The Banality of Cancer

My dad, on a good day in his final years.

My father died last month. He was 77. A few years ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and it turned out to be a kind that there aren’t a lot of effective treatments for. He tried chemo, immunotherapy, and had several surgeries, including one to take a tumor the size of a golf ball out of his brain. After a couple years, the doctors gave him eight weeks, of which he lasted about three.

I’ve found his death to be less exciting than I suppose I thought it would be. When we think about people dying, it’s always sort of exciting, in the sense that a terrorist attack is exciting. Cancer does all of this in slow motion. It is being on top of the World Trade Center on September 10th, and not being able to leave the roof in time. You stand there, watching death advance, like the tide coming in, and there’s nothing you can do. The doctors read you the riot act, assure you that it’s the riot act, then talk treatments. Hope! The treatments happen, they don’t feel very nice for the patient, and something changes. Not so much hope. Then it goes back to where it was, and you begin a countdown to death. No hope.

When his ability to walk and even go to the bathroom were too compromised for him to live at home (about two weeks after they stopped treating him) he went to a hospice. The people at the hospice were incredibly kind. Angels, really. I cannot imagine what it must be like to do that job…