Cancer, Death, Story, and Unfinished Business

You know it the minute you catch yourself adding "oncology" to your predictive text dictionary.  Death is a creeping thing, but in the age of instant communication it hits you with all the casualness of an invitation for coffee.  The text blast goes out and hits a score of people: "oncology report is in, tumor in small bowel. Very rare.  Matter of months."

And it comes without the momentous stretching out of time that a long horseback ride across open country would bring with it.  It's just an event.  You can tweet life and death, and it's not a story, just a newsfeed.

I want to describe the oncologists: a powerfully built open and kind Indian man and a steely crop-haired woman, short but formidable with a practiced bedside manner that maybe felt the tiniest bit rehearsed.

I want to say what it's like, this death by a thousand cuts, the parade of people with news, almost all of it bad.  Internal medicine team, surgery team, oncology team, nuclear medicine team.  Teeming with doctors, this place is, all paid for by insurance, all with lives at home that they will live when they leave this place.

This place is our life.

This is our story.

We got the news an hour ago that the cancer will not be cured, only controlled.  Mom seems resigned.  Maybe that's a stage.  But the story is that we have few accounts, little unfinished business in this world.  She'll face the road she needs to walk.  I can feel other family members, and maybe a little bit of myself, wanting to scream, Don't make that choice yet.  Hear out all the options.  Learn more.

My sister puts it succinctly: "I can't believe I'm hungry.  Don't bother me with food."  It feels indecent to live in the shadow of death.

We want, like King David fasting for his dying son, to starve god in our bodies until god chokes up life.

But then the peaceful heart of me that knows my mom very, very well whispers, No.  You do what you need to do for you.  You've done more for us than we will ever be able to repay.  There are no open accounts that can be paid back now, there's not much left to say that absolutely must be said.  There will always be more to say.  But there comes a time when you tell your last joke, and you lock your house for the last time, and put your key in your pocket from force of habit, and turn your back, and you walk away.