping out. He’s slipping into quieter movements again, ones which he adopted when he was sick last spring. He’s napping more, though not necessarily restfully because of the pain. His appetite is fading again, and he doesn’t have the energy and pluck necessary to fight the good fight of making dinner every night; he eats breakfast and lunch reliably, but dinner is hit or miss.

The watch is winding down, and I can tell that while his body is being assaulted with pain, his mind is more bleary because of its constancy. He’s retiring back into the warm embrace of silly trifles, the swashbuckler movies and adventure books of his youth; his illness, while not as gripping as it was last spring, is coming back into bloom.

And finally, in a tacit understanding of what’s transpiring, I’ve called a housekeeper for him. Nothing too invasive, just a weekly visit to come in and sweep up the dust bunnies, but it’s a part of the larger picture, both that his time is precious and he shouldn’t spend the rest of it vacuuming, but also that his body is withering and doesn’t have the same capacity to complete the jobs we take for granted in our healthier days. It’s him relinquishing a small piece of his independence, a mighty blow for him.

This man who withstood single-parenthood with two children, cooked us fresh meals every night for years, raised us, taught his children and thousands of students who came through his classes for close to forty years, who painted thousands of paintings, sketched greater or lesser drawings for over fifty years, and read thousands and thousands of books over the course of his lifetime; he’s having to let go of some of that remarkable independence for a smaller, much more difficult dependence upon others. He still paints and draws, but the cooking is fading. He’s tired. He wants to tie up loose ends.

This might be the greatest blow of all, though none of us think of it a burden. But it’s a quiet  resignation, and I’m trying to be sensitive to that fact. His life is the work in progress, and as such it’s also an exercise in him finally accepting what is due to him, the love being returned to him in triplicate, he who sacrificed so much for us over his own life.

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