Vol. 14 - Being a Dad is Hard as F*ck

The view from a son's perspective

It’s Thursday.

Which means this newsletter is a day late.

It’s a day late because I’ve had my hands extra full this week. Not full with kids or preschool or diapers or anything that we’ve already discussed thus far in the life of this newsletter (though, I promise, they are full with those things).

It’s a day late because I’ve been posted up at my father’s house most of the week, helping him convalesce from the surgery he had to remove a cancerous kidney he discovered just before Christmas.

It was found by accident during a CT scan that had been scheduled to check for the possibility of an aortic aneurysm; a physical anomaly that has been known to run in my father’s family.

And while his aorta appeared fine, his radiologist noticed something that didn’t look too kind sitting on one of his kidneys. She ordered an ultrasound, followed by a CT scan of the abdomen. Finally, on Monday, a nephrectomy was performed to remove my father’s cancerous kidney.

It was only about month from when we were first alerted to this growth to Monday’s kidney removal.

One month from first scare to diagnosis of cancer to, hopefully, final cure.

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One thing that happens when people you love get sick is you quickly become an expert in the thing that is trying to kill them.

And now, after a few short and furious weeks of dealing with a second cancerous parent, I know that kidney cancer is either really good or really, really bad.

Because of its lack of symptoms, it’s either found early and incidentally, as it was with my father, and is easily curable.

No spread? Take the kidney out. Live on.

Or it’s found too late and is basically a death sentence.

“It’ll be really good news or I’ll come home and figure out how to divvy up my guitars,” my father said before going in for his abdominal scan.

He makes jokes when he’s nervous. So do I.

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Though it’s never been diagnosed, I do think I suffer from some kind of post traumatic stress disorder that stems from the years I spent watching cancer kill my mother.

Most of her final years weren’t too extraordinary. They were rough, no doubt, but somewhere in between diagnosis and death, we found a handful of workable years, and for a time even thought she might stick around a while longer than anyone could have imagined.

But it was the earliest stretch following her initial diagnosis, the part where we had to learn how to take care of her, how to expect the worst, how to placate our feelings as we waited to see if her all-telling CA125 numbers were up or down, that was the roughest. And, of course, her final few weeks were a horror.

More than anything, the very beginning and the very end of my mother’s journey with cancer have left me, to some extent, traumatized.

As I drove aimlessly around Alamance, North Carolina, waiting for my father to come out of the appointment that would determine if the growth had spread, to find out if his was a death sentence, I was overwhelmed by a tsunami of emotions that I recognized all too well.

I remembered learning my mother might have cancer just before Christmas, just as we did with my father. I remembered interminable hours spent in hospital waiting rooms trying to find a comfortable spot on those rock-hard chairs. I remembered that gentle tightness in your chest when you know bad news is always lurking just around the corner. I remembered that constricting of the mind and the emotions, when all you can think about is that one fucking thing. I remembered shaving my mother’s head for her, still the worst night of my life, when her cancer became undeniably real. I remembered sitting by her bedside, holding her frail hands, and saying goodbye. I remembered the guilt I felt for being happy she was finally gone, freed from her pain. I remembered opening the windows that surrounded her deathbed, per her instructions.

“The spirit needs a place to go,” she told us in her final weeks. “Open all the windows and say, ‘Shoo. Shoo! Get out of here, you ghost! Time to go!’”

I remembered the black crow that perched outside her window in the moments after she died and how he stood sentinel for almost twenty minutes, cawing to us and letting us know that we could say goodbye.

And then my phone buzzed. And I remembered the bile that rose in my throat whenever you knew you were about to get life-altering news because the bile rose in my throat, knowing I was about to get life-altering news.

It was my father, happy, laughing.

No spread. Take the kidney out. Live on.

I remembered the feeling of all your insides unspooling, of the invisible foot lifting from your chest, when you got good news.

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Somewhere between that first CT scan and the joyous realization that his tumor was confined to his kidney, my father and I embraced in his living room, both of us crying.

“I’m not ready to go through this again,” I said, selfishly.

I realized as the words spilled out that it was not the right thing to say. I realized how in that moment, my job was to try and comfort a man who was facing his own mortality a few decades earlier than he had hoped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This isn’t about me.”

My father held me as tight as he could.

And—just as my mother had so many times in the years she lived with cancer—it was him, the one who was perhaps dying, comforting his son.