(This article was originally published in The Daily Beast.)
"You
are the only person I've called" he says. “I have cancer".
I knew right then I would lose him. But I didn’t know I would lose him like I
have, in installments. I was not prepared for the staggered, ruthless falling
apart of one of the people I love most in the world.
The man with prodigious memory became forgetful. I don't mean he didn't know
where he left his glasses. I mean he'd be angry for the fact we had not talked
in weeks when in fact we had spoken that morning. He was always idiosyncratic
but became contradictory, confessing he did not want to fight , did not want
chemo; then scheduling appointments, then not showing up for them. He, never
easy but frequently reasonable, became unwilling to adhere to any order by any
doctor, refusing, for example, to take the antibiotics prescribed after a
life-threatening surgery.
The man I
knew as the most charismatic influencer became insatiably lonely. My superhero
became afraid. Not just of death. Of life, of leaving his house, afraid of the
dark. I could hear him pacing straight through the night. Ambition, diminished,
gave way to restlessness. He lost all evidence of inner peace.
The strongest, frankly dictatorial authority figure I have known would look at
me blankly, unable to make even simple decisions. "Tell me what to
do" he would say to the person he once instructed. "I don't know what
to do".
"I have trouble imagining what the world will be like without me" he
told me one day. "I don't want to live in that world" I replied. I
meant it.
I looked at
him while he was sleeping - a ghost of him, see-through almost - and began to
cry, I hoped quietly. He opened his eyes and held my hand with his so very
frail one, veins showing blue through his skin. I saw a faint, sweet glimmer of
the ferocious protector he once was. "Don't worry" he patted me.
"This is nothing. I will recover".
A few days
later I overheard someone say a person they knew had "lost the
battle" against cancer.
Lost? How
can you lose after so many years well lived, after spending yourself every day
in your endeavors, after being so impossible, after forging relationships with
people you will come to count on, after reading so many books, after making your
mark in so many different unsuspected places, after so much success, so much
failure, after being such an active participant in this thing we call life?
That’s when it hit me. Our vernacular is all wrong. I resent how cancer is represented.
Just because something kills you cannot possibly mean it defeats you. If that
were true, we would all - masters and poets and liars and sinners and dancers
and writers and heroes - be destined in the end to be losers.
I believe that
my human is a winner who will one day go, triumphant, to his own secular
heaven, where he will survey the newspaper over freshly pressed coffee, eat
delicious food, sip the best scotch, partake in really good sex, jog on a long
beach, and spend a lot of time watching over the people he loved and left here,
including me.
And cancer,
deceiver, pretender, coward; it cannot even subsist without the vibrant people
it depends on. It will end up shriveled up, dried up, dead; rolled up in dirty
gauze and tossed into a wastebasket, quickly forgotten.
So suck it
cancer. No one here will ever lose to you.
