*This is from my other Stack, Sincere American Writing. Click link at end for the rest. (Free.)
###
This personal story—as most of you all now know—has been retold by myself ad nauseum. But for those who haven’t heard it, a brief recap.
In early June, 2021 I left Manhattan, where I was living in a little shotgun 3rd-floor walkup in Lenox Hill, to visit California.
I was born and raised in Southern California, Ojai, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Ojai is a little 8,000 population rural town 12 miles east of Ventura off Highway 101, filled with fields of orange groves, rugged mountain trails, the Topa Topa Mountains, a lush, wide valley, a teeny-tiny downtown, hippies, surfer-biker bros, rich people, and ex/current/former Hollywood celebrities. (It’s also a cherished spot for Buddhist meditation. Krishnamurti once lived there.)
In June, 2021 I hadn’t been back to California in 18 long, harsh months. It was the Pandemic Period. When the lockdowns had hit, in mid-March, 2020, I’d been unfortunately living in what turned out to be the Wild West of upper East Harlem. I wrote a whole book about that; click HERE to read it.
Since 1991, when we moved to Ojai from Ventura when I was eight, my folks have lived in my hometown. The Thomas Fire in 2017 changed their desire to remain. They decided to leave. Santa Barbara—where my mom volunteered and had her friend group—made the most sense. So, in the middle of the pandemic, right as I was simultaneously breaking my lease in Harlem (I’d been chased twice, witnessed a rape in Marcus Garvey Park in midday, and had been told that two men broke into our building and held up a tenant at gunpoint one night while I slept upstairs), my folks were moving the one hour northwest of Ojai to the shimmering diamond that is glorious, gorgeous Santa Barbara. Sixty-nine and 74, they were going to enjoy their golden years, traveling, walking along the beach, walking the dogs, enjoying their spectacular view of the city and Highway 101 and the Pacific from up in the Santa Barbara Riviera, up above it all.
But, as is so often the case in Real Life: It didn’t go down that way.
*
Dad, I knew, had had a cough for a while. Since I hadn’t seen any family in 18 months, it was impossible for me to get a full picture of him. My folks and I had Zoomed every 2-3 weeks while I was in New York, but that hadn’t been enough for me to really know the extent of their conditions. I commented a couple times on my dad’s consistent, lingering cough. He waved it away, as he waved away everything he didn’t want to deal with. Zoom only showed me his head and shoulders.
But the moment I saw him at their new house—which was lovely—I knew something was wrong. He’d lost perhaps a good 15, even 20 pounds. His cough was nasty and wracking. In hidden, brief, quiet conversations Mom told me he’d had the cough for a whole year. I couldn’t believe it. He’d done a physical before the lockdowns, but since then nothing. (It was Covid, of course.)
When my mom and I finally convinced him to go, it was somehow both surprising and not surprising at all when we got the news: Cancer. Stage four. Melanoma. Skin cancer.
The story of the journey of his cancer and my mom and I as caretakers is my next book. (Already 100 pages deep into writing it.) It’s too long to relate here. Suffice to say: It’s been an intense journey. Here are the basics. I never went back to New York; my landlord, who I’d just resigned a one-year lease with, kindly let me off the hook. My friends cleared my apartment out and shipped all I owned (very little except for crates and crates of books) across the country to my parents’ house. For the first time in nearly twenty years I was living—temporarily—with my folks again.
The cancer had spread to his brain. He did successful brain surgery. But the main tumor—even though we never did discover where the “primary” actually started—was in his lungs. A series of MRIs and CT scans began. The immunotherapy worked on the cancer in his body.
By October I had a little studio apartment I found above a garage in the front of a house in a suburban area off Highway 192 at the foot of the Los Padres Mountains. It was ten minutes’ north of my folks. Dad started immunotherapy and soon, due to the toxicity of one of the drugs, he developed an extremely rare neuromuscular disease called Myasthenia Gravis, which slowly weakens the muscles of the body and eventually, if not fixed, can lead to death. His symptoms included: Droopy eyes and terrible eyesight (double-vision); bad/high/slurred speech to the point of having to write things down because we couldn’t understand him; the total inability to swallow (we had to have a peg-tube surgically inserted into his stomach for liquid food via a machine pump).
All of this was profoundly difficult on multiple levels, and for all three of us. (My father most of all, of course.) Between early July, 2021, and early February, 2022, things were chaotic. Caretaking became a fulltime job for my mom and I. Picking up meds. Groceries. Walking the dogs. Carrying anything heavy upstairs. Crushing meds and administering for dad. Helping him move, dress, communicate. Cleaning his bed. (There was diarrhea on and off, etc.) Driving Dad to doctors’ and oncology appointments. Taking him to the ER. Taking him to the hospital. To rehab. Visiting him in all these places, often multiple times per day.
It was beyond stressful. I lost weight, pounds and pounds. During my time in New York I’d discovered running and I was doing eight, nine, ten-mile runs multiple times per week now, to relieve the stress. I was lonely and sad and tired, having left my Dream City for a town I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to live in, despite it’s natural beauty and prestige as one of California’s coastal crown jewels. I wanted comfort. Sex. Love. Freedom. I wanted my father to be healthy. I wanted things to be how they had been before the lockdowns in 2020. Everything had been dumped upside down and shaken violently. Nothing made sense. Things were backwards, unintelligible. My father—a man I’d always loved but never understood—was a pillar of my life, of my assumed privilege. He’d always just been there. Solid. Stoic. Stubborn. Like some ancient Grecian statue. Permanent.
And yet now that statue was showing cracks.
(To keep reading click link below)
“My father—a man I’d always loved but never understood—was a pillar of my life, of my assumed privilege. He’d always just been there. Solid. Stoic. Stubborn. Like some ancient Grecian statue. Permanent.
And yet now that statue was showing cracks.”
Powerful work in here. It’s brave sharing this. Thanks so much for it.