The Way Life Goes

My dad has cancer.

It’s not that unexplainable kind that might show up out of the blue in a thirty-year-old mother who never sunbathed in her life.

It’s not even the kind they take out of your colon when you’re sixty and life goes evenly on because they get it all before it spreads.

No, it’s the furtive kind that has its beginnings in tiny asbestos fibers that maybe you breathe into your lungs at a random construction site in your twenties, as you work to feed your sprouting family.

Or it could start even earlier, they say, when you yourself are a kid and your dad comes home from his shift at Geneva Steel with the tiny jagged fibers on his clothes and in his hair.

But wherever those fibers find you, they somehow do. And they implant themselves in the lining of your lung.

And they irritate your very cells.

And those cells might start to change imperceptibly as you buy your kids an Atari and stage Pac-Man and Breakout tournaments.

And you carry toddlers on your shoulders down crowded parade routes, and hike with them up paved trails to dark, clammy caves, and all the while the rogue cells are still altering their design. 

Then maybe they start to divide, even as you work all day and spend your evenings building your family a home, pouring cement, guiding little hands to leave a print and scratch a name in the sticky new patio under the stairs.

And you help white-clad children into baptismal water,

And paint pinewood derby cars,

And watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind whenever it’s on television.

But the silent, biological corruption is still simmering inside you, and the day comes when your dark-haired love has to leave, and your chest seizes and your lungs won’t fill, not because of the cancer—not yet—but because you are buried in grief and in burden, and six lost children all turn their questioning eyes to you.

And still you forge on, and so do those errant cells, as you raise those kids, and others, too, and you log endless hours watching them play soccer, and football, and softball, and piano. And you film their moments and you worry and yell and you drop into bed night after night in sheer exhaustion.

And the children succeed, and they leave one by one, and they sometimes come back and still you are there, and you write them letters and you guide them on and you put your big rough hands on their heads and speak halting words of immeasurable love.

And the cancer has formed and the cells multiply as your kids do the same, and the grandchildren pour down like rain with hardly a breath between, and you welcome and wonder at them all.

Then one day the latent intruder steps out from its hiding place. And you’re tired, and you cough, and over and over you have fluid drained from your lungs. And you undergo tests that are largely inconclusive.

And you attend a long-planned family reunion, where you hike down and up 888 slippery steps in a dripping cave with your progeny, and the tour guide explains things they already know, because you taught them about caves decades ago. And you and your wife stage a raucous game of Minute to Win It, and the grandchildren clamber to take on your challenges. And the two of you bring out gigantic bubble wands, and together you smile as the little ones laugh and wobbly, iridescent blobs emerge, bigger than they are.

The vacation ends. There’s a biopsy. And then the news.

And your grown children cry, and they move through their days with a cold heavy ache deep inside, and they push it away and it pushes back in, and the world feels dark, and then they call. You ask them how they are, and your calm voice brings back the light, and things feel okay again, for a while.

That’s the kind of cancer my dad has.