Shine A Light On Me

In the fall of 2013, my dad started to lose weight. He was having trouble eating and experiencing great stomach discomfort. All of which he never was vocal about. My family assumed he was getting older and all the bad habits were catching up. I remember my sister was in shock when she saw him that Christmas, this was a few months before my interview with him. He was no longer the burly man we had known our whole lives. Now he appeared in a faded, thinner version. My mom and him joked about his weight loss, how his pants were almost falling off of him. It never occurred to us that something was deeply and seriously wrong. Something that’s embarrassing to think of now. 

During one of our interview chats, my dad and I talked about our difficulties eating. He talked about not being able to eat some days, the pain and frustration. I also had similar stomach problems that I couldn’t quite figure out either, though turned out to be lifelong GERD and gluten sensitivity. At that time we both assumed we had inherited the same digestive issues. That spring was when he finally went to visit our family doctor. The man we trusted for over fifteen years responded to my dad’s concerns with, “Well Mike, didn’t you need to lose some weight anyway?” 

The summer of 2014 I traveled to Austin to my sister’s house and my parents drove in from Houston. I couldn’t believe how much older he looked from the previous year. The summer before he had been at least thirty pounds different. But still, we all thought he was getting older, nothing serious. It’s hard to admit, I, like everyone else, convinced myself it was normal. I believed seeing him lose weight was a good thing, because in this world we always seem to associate thinness with being healthy. That last summer together was the World Cup tournament. We watched a lot of the games together at my sister’s house. We shared what we didn’t know would be our final family 4th of July together. 

Returning home, I called to see how he and my mom were doing. I have a hilarious memory of calling during a game in which by chance, a goal almost occurred.  As our line connected, both my dad and I answered mid scream.

He knew I loved to watch the games and would watch them too, probably out of excitement that there was finally a sport we could bond over.

•

Back in Oklahoma, that July, I turned thirty two. I had the best birthday involving Thai food and decorating extraordinarily early for Halloween, because no one could stop me. At around midnight I was taking a bath and thinking about how high pressure the following months would be. That fall was my last semester of classes followed by my student teaching in the spring. In only two semesters I would be done with everything and ready to teach. I was terrified but energetic to get it all done. 

I had already requested my family to come up for graduation in May. Something I hadn’t done for my first degree. I had worked incredibly hard and was quite proud for once at my accomplishments. I floated in a bath as the clock struck midnight on my birthday. I felt peaceful, even happy. Everything was quiet. In the back of my mind a nervousness began to grow, like in a nightmare when you sense that something awful is coming for you just around the corner. I brushed the anxiety off and decided it was nothing more than my usual paranoia.

August had arrived and my mom mentioned that my dad was not satisfied with some of his recent doctor visits. He had begun to make more appointments and demanded a CAT scan. He had been doing this secretly, to keep us from worrying. I could tell by my mom’s voice that she was starting to lose ease about the situation. My sister reported back after a trip to Galveston with him and her kids that he looked bad, worse than the two months prior. I didn’t know how to process her fear or any of this information because I had not seen him.

September I was back at school, on campus at UCO doing fifteen hours, plus added hours for student observations. I was pulling in almost nineteen hours total. A challenging art history class and an exhausting studio metal-smithing class added an additional layer of intensity. I had to get straight A’s to stay in the program. It was a side effect from my old GPA in Houston, the curse that kept on giving. 

I had turned my life around this second degree, it didn’t seem fair trying to outrun a ghost from my old life. I was now a straight A student, focused and energized, things I didn’t know I could be. The Fine Arts counselor seemed worried at the course load I was taking on, but I was unbothered. I was determined to prove her wrong. A tenacious side of me I hadn’t even known to exist began to emerge.

It was Friday, September 19th, 2014. I got up early to go meet my middle school mentor and get some observation hours out of the way. I also had to put in the unavoidable studio hours for my metal-smithing class. My sister had texted me to see what I was up to. I told her I had a big day and that we could talk later sometime. The heat was unbearable driving to my assigned middle school in my stuffy professional clothes. It was the typical wrathful sun of a summer’s end. 

After my observation hours, I swung by a store to get a regular t-shirt and not wear my work attire in the metal shop, which would surely be a sauna. I couldn’t go back home and change. I remember standing in the store picking out a simple and cheap maroon shirt thinking it looked comfortable and cute. I definitely wasn’t thinking, “Oh, here’s the shirt I’ll be wearing when I get the worst news of my life.” Yet, I stood there looking at it and smiled unknowing.

Inside the studio at the wooden desk cubicles, I worked for hours on my jewelry project until I grew tired. I watched through the massive wall sized window as the Autumn Moon festival came and went while wishing for courage or money to go take part. Crowds of people also filtered through the studio during that five hour stretch but it had now fallen quiet. The festival was over, the sky was black. It was about 9:30 and there were barely any students left in the art building. 

I packed up and walked the long trip back to my white Nissan. I called Jon on my cell phone asking if he’d gotten his dad a birthday card for the next day. He said no. I blew up, “Do you have any idea how much stuff I had to do today? You know it’s tomorrow!” Soft silence followed. He didn’t say much, an oddity that struck me. The fact that he didn’t keep his word was even stranger. He didn’t even get mad at my yelling, he calmly apologized and told me to come home. Something seemed off, it didn’t make sense and I had a weird feeling, I could tell his voice was different. It crossed my mind that something had happened but I was incredibly tired and mostly annoyed.

I stopped by a drugstore to get a card and candy then made my way home. In the car my mind lightly swirled over the usual anxieties. For years I had prepared myself for coming home to bad news. My parents were older, my dad was never in the best health. Still, I pushed it out of my mind. For all those years we had been away from my parents, I had tried to brace myself for the worst. Funny though, what you think of when it comes to your idea of “worst.” I had always envisioned the worst would mean a heart attack. That’s the worst I could imagine. Somehow that night in my car, it came and went from my mind, as it had hundreds of other times.

The house was dark and still when I walked in. His parents were already gone to bed. Jon got me some food. I sat down exhausted and ate, telling him about my entire day. Jon was not himself, he seemed tired but not in a normal way. When I asked, he claimed nothing was wrong. I finished eating and addressed the silence, “What’s wrong? Did one of the cats die?” He smiled weakly and softly. I continued, “You look weird. Something is wrong.” Jon had spent the whole day tortured, wondering how and when he was going to give me the news that would destroy my life. 

“Your mom called this afternoon, she said…we’ve got bad news, Mike has cancer.” His voice weakened as he got the whole thing out. I sat for a few seconds in what felt like an undulating silence, physically pulsing throughout the room. I nodded my head, as if to say I understood. I stared off into a wall as I began to hear a ringing that seemed to be radiating through my entire body. The sound, what I suppose was my pulse, soaring through my ear canals. Motionless, I asked for simple facts and blinked a few times. I was in shock.

In reaction to the news, my body felt the repetitive pain from what you experience when cut by a knife, except it was my entire body and that pain would last for weeks. The pain was real and constant. That first night I struggled to sleep. I remember laying in the dark shuddering and staring at the dark silhouette of the new coat my dad had just sent to me hanging on the closet door. It would be the last coat my dad ever bought me. Suddenly I knew how much I had taken him for granted my whole life. In a way it felt like he was already gone. The sight of it pierced my soul. It felt as if I was being swallowed as I finally drifted off to sleep. The next day was worse. 

•

Slowly I began to understand. Jon told me everything he could about Pancreatic cancer. Then I finally talked to my parents on the phone. My mom tried to be normal. My dad sounded small, his voice unprecedentedly defeated, it even sounded almost ashamed. They had waited days to tell me. He didn’t want me to know because he was worried, about me! He knew how much I had to do and didn’t want my school work to suffer. 

We tried to say the right things and be normal. We tried to be positive, without being too obvious. It was absolutely awful. Everything had changed. I started to want to die. Hanging up the phone I couldn’t believe how futile it all was. A mundane phone call about death and humiliating helplessness. The tragedy was spoken over the phone with such normality that it felt completely outrageous. This was not a phone call I had ever thought I’d have. I collapsed on the floor between the bed and the wall, the emotions had now arrived. Laying on the floor I dissolved, almost too weak to cry. Jon came in and sat next to me. I whispered the thing I feared most, “I’m going to watch him fade away, into nothing.”

I had a dream that weekend, based on a real conversation that had taken place weeks earlier. My parents had been cleaning out their house. They still had the crib that had been for my niece, who had outgrown it. Of course my mom couldn’t resist a reason to ask if Jon and I would want it. I laughed and rolled my eyes at the loaded question. I don’t even remember if I told her to keep it or not. 

During that weekend of the world caving in around me, my mind had resurrected the conversation. Except now the crib was only a shadow, locked in past tense. In my dream, my mom was crying and saying, “It’s too late.” The moment Jon told me my dad had cancer, my first singular thought had been that, “I’m too late.” 

My plans, any thoughts of the future, had all been wrong. My dad would not see me graduate, marry, have children or ever sit down in my own house with a cup of coffee. My plans for his distant sixty-seventh birthday would never happen. Every word in my naive and unintentionally written book of life, was now gone. It was all over, the hope, the dreams, the plans… because I was too late, he would not live to see any of it. 

That dream haunted me for weeks, along with the disorienting facts of what my new life was about to become. The mental vertigo would continue for months. I could no longer see the floor. Every step I took brought me falling, spinning, faster into what seemed an infinite abyss. My story, my life was all blank now. I had always expected to lose a parent after I was forty or fifty. I was wrong. The person I looked to for advice and guidance would no longer be there. I had no idea where I was going. It was only threatening, vast empty pages.