I’m not sure if I had heard the word before I received it in a letter from my Mom telling me that my Dad had cancer. “What does that mean?” I had just left home in California where my parents had moved for my Dad’s new job in Palo Alto. I was fourteen and beginning at a boarding school in Massachusetts. Cigarette packs had not yet started to carry the label “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health”, and everyone I knew was a smoker, including my fourteen-year-old self. Looking back it is most likely that my Dad’s case was caused by overexposure to radar when he was an ensign gunner on a battleship in the Pacific during World War II. When he retired from the Navy he received one hundred percent disability pay, a sign that the disease had been service-related. That pension, coupled with a doubling of his salary when he moved to the private sector is what enabled my attendance in boarding school. These are things I only pieced together later in life.
My Dad and I had made a trip through New England a year earlier; he was interviewing for jobs after twenty years in the Navy and I was visiting schools. It was a great trip. He was in Poughkeepsie at an orientation with IBM. We then lived in Bethesda and I rode the train from Union Station in Washington up to Penn Station in New York, where an IBM guy met me and took me across town to Grand Central. I was feeling very cool, completely unaware of how tender I must have appeared as a short version of my Dad, in jacket and tie, a man of the world. When I got to my Dad, he gave me a copy of “Catcher in the Rye” to keep me entertained, saying “Watch out for what you’re getting into.” I tore into it and loved it. I was, then as now, a combination of diligence and rebellion and when I read Holden referring to “some asshole from Andover”, that’s pretty much what I aspired to be. I hadn’t enjoyed a book so much since my Dad had given me a copy of Mad magazine when I was ten. My kind of literature.
The news of my Dad’s diagnosis left me in a state of numb confusion. I had chosen to go away to school at the suggestion of my eighth grade math teacher who had told my parents that I was headed in the wrong direction and should be challenged more in school. Looking back I think my wanting to go away and my growing defiance had more to do with subterranean tensions at home which in the fifties had no forum for discussion. My older brother, who had always been my rock, had had a miserable adolescence, and had physical conflicts with my Dad, while my mother’s drinking had become an issue. I was ready to be on my own. My Dad’s diagnosis was suggesting that I would get my wish, but he wasn’t the one I wanted to lose.
Uncertainty prevailed. Having always been a doer, I found myself helpless and far away and I retreated into a shell of performance, inside of which I could control a version of myself. There was a role to play and I acted it out, grateful to be fed the lines in a period that I was unable to write my own script. It sort of worked. I did well in school, with some attitude adjustments needed when I was caught smoking and flunked Latin. I needed to decide whether I wanted to stay in school or be a juvenile delinquent. My confusion and dismay were held in check as I fulfilled the plan that my parents had laid before me and I had enthusiastically embraced. I was an adult impersonator whose adolescence would be deferred until later.
My dad had procedures and lived another thirty years, passing away at age seventy. He became my rock during those years and saw me through my confused college years into an adulthood of replicated family challenges, disappointments and recoveries. When I turned in my draft card and refused to serve in Vietnam he stood by me, which for a career Naval officer and war veteran showed me a strength and generosity which I sorely needed when contemplating the prospect of prison. During that same period, he would undergo surgeries for the diagnosis and removal of recurring tumors and my Mom and I would visit him at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland. This was all received with a family stoicism that could only be described as Brittanic. When he finally died I spent a year living as if I were under water, but sober and in authentic pain. The time for leaning on performance to bolster my self was over. I could still, as I do now, rely on his strength and encouragement to see my way through life’s challenges. It became clear that cancer has a life of its own, and as much as one might “fight” it, the outcome can’t be controlled. I have seen people of great strength and determination succumb while others lucked out. My Dad chose to carry on and live with the uncertainty and taught me that it’s not the outcome that matters so much as how we meet each day.
My brother passed away from pancreatic cancer at age 70. It was a rapid onset and took him in a matter of months. He had been my Life Saver as a young boy. That is the memory I hold dear. I have had a recent incidence of skin cancer and will have an outpatient procedure in a month. I have now outlived my father and brother by a few years and mortality is a visceral presence even as I plan to live to be a hundred years old. It’s the immediacy of the day that informs these thousand words.