Silver Linings

Did my dad die while still in his prime from a terrible disease that struck at random? Or did he stave off a killer for much longer than most anybody does, and manage to have a good few years of enjoying his hobbies and his family? If he were here to answer, unquestionably he would say simply, "Yes."

Pick up two different newspapers some time and read their coverage of the same event. What exactly happened? Perspective matters. Attitude matters.

Even though I had my dad for 31 years before cancer, and only four and a half with it, life before we entered the cancer universe is hard to separate in my memory. Earlier today I flipped through some pictures of a long ago visit to my parents' house. At the time we had "only" two kids, and the older one was not yet three. The baby was all of three months old. There are some great photos of my dad holding the baby, and as I tried getting into my memories of 2006-2007 it dawned on me that we weren't sure these two would ever get the chance to meet. He is the second of my parents' five grandchildren, and my dad got his diagnosis a couple of weeks before we even got to tell everyone that my wife was pregnant with him. As it turned out, they did have time together. The few years they got to enjoy each other's company was entirely too short, yes, but it was all borrowed time. When I think about it, I am grateful that there was any time at all.

Terminal illness forces you to mark time that you might have let slip by without a second thought. It makes a lot of first times that much more important, because they might be "only times". This was exactly the case with my baby daughter and my sister's baby son meeting my dad last spring. But instead of crushing myself with the thought that the grandchildren won't have their papa as they grow up, I try to focus on the silver lining: He got to see them all in the flesh - even the two who were weeks old when they lost him. He held them and kissed them and played with their tiny baby fingers and toes, heard them cry in the same room. Posed for more pictures than he probably wanted to, but that he knew we needed to have.

You can't squeeze a lifetime into a long weekend, but for the babies and for my dad, at least we had the long weekend.

It Takes a Village

Stand-up comic Steven Wright (suggested motto, "I was much funnier in the 80s") had a one-liner about what it's like to reminisce with strangers. I won't bore you with the whole thing, but my dad always loved that dumb joke. As it turns out, when I was mourning his loss, I sort of did end up doing a version of that. Just another one of those things that have happened since I've been cut off from him that he would have found amusing. I could fill a whole separate blog with those.

The day after the funeral I flew back home. I hadn't seen my kids in ten days, and I needed to be home.  We live in the town where my wife grew up. She's got roots here, so we've got roots. Take it from a guy who in the span of fifteen weeks became a dad for the third time and lost a parent: roots are everything.

I've lived in my adopted home town for several years now, but my dad was only ever a visitor here. His home was a thousand miles away. But our house was very crowded all three nights of shiva. One of the nights there were so many kids running around that we thought they would come crashing through the ceiling from upstairs. Joyful noise indeed. Most of the visitors had never met the man, which made the gesture all the more meaningful to me. All these months later I am still deeply touched when I think about it. In the aftermath, my wife and I said to each other that we need to make more of an effort to be there for everyone the way everyone was there for us.

Cancer is horrible. Losing a loved one is horrible. But if you are lucky, even those experiences will afford you a chance to see some of the good things about your life that you didn't know were there. I already was well aware that my town is not like most other places, but the way my friends and neighbors came together to be with me showed me beyond any doubt that this place truly has become my home.

The Big Questions

Back in the fall an acquaintance lost his family dog. The man has two sons who are 11 and 7 years old. He didn't know when he was telling me the story that I was four months removed from burying my father, so he wasn't being insensitive when he consoled himself by saying that at least the dog provided his boys an experience with a "starter death". I took no offense, but I did think about how my kids had no choice but to dive right in on their first meeting with death. They weren't afforded training wheels.

Thankfully my wife is an excellent mother, and she did a lot of work in advance to make sure that when the time came to break this terrible news to the kids, it was done with compassion and grace. She once said to me that this would be our chance to influence how they felt about death throughout their lives, so we had to get it right. She brought home books, and talked with people who had had to share this kind of news with their own young children, as well as educators, rabbis, and psychologists. We are fortunate to have so many great friends. I am fortunate to have married this lady. I'm not saying that you can remove the scary or upsetting parts of losing a grandparent, but she managed a tough parenting challenge masterfully.

These days Papa is as much a fact of life in my house as anything else. We can mention him without any of us falling to pieces. This is good, because it is very important to me that my kids associate good memories with him and don't fixate only on losing him so soon into their lives. My middle guy, who is four now, but was three when we lost my dad, believes Papa is in our hearts. But he seems to think that a mini version of a living person is literally in his heart. So much so that he once told my mother not to pat his chest, because she was shaking Papa.

The oldest is processing it differently. Once in a while he brings it up, and he wants to know every single minute detail about what happened. How did the nurses know he died? Who did they call? What did you do next? When did the rabbi get there? What did you do in the room right after he died? What was he wearing at his funeral? Who dressed him? Where was he after he died, but before he was buried? How did he get cancer? Why couldn't his doctor just take the cancer out of his body?

Losing a grandparent also has forced him to think about life's big questions well before he should have had to. And as a parent, it has forced me to try to craft comforting answers before I felt wise enough to. I expect any day that he will ask the two big questions: How did we get here, and what happens when we die? He is most interested in the latter question. Of course, the most honest answer to either one is, "Who the hell knows?" But that isn't useful when you are trying to help a first-grader make sense of the universe. I want to set him at ease, but I don't want to weave myths that will invariably come undone, and I want to try to be honest, too. My boy is intelligent and perceptive, but have you ever tried explaining what a soul is to someone who only recently learned how to read?

For now he seems satisfied by the stock answer about souls "going to be with God." But if and when that answer no longer holds I've decided to share with him a version of my own feelings about what happens when we die: the best we can do is be kind to others while we're here without expecting some eternal reward. This sentiment was expressed more elegantly by Dr. Mark Vonnegut, the son of my favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut. He said, "We are here to help each other through this thing. Whatever it is."

Spring Renewal

Pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training any day now. Over the weekend my first grader and four-year-old reported somewhat early. It was just barely warm enough to play outside, and the first thing they wanted was to take batting practice in the backyard. Nevermind that my glove was soaked through with melting snow, and that it was still cold enough to numb fingers into immobility. They love baseball.

My dad wasn't much of a sports fan. It just wasn't his thing. But my sons love to play and watch most sports. The older one especially loves baseball. It is everything to him. And we are lucky enough that our home team happens to be in the midst of a great few years.

Ten days after they lost their papa, we had this great week where I took each of my sons to a home game on different nights just as the pennant race was heating up. We ate dollar hotdogs, we saw a walk-off homer, and we even saw the much-anticipated debut of a prized rookie- a 22-year-old whom my first-grader still calls "the kid".

Was this a sign of disrespect for my dad? An indication that I hadn't mourned properly or enough? Was I ignoring my duties as a son? None of the above. I took my boys to see their team because I can never, would never, stop being their dad. Not for a nanosecond. Not in the middle of my deepest grief. My own dad would expect nothing less.

A good friend told me at the very beginning that nobody would think I didn't miss or love my dad if I didn't feel like moping around inconsolably at all times. I think that is quite right. People process feelings in different ways. There is no right or wrong way to mourn. Dad would have understood that there was something redemptive about spending that kind of time with my sons, especially while we were having such a hard time.

So here we are with winter (hopefully) yielding to spring, and with my family awakening a bit. My baby girl, who only met her papa once, is now walking, and will soon celebrate her first birthday. After a long dark period, I've set some personal goals for myself, and am moving in the right direction. And as I said at the top, the boys are getting ready for baseball. We will always have a hole where there should be my dad, but we won't stop enjoying life together. He would never have asked us to. I think if he could see the shape we're in now, he'd be proud of us for looking forward to what is ahead.

The Grey's Anatomy Effect

About four weeks after the last scan, when my dad was in the hospital for the first overnight stay in his four-plus years as a cancer patient, when it was abundantly clear that the chemo hadn't been working for a while, and that the cancer was spreading fast, it finally landed on me.

No, it didn't.

My dad was in bad shape, but he was still alive, dammit. And if someone is alive, then hope springs eternal.

Except that often, it doesn't.

His oncologist, whom we liked and trusted, tried to tell me, but I needed to be hit over the head. Hit me over the head, he did. His exact words still ring in my ears some eight months later, "The chance that your dad will respond meaningfully to any further treatment is zero." You'd think that would have done it. It didn't. I called in favors. I moved up appointments we had made at two brand-name cancer hospitals, and I was on the road toward getting him an experimental drug, even though the trials usually don't admit patients who have exhausted their traditional therapy options. If I could have arranged to wheel his hospital bed into an infusion suite to get that experimental drug into his body, I would have pushed the thing myself.

We opted for hospice care only when it was clear that his body was failing so completely that it was not physically possible to offer any further cancer treatment. That, and another doctor advised that further treatment could have hurt him, or ruined whatever time we had left.

So the big news yesterday that a major medical association was changing its guidelines to encourage physicians to be more candid about likely outcomes and options to help terminal patients plan for "a good death" was kind of a punch to my gut. It fed my need to wonder about whether I'd done the right things for my dad. But then again, my wife correctly pointed out that my family would not have gone quietly toward hospice any sooner than we did. Well, maybe we were wrong.

When someone you love dies you find a million ways to torture yourself. See all that stuff in the paragraph up there that I said I did? None of it stops me from wondering if I did enough, or if I could have done anything sooner or with more urgency. Partly this is a normal reaction. Partly it is because of what I call the Grey's Anatomy Effect, an overlooked cousin of the oft-reported CSI Effect.

Watch enough medical dramas on TV and you may become convinced that your loved one can be saved at the last minute by something risky, experimental, rare, or entirely dumb luck. Hell, maybe it was never cancer at all, but some previously unknown, but non-lethal disease. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case. But mix this bit of cultural conditioning with the normal feeling of not wanting to lose someone, and you can see why the doctor had to be so blunt.

Here's hoping that this new practice guideline in cancer care helps patients and their loved ones adjust and prepare for the inevitable, and do it with some peace of mind and physical comfort.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

About ten weeks after my dad died, the great comedian Robert Schimmel died, too. This was a big deal to me, and not just because I loved his work. Schimmel was something my dad and I shared for years. Once I met him and asked him to sign an autograph for my dad. I didn't even want one for myself. I just wanted to give it to my dad, who loved having it. It still sits on a bookshelf in his den.

Then on Christmas, Miami radio legend Neil Rogers died. Again, a big deal to me, because I remember spending whole days with my dad where we'd listen to "Uncle Neil" for hours in the car.

We are a long way away from the world with three TV stations and the Saturday Evening Post, and since there are so many choices and variations, each person can experience the world a little differently from everyone else. Each person creates his own universe of culture (in as much as the two poop-joke purveyors named above constitute culture), friends, food, stories, memories, etc. And when a person dies, the universe of experiences and preferences he or she spun may remain intact for a while, but it too, must disappear little by little as life rolls on. That is what hit me about Schimmel and Rogers dying.

More and more of the way my dad experienced the world will surely change or slip away soon. Not just through celebrities dying, but through stories slipping from memory, worn out jokes being worn the rest of the way out, restaurants closing, streets I may never have occasion to visit again, through losing touch with some friends and associates who were really his and not ours, and through a thousand other small changes that simply happen everyday in the world.

This post meandered a long way away from what I intended to write after I decided on that clever title. I was going to pay tribute to my dad's personal universe by describing some of the more colorful people he knew. He knew a lot of eccentrics, and may have been one himself. It's a pattern I don't mind finding myself repeating in my adult life. Maybe you will hear about the "I'm sure gonna miss you guys" guy and the, "They asked what college I had went to" guy in a future post.

When we think about lost loved ones, we're not just remembering the person or our time together. Inherent in our memories is the way they experienced the world. For my dad, it boiled down to some combination of music, machines, and memorable people. Staying connected to that version of the world, even as it changes, helps us feel close to the ones we miss.

Becker Luck

I'm sure most families have some version of what my dad called Becker Luck. I don't know if he was the one who defined it, but he was the one who experienced it and identified it the most. It isn't bad luck, it's just different luck. He defined Becker Luck as getting the thing you were seeking in the first place, but only after going through some kind of unnecessary and sometimes preventable hell first.

Let's say you go to Best Buy on a Sunday to get a TV they advertised on sale. You get there and they are sold out, no rain checks. Every store in the area is sold out. On the way home you get a flat tire, and you have to spend Monday getting it fixed. Tuesday you wander into Sears on an unrelated errand and you see the same TV on sale that day only for $200 less than Best Buy's sale. You've just experienced Becker Luck.

My dad lived with stage IV lung cancer for four and a half years. That is a miraculous amount of time. It wasn't enough time, of course, but 100 years wouldn't have been enough time. We told each other a lot that this would turn out to be some kind of Becker Luck. What he wanted was a long and fulfilling retirement. What he got was peripheral neuropathy and chemo and worry. He made the best of it, but it wasn't the retirement any of us imagined. I just knew in my heart that one day he would be cancer-free, and we'd look back at the cancer years as the unnecessary hell on the way to that long and fulfilling retirement.

I was looking at it backwards. It was cancer that had Becker Luck. Only 16 percent of people who have lung cancer live five years after being diagnosed. Only one percent who have the kind my dad had live that long. Lung cancer nearly always gets its man. But you fight it. You put it through hell. You make it wait. If you are lucky, you get a couple of good years where you can fool yourself into thinking that luck is on your side.