1997
When you are young or healthy enough to not know better, or need to know any differently, you won’t spend a great deal of time pondering the ways our bodies work. We learn in school that our bodies are like machines (or, if religion gets there first, we are instructed that our bodies are miracles, at once made in God’s image and the perfect alchemy of His divine experiment, begun in the Garden of Eden).
When the body is unencumbered by illness or self-inflicted duress, it works best when it is inconspicuous. We don’t necessarily notice when we breathe, swallow, sweat, absorb or any of the other invisible responses that keep the organs thriving and the synapses firing.
When we are sick everything changes. So many of these considerations come into focus and we appreciate what our bodies allow us to take for granted. When we get fevers or infections, we can acknowledge—and appreciate—that the aches and chills, even the coughing and the phlegm, are evidence of our systems in action, combating the viruses and bacteria that might otherwise incapacitate us. We may marvel at the way a body can cure itself: illness runs its course, scars heal, skin grows and symptoms dissipate. It is possible that we never feel healthier than when we are recovering from a minor ailment.
With a malignant illness, like cancer, it obliges a humbled concession of the limitations of any single system’s resources. When the body, invaded by an opportunistic cell, starts to turn against itself, we look to medicine—and the professionals paid to dispense it—because we have few other options. Anyone with a sense of history has the perspective necessary to perceive the ways medicine has enhanced our lives.
At one point in our human development we considered bad health or sickness an infestation of evil spirits; later we used remedies such as leeches and burning glass to drain or expel malevolent fluids. And yet, it inevitably seems more than a little antiquated, even barbaric, the way we poison our bodies to thwart the cancer: chemotherapy can seem like the modern application of a medieval concept. Our method of making the body a less hospitable host and rendering it almost uninhabitable can cause one to contemplate the progress we’ve made on the continuum of disease and mortality.
If you are not prepared for what cancer can do, this is a blessing of sorts. Being unprepared means you have not previously had occasion to think deeply about the disease. The initiation causes you to look at things differently or, you never look at the world, your loved ones or yourself quite the same way.
***
Until he passed away shortly before I became a teenager, I would see my mother’s grandfather, Nonno, every few years. His wife had died young, so he lived the last thirty years of his life alone. In truth, I remember little except impressions and the stories others have told about him. My recollection is that he was fairly short, had pleasantly disheveled white hair and still spoke with a strong Italian accent. He kept chickens in his backyard and I would enjoy watching them clucking in their wooden cages. Most of all, I recall that his house smelled like piss.
He was diagnosed with colon cancer in his ‘50s and, almost miraculously for that time, the surgery was successful. As a result, he was obliged to wear a colostomy bag and his diet, for the last few decades, existed almost entirely of cereal and crackers. Looking back I can better appreciate what a tough, self-sufficient man he was. He was in poor enough health that he could occasionally have trouble making it to the bathroom. As a result, he simply filled up half-gallon milk cartons and would leave them around the house, mostly in his bedroom.
I was too young to process this on any sort of rational level, but old enough to find it unsettling, and even a little frightening. What I could not possibly appreciate, then, was how independent and resourceful he managed to be. I like to think of him living out his years, comparatively content to exist on his own terms, at least as much as he was capable of doing.
All I knew, circa 1979, was that I was going to live forever. I knew nothing of cancer, or old age, infirmity or isolation. I knew that piss smelled unpleasant, especially when it had been sitting in a semi-open container, neglected inside a warm room within a house without air conditioning toward the end of summer.
I did not know much in 1979, but most of all I did not know all that I did not know, which is the one irretrievable condition of youth. I knew some things, like the fact that my backyard was Fenway and Yaz never struck out; I knew about block parties, blue gills, burned marshmallows, mosquitoes and putrid bug repellant that did not kill anything but made me stronger. I knew I was going to live forever and no one close to me was close to dying either. And then, in 1980, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer.
*excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone
