Diary #9 (5-16-23)

The Cancer Diaries

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Well my friends: We’ve reached a new threshold. Yesterday afternoon—not long after my last post—my folks had their zoom chat with the oncologist. My parents told the oncologist what’s been going on, that Dad has been getting worse. Given the new information, the doctor said the treatment clearly wasn’t working (duh) and that he didn’t think my father was a “good candidate” for further treatment. But, of course, he left it up to my father whether to do another dose of immunotherapy or not. (Scheduled for the next day, aka today.)

Shocking us all—and yet in another way completely expected—my father decided against more treatment. In other words: He’s going to let the cancer do its natural thing. He’s giving up.

I get it. I really do. It’s been a long, hard fight. Almost two years, since July, 2021. The man is tired. We’re tired. We’ve thrown everything we can at his cancer; this thing is just unstoppable. Last week he suddenly—at least externally suddenly to my mom and I—resigned from his job of forty years. That was the biggest sign that he was getting close to throwing in the spiritual towel. Work has always defined my father. Giving that up meant more than anything else so far on this journey.

Everyone has a stopping point, a wall which can be crashed into, a breaking spot. My father found his. When my mom texted me with the news—probably too emotionally broken up to call—I was lying on the couch at my and Britney’s house up north in Lompoc, reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Yes. Actually.) My heart burned and thumped in my chest when I saw the words. It took me back full-circle to early July, 2021, when Mom first called me with the news of his diagnosis. At that time I was still technically living in Manhattan, though I’d just been with my parents for two weeks in their new house in Santa Barbara and I was currently staying in an Air BnB studio in West Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a call I’ll never forget. I remember my mom, her voice shaking, saying, I have a feeling this is going to be a long, slow process. And she was right. It has been.

I felt a mix of great sadness—tears brewing—and strange relief. Though he’s still mentally sharp, and though he’s incredibly still in no physical pain, the man’s quality of life is very low. He’s in bed 97% of the time, and when he isn’t he’s usually going to the bathroom next door to his room. He and my mom listen to audiobooks. I play political podcasts for him. But mostly he sleeps. Mostly he gets ogled by us and by visitors, like some ancient museum piece. He can’t work. He can’t physically eat. He can’t leave the house. He’s comfortable in his little bed with a view of the garden outside in the backyard. It’s all fine…but it’s not much of a life. This has been a slow process of letting go a little more, a little more, a little more. His backpacking gear. His car. And now, soon, his existence. We give things away until we ourselves are offered up to the metaphorical gods.

I texted Britney and gathered my things—how many times have I done this now?—and by 5pm I was heading down south to S.B. This time I didn’t listen to music or a podcast; I just rolled the windows down and sighed and drove, thinking, not-thinking, being. Memories of my father flitted through my mind, from when I was a kid and older. All the years went by: Childhood, teens, twenties. I realized that for all my life I’d mostly resented my father, seeing him largely from one single perspective: That of failed father. But I was grasping now, finally, that he’d been so much more than that. The truth is: He’d always been there for me, hovering just in the background. He’d been an almost unconscious pillar, expected and depended on. And, like Britney had said the other night while in bed, he’d always been a profoundly good man, with the deepest character of anyone I knew. He was a good man. IS a good man. Will live on in my memory as the best of men. He was uncertain of fatherhood, for sure, because he never had healthy modeling from his own father. But he was always there. And he genuinely did his very best. I guess my ultimate Thank You has been the past year and ten months of caregiving.

*

I got there a little before 6pm. It was hot and humid and gray out. I parked the Leaf in their short black driveway, cut the electricity and just sat there for a few minutes. I wasn’t thinking. I was just preparing myself. I sighed again—I’ve been sighing heavily a lot lately—and got out of the car. I took my time. Part of me didn’t want to fully face this moment. We never do. In ourselves or in our loved ones. I checked the mail. Grabbed the pieces in the box. Then I snagged my bags and jacket and hat and walked sluggishly up the twisting, steep stone steps, the steps I’d walked up hundreds of times by now. This house, unfamiliar to me until June, 2021, was now a part of my consciousness.

I walked in. The door was unlocked. The dogs—ten-year-old yellow Lab and ten-year-old German Shepard/Husky mix—went nuts seeing “Uncle Michael.” (I walk them so they react insanely.) In the kitchen Mom walked in. She looked disturbed and sad. We hugged. I sighed again. I walked downstairs and left my bags and stuff in the downstairs bedroom. I’d deal with that stuff later.

Back up the stairs and down the hallway. I walked into my father’s room. There he was, in bed, looking just like the day before. Only now he had obvious tears in his eyes. Only a handful of times in my life have I seen my father cry. Once was a month ago when I read my piece called “Death” to him about him on my Substack. And now this.

Looking down at him I clutched his arm, as I often do. Sometimes we shift into awkward semi-hand-shaking but this time I just clutched his arm and rubbed it gently and stared at him and said, “So, you’re ready to move to the next thing huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking at me, his big blue eyes wide.

“You’re tired of fighting, huh?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m just not getting any better.”

“The quality of life is dwindling.”

“Yeah,” he said, softly.

We held each other’s gaze.

“I get that, Dad. I get that. It makes sense.”

We let that turn into smooth silence. There wasn’t anything else to say, really. He was ready to let go, to turn things over, to be free, to cease struggling. It was a perfectly reductive mathematical equation and it made total logical sense. I could not blame him. I’d probably do the same thing were I in his shoes. I can only imagine what his experience has been and is like.

I sat down on the little comfy orange chair across the room and looked at him, taking the image of him in, the way Jim, he and my mom’s good friend from Ojai, did so when visiting Dad one day five weeks ago while he was in Cottage Hospital, looking at him as if it were the very last time. (And maybe, for Jim, it was.)

Mom entered the room and sat down. We didn’t speak. What a journey, I thought, from diagnosis to brain surgery to immunotherapy to Myasthenia Gravis to ER trips and hospital stays and rehab stays to blood transfusions to chemo to more immunotherapy to radiation to this moment right here and now, a year and ten months after he first felt tired and had to sit down while playing Pickleball.

So I’m here now. Who knows how long this will take or how precisely it’ll happen. The oncologist is ordering hospice care. We’re all on board. Now it’s all going to be about managing care until he passes. The fact that he’s resigned from work, that he’s decided to terminate treatment: This all means he’s psychologically made the choice already; he’s already mostly if not entirely transitioned. Now we just have to wait for his physical form to follow his mind. This may happen quite quickly; I really don’t know. He said he doesn’t want to be intubated at this point, if he needed that. So that could be what takes him out. Or the cancer in his lungs, which is aggressively expanding, might simply begin taking over other major organs. Maybe he’ll get lucky and simply slide off in his sleep one night. That’d be ideal. That’s what we all want, I think. When a man’s will is broken, and he’s ready to go, it seems that they often go quite quickly. So we’ll just have to see.

This is the moment we’ve been afraid of since the beginning. None of this is shocking, really. He’s been slowly declining, overall, since July of 2021. But there’ve been dips and rises along the way, in the shorter term, and even when you know the external reality you can fool yourself in the present moment by convincing yourself there’s more time, he won’t be going anywhere too soon, there are more podcasts to listen to, more audiobooks to take in, more threesome family chats to engage with.

And that’s true, of course…until it isn’t. We’ve reached the dead-end we always knew we eventually would. And it’s a dead-end only two of us will return from. We all arrive at this point one day. Sometimes we walk with a loved one to the very end of the path, overlooking the cliff, and we hug them and tell them “I love you” and then we watch as they silently step off the edge into the abyss below. We do not follow them. Not yet.

Not yet.