Well the past few days have been rough for the old man. After six weeks of oral chemo and now three radiation treatments, he’s been retching and vomiting and coughing non-stop. Still no physical pain, incredibly. And: he’s still working. Barely. All he needs to do is be at his computer for an hour here, an hour there. But even this has proved difficult lately due to severe fatigue. Even his swallowing is slightly worse.
Mostly these effects seem to be stemming from the chemo. We knew this was possible. It’s very common for cancer patients: Chemo Brain they call it. A little foggy, fuzzy, out of it. He’s sleeping almost all day every day now. Like a grizzly hibernating through winter. No more clinical trials. Just more radiation.
I’ve been living with Britney in Lompoc for almost three weeks now. Slowly moving my stuff in boxes to our house. Each Wednesday and Friday I go to Santa Barbara to walk dogs. I try to stop by and see my parents. They know if the shit really hits the fan I’ll be there. I can even live with them again temporarily if need be. The radiation oncologist guesses Dad has a year. But we’ve heard this before. We’ve heard miracle stories before. The truth: Who the hell knows. We’re all going to the grave one way or another.
Camus wrote (in The Rebel): “Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it
insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock.”
Perhaps. I think my mom demands order on some spiritual level. Her method for conquering fear has always been ego, untruths, denial, isolation. Not me. I embrace the messy nastiness of life; the biting confusion; the rapturous complexity; the gelatinous unknowing of reality. Uncertainty: That is my modus operandi. And this is certainly a very uncertain time in my life. My mom’s, too, of course. Not to mention my father’s.
Nineteen months ago I was living in Manhattan, writing often, generally content, the worst of the initial pandemic over. Then my teenage niece tried to kill herself. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I decided to leave New York to care for him. I ended up living in Santa Barbara, with my parents of all people. It was a shocking transformation. It felt jarring. A year and a half later I am 40 by literal age but perhaps 150 by metaphysical truth. I exist within my own internal clock, and that clock doesn’t tick like a real one. I am my own man. My own person. Young and old. Free and imprisoned. Afraid and fearless.
My parents are good people. Complicated, no question. Flawed. Like all of us. I see my mom’s weaknesses in myself, reflected in my own thoughts, feelings, behaviors. I sense my father in me like the primordial muck of time. Dad is a computer engineer but before that, many decades ago, he was a high school and college professor. That is me: Half intense creative writer, half madman professor. Arrogant yet kind. Loving yet at times cruel. Sensitive yet sometimes mean. Desperate and alone yet hopelessly in love and happy. A reader. A writer. A thinker. A pusher. Directed more by my DNA than I’d like to admit.
If there’s anything to say it’s that I forgive my parents. Forgive them for being good and imperfect. For not knowing what to do or how to protect me when I was young. For choosing self over child, out of bald, ripe fear. For distancing themselves emotionally from me when what I craved was intimacy; closeness. I’ve been seeking a mother all my life, chasing a father. They’re both there and not there. I know I wasn’t an easy child. I’m not an easy man. My life brims with past mistakes. I am a wild work in progress.
Here’s to forgiveness and to love and to letting go. I accept things as they are. Life is sweet, short and bitter. Life isn’t moral propaganda; it’s just simply what it is. Evolution. Consciousness. Awareness. Choice. Desire. Emotion. The five senses. All of it. None of it. Everything all at once.
Yes.