Happy Thanksgiving!

Things to be eternally grateful for

Dad at Thanksgiving last year, 11/2021

Happy Thanksgiving!

This may be the most important Thanksgiving of my life. Because it might end up being my father’s last.

          We’ll see. At age 77, and with a tumor in his lung and his brain…it’s anyone’s best guess. Soon he’ll likely be starting in on “clinical trials” which means who knows what yet. Last year we skipped Christmas—for the first time in my almost forty years of being alive—because my father at that time was no longer swallowing, could barely see, and could not speak coherently. (He basically sounded wildly drunk when he tried to linguistically communicate.) This was a result, as I have shared many times now, of the Myasthenia Gravis, the rare neurological disorder he picked up from the powerful immunotherapy which had just a year before been accepted by the FDA.

          That time—late 2021—feels like a lifetime ago to me now. My mother and I were in the midst of the brutality of both his Stage 4 metastatic Melanoma, and his nasty M.G. It was a time filled with ER trips and hospital stays and a two-week stint in physical rehab. My father hadn’t stepped foot in a hospital in nearly half a century, at least not fort anything connected to himself. (He visited other family members, of course, over the decades, including a drunken me at age 24 after a brutal multiple-roll car crash in my hometown.)

For Thanksgiving last year, though, my older half-sister and brother-in-law and their kids (my niece and nephew, ages 17 and 15) drove up to my folks’ house in the Riviera hillside neighborhood of Santa Barbara from LA. My dad was exhausted and sick-looking, hollow and thin, a husk of his former self, just four months after his first serious symptom of sickness and the official diagnosis in July. In photos from that event you see all of us gathered around my father, jolly-seeming (though certainly masking deeper, troubled emotions) and my father, slack-mouthed, seeming grateful yet tepid, in the throes of physical denudation, and certainly one must imagine emotionally in some sort of void-like inner solitude of fear and anger. (At least I think I’d be this way were it me going through it.)

Fast-forward to exactly one year later. Twenty-twenty-two. We’re all descending to my sister and brother-in-law’s tomorrow from 2-5pm in LA. Dad is doing much better overall, but there is the slow-growing lung tumor and the new brain tumor, exemplified by his fresh exhaustion, low-slung eyes, and sketchy on-off sleep.

I look forward to seeing my sister and brother in law and my two writer-cousins. They’re both bringing their significant others. My significant other is in Holland—Amsterdam—with her about-to-turn-17-year-old son. She took him for his birthday. That’s what she does: Instead of traditional, superficial “gifts” she takes him somewhere. I think it’s a delicious, tantalizing, superb thing to do. Reminds me of the family trips we used to take in the late 90s to Baja when I was a kid. I remember those long drives, from Ventura, along U.S. Highway 101. The surfing. The sheer cliffs. The smell of the briny, salty sea. The noises of seagulls squawking at all times. The apartment we rented on top of those cliffs, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the stupendous Pacific Ocean, purple-orange at sunset, like sparkling, radiant jewels.

Anyway, I am very grateful right now, for so many things. For my family. For the fact that my father is still alive. For being in love with an incredible woman it seems God literally placed on Earth just for me. For the fact that my teenage niece survived her sincere suicide attempt (via purposeful car crash) last year. For the fact that I have a tuxedo cat I love more than anything. (He is my natural-born son, I tell myself.) For all the pain and suffering and alcoholism and struggle which led me inevitably to this moment right here and now, penning this prose. Whatever doesn’t kill you really DOES make you stronger. (And wiser, I might add.) I’m grateful for reading and writing. I found Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic on the street a week ago and randomly opened it a few days ago and started reading; it blew me away. One thing she said was, basically (paraphrasing): When it comes to writing (or just generally living creatively), forget about money; forget about being a New York Times bestseller; forget about what other people may think or not think about you or your work. Instead, write (or be creative) because you WANT to. Because you have that inner need. Because there isn’t possibly anything else you could or would do.

And Hell, that’s me. I tried for years to not write. I was always drawn back in. It’s like The Godfather: Just when I try to get out, they draw me back in. I write because I can’t not write. Through thick and thin, up and down, brutal and fun, violent and painful and transcendent: I write. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.

But I digress. Gratitude, people. It’s a real thing. It works.

Life is not easy. It’s not supposed to be. But there is always hope and love and forgiveness and acceptance. And, for me, writing.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s to family and friends and all loved ones, even when it’s hard. Try to avoid politics tomorrow!!!

My “son” Lucius (named after the child in the film Gladiator)