The Topic of Cancer

Cancer is an indiscriminate bastard. It takes so many and passes by others whether or not we've painted our doorframes with medicinal and spiritual blood. Young and old, fit and fat, cancer with its hundred heads doesn't have a type or target. It settled in my grandfather's brain. It revisits my father's skin regularly as if testing for weaknesses in his defenses. My mother beat it back twice and almost lost her voice doing it. It began unobtrusively behind the knee of my first choir director and advanced until he could retreat no more. My list could go on, as I’m sure yours could as well.

The day after I wrote this passage just a few months ago, I woke to the following two pieces of cancer news. An old friend was celebrating the six-month mark after his leukemia-necessitated bone marrow transplant. At the same time, I found waiting the obituary for the sportscaster I most identify with my youth. Stuart Scott was only nine years older than me and the worst word in this sentence is was. I am aware that was will apply to us all eventually, but cancer seems bent on robbing so many of their is and will be.

***

As I said at the beginning of this series, I didn't think I'd live to see forty. Most of the time, I'm glad I did. All of the time, I am mindful of those who didn't for whatever reason. It also makes me wonder how we can care more about the losses around us than we do right now, particularly the ones that seem so unfair. It makes me wonder if the four-year-old girl I saw in my daughter's home country making gravel by hand has become one of those losses. It makes me wonder if the guy I grew up with who was in jail at 12 for selling drugs made it to adulthood. It makes me painfully aware that many of the people I’ll wonder about next are already gone.