It's hard to get my dog's mouth open. If he's gotten ahold of a chicken bone tossed from some construction site it's nearly impossible to pry it from his hydraulic jaws. Now, half asleep on the floor, and under the narcotic influence of belly rubs, it's a little easier to get him to open up. A quick look around his palette reveals no visual evidence of tumors, and again I'm relieved. I do this check every month since his battle with oral cancer last year.
The new top post on my list of worries is occupied by my dad. He was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer AND skin cancer, and will soon be enduring overlapping therapies. My family has seen its share of deaths from cancer. I've lost three grandparents, an uncle and a cousin to various cancers, including breast, lung and liver varieties. This seems like a lot, but I'll bet it's pretty average. There are literally thousands of blogs by and for people living with cancers. It's the boogieman in the back of a million mental closets. In my world, the boogieman is right out in the living room.
They say it's important to be able to laugh about your troubles, so here's a funny cancer story. OK, maybe not funny, but amusing in a pathetic and absurd sort of way. My own skin cancers were entirely self-induced. Back in the nineties, before my vow of poverty as an artist, I used to take beach vacations at least twice a year in either the Caribbean, Florida, coastal Virginia, or once in a while, Mexico. For weeks prior to each visit, I would spend hours on a tanning bed "building up" a tan so that I could run around in the searing subtropical sun without a shirt. I did this for years. Fast forward another decade, and this time it wasn't a tanning bed I was on, but an operating table. I've had two aggressive melanomas that have left my back pretty scarred up. After my most recent, my surgeon actually said "The bad news is, your modeling career is over. The good news is, we think we got it all."
We had already planned for my parent's annual visit to Colorado before we learned of dad's cancers. With his doctor's approval, we kept our plans, and agreed to make the vacation normal with a capital N. No sad conjecturing and moping around. It wasn't going to be about cancer. There would be weeks and weeks ahead for that. So we set about renting a mountain cabin as a base for toned-down hikes and nights of card playing, and absolutely NO politics. That last one was possible only because we kept the TV off.
For ten days we explored Colorado and managed to not talk about cancer much at all, though I did find myself wanting to show my dad utterly beautiful things that I hoped would somehow flood into his psyche and provide a healing buffer. It's the best thing I could think to give him. So one night we drove up to Cottonwood Pass on top of the continental divide to watch the sunset. And it delivered.
I can easily recall a time when inter-generational tension kept family visits brief and polite. As a young man I would obsess about the imperfections of my family. The same was true for my wife Kae and her folks. On a car trip home after one beach vacation with her family, we had that conversation where you amaze yourself by identifying all the layers of dysfunction that somehow only you could see, but that mom and dad could not. We were pleased at our own insight and our resolve to live differently. After a hundred miles of working ourselves up, we decided we needed a good primal scream. So just as we came to the Sideling Hill Pass over the Allegheny Mountains, we rolled down our windows and stuck our heads out in the 70 mph wind and screamed ourselves silly. Ahead of us the road sloped downhill all the way back to our home in Chicago, where we couldn't wait to be. This primal scream became a tradition. We did it every year at that same pass. We'd do it even when we had an enjoyable trip, just because we liked traditions. Our kids found it confusing when they were little. As they got older they let us know we were being overly dramatic and embarrassing. Eventually we agreed and stopped doing it.
A half hour before it was time to drive my folks to the airport, my dad and I sat quietly together in the living room, both busy with our mobile devices. He was on his Nook, and I was texting a friend about an upcoming photo shoot. My mom walked in and said, "Put down those things and visit, we've only got a few minutes left!" My dad responded, "We've been here ten days. We're all visited-out." Which was true, so we all laughed, and then I drove them to the airport a little early.
After my folks left, Kae and I puttered around the house, cleaning up a little, adjusting to our home being just ours again; which was welcome, but also made us a tiny bit melancholy. A ray of late afternoon sun hit the kitchen counter and illuminated hundreds of fingerprints. Evidence of life, invisible from other angles. Twenty or thirty years from now (if we're lucky), it will be our kids worrying about us, making plans, stressing out, feeling sandwiched. And as they see us beginning to fade, it will feel unfair, and it will seem absurd, as it should. I looked across the room at Kae and asked if she wanted me to make a margarita. The sunlight on the counter was now on her. Tiny blond hairs on her arms gave her a halo. "Why does any of this have to end?" I said.
And she knew exactly what I meant.
