The following is part eulogy, part lament, part wondered musing, part rant. I thought about streamlining it, focusing it, giving it a purpose of some sort. But at times like these, the thoughts don’t come out in an orderly, organized fashion. I *am* sad, and I *am* angry, and I think there’s space for all of that, even if it doesn’t make for good reading. Pardon the disclaimers. Read on if you dare.
I’ve got goodbyes on the brain, and there’s good reason for it:
We buried my wife’s father last week.
His passing was not unexpected — in fact it came after an agonizing series of weeks in hospice care, where despite repeated assessments that he might go “any day now”, he simply refused to give up. It was the sort of death that came as a relief, no matter how painful the loss was, because he had been in such a poor state for so dishearteningly long.
But the truth is, the man he was died months ago.
See, he had cancer. (Fuck cancer.) And the cancer had caused a tumor in his brain. (Multiple tumors throughout his body, actually, but the brain tumor was, for obvious reasons, the main worry.) That tumor was causing pressure and loss of function, so he was beginning to forget tiny details and taking a little bit longer to think about things than he was used to. Turns out, when my wife and her siblings got him in to get checked on for those symptoms, that this tumor may have been within days of killing him. A few more days of unchecked growth, and who knows?
But they spotted it, and thus began the end. The options in short were:
- Radiation treatment to shrink and manage the tumor. Not a preferred solution in his case because the tumor was already advanced and, of course, radiation has other harmful effects on the body. Further, the tumor wouldn’t “go away” — it would simply be, in my words, checked.
- Brain surgery to remove the tumor. Difficult, given the location of the tumor, but a better chance at a stronger recovery.
The family opted for surgery, knowing full well there was a chance he might not survive.
The truth is, he didn’t.
The surgery took longer than intended, and recovery did as well. While they expected him to return home and begin rehabilitation on his road back to normal, or near normal, within a few days, his stay increased to a week, and then beyond, and then beyond that.
Worse, his condition was not improved. In fact, he wasn’t speaking, and seemed confused about everything. “It’s normal after his procedure,” they were assured. “Just give it time.”
But time didn’t fix it. He only got worse. He began speaking again, but the words often came out slurred, slow, confused. He had to think for a *long* time before speaking, and even then, his responses were clipped, short, rote. He recognized everybody — he knew their names — but there was no flicker of recognition, no light in the eyes at seeing their faces. He regularly mistook my wife for her mother. Other times he would ask for his wife (who passed some years prior, also from cancer, which by the way can get entirely fucked). The family would have to tearfully remind him of her passing. At which point he would, understandably, get very upset. Again and again.
He didn’t remember having the surgery. He didn’t remember agreeing to it. He didn’t know why he was in the hospital. And he could barely express himself to ask about it all.
Needless to say, gone was his quick wit, his penchant for dad jokes and puns, his quiet bemusement at the goings-on around him. He couldn’t dream of playing the drums, which he had loved — the impulse wouldn’t even have occurred to him. He couldn’t conceive of going to a ballgame with his daughter, something they had both loved in the past years — he could hardly walk down the hall, or even follow the action of a game on TV.
You often hear the expression “he was a shell of himself” to talk about how disease or injury can diminish a person. But the man was, quite literally, a shell. He was there in body, yes, but the mind — and he had SUCH a mind — was gone. And it never returned.
He had gone in for brain surgery and come back as somebody different.
The intervening weeks were a futile procession of doctor’s visits, consultations with specialists, and eventually, a miserable stay in hospice care. All of it was awful, all of it an insult to the life he lived and the man he was, and I don’t write today to recount it. It’s not my story to tell beyond what I’ve already described.
But I can’t stop thinking about how my wife’s father went to sleep as himself — a slower, slightly less-capable version of himself, yes, but undeniably himself — and woke up as a person we couldn’t recognize.
Did the tumor, or the surgery, erase that part of him who we knew and loved?
Did the tumor and treatment somehow create a new, different person out of his damaged brain?
Or was he still in there? Trapped in a body that could no longer operate, or feel anything other than confusion and pain?
He wasn’t a particularly religious man, but his funeral was. The officiant, who didn’t know him particularly well, talked at length about god’s love and the glory of heaven and the peace we and he can feel that he is with god now.
It was offensive.
A loving god would not inflict suffering like this on good people while literal villains live to obscene old age (some of them even running entire countries). She wouldn’t inflict suffering on their families like this.
There’s no glory in what happened to him, and there’s no evidence that he goes now to anything like glory.
And the only peace anybody feels now is that his final, awful chapter is now finished. There’s no epilogue for him. And if there were, why should he want to spend even a moment of it with such a monster?
My wife’s father was a good man, who made the world a better place.
He deserved better.
She deserved better.
My kids – his grandkids – deserved better.
To reiterate, Fuck Cancer.
Accidentally Inspired 