F*CK CANCER

In a span of 2 years and 8 days, I have witnessed two dear friends get diagnosed, and lose ugly battles with pancreatic cancer. I am not writing this to gain sympathy, for “my” loss is miniscule compared to the pain endured by their beloveds. There is another loss to speak of. Your loss. If you never had the pleasure of knowing Tom Cheever or Kevin Brooks. If you’ve never heard them tell a story, or improvise a song. If you’ve never witnessed them admiring their children, or looking into the eyes of the women they loved. If you’ve never seen their fantastic smiles or better yet, heard them laugh, then the loss is yours. Lives cut short (Tom 43, Kevin 55) from achieving professional, creative and personal goals. Happy, healthy, lives. Admirable lives. Imperfect, striving, beautiful lives. Potential unmet. Potential the entire world has lost.

When someone dies of cancer, it seems as though the same questions get asked. “Did he smoke? Was he overweight? Does it run in the family?” What people are really asking is “What did he do wrong to bring this on?” because, somehow we want to think that we’re immune. That if we eat this, don’t do that, or practice the other, then we won’t get caught in cancer’s ugly net.

Cancer doesn’t discriminate. It hates everything it touches. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we consume. We are playing Russian Roulette every day.

When I sat down to write this, I’d hoped for some kind of uplifting message. That we each walk our journey, and we never know where or how it’s going to end, and somehow that’s okay. Well, it’s not. It sucks. We are richer for having known Tom and Kevin and yet poorer for having lost them to a force that will not succumb. As the work they didn’t finish slowly fades, we’re left to carry on without them. I am humbled by cancer’s cruelty and powerless in its prevention. I have no lessons to share or wisdom to appreciate. These are but two men. Two men I have known, I have shared meals with and laughed with.  There have been and will always be others whose time with us isn’t nearly as long as should be, and we can only move through our grief hoping that one day the pain will ease. But it will never cease. And I guess that’s what it means to be human.

Life’s a bitch, and then you die.

PHANTOM BIRTHDAYS

Sunday, the 16^th of May would have been my friend Kate Billings’ 53^rd birthday.  For years, I was convinced it was on the 19^th.  I told her once, that as she got older, she’d appreciate having a few extra days at her previous age.  We never considered that her nagging cough in October 2008 would be diagnosed as Stage 3 non small cell lung cancer.  She would be gone 11 months later. 

Kate and I were friends for more than 20 years, and what I don’t want to do is focus on the last, and most painful one of her life.  As she was so full of it (life, that is…).  She was a successful television producer, who at 40 decided to chuck it all and pursue acupuncture.  Upon graduating from the New England School of Acupuncture and getting her license, she moved to Falmouth on Cape Cod.  In short order, she had a thriving practice and a fantastic guy who shared her deep love of sailing.

I had never been on a sailboat before, when on a rather cold, windy, rainy, nasty day, I joined Kate and some of her friends on her first boat, The Dolce Bella.  I spent a good part of that sail below deck trying my damnedest not to get sick.  While I managed to keep it together on the inside, on the outside I had turned as green as the bay.  This was not lost on my captain, who from that day forward – and in spite of my eventually earning my sea legs – trotted out that story at every opportunity.  Several years later, we were on the water with some other friends and she started to tell the tale.  About two sentences in, she looked at me, smiled, and said, “This story is a lot funnier when you’re not here.”  At her memorial service, I was reunited with the original folks from that first sail.  Nearly 20 years had passed, and it took some time for us to place each other.  Then, a bolt of recognition, “Weren’t you the one who turned green…?”  I could hear Kate laughing.

And so as we muddle through this black mark of firsts on the calendar…first Thanksgiving, first Christmas, first Easter, without her, I find myself thinking about those who’ve passed, and how their birthdays hang in limbo.  How do we mark them? 

Someone once told me that on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, they find someone who didn’t know the deceased, and tell them a story about that person, so that they live anew.

Perhaps that’s what I’m doing here, but on the day she came into the world, rather than the one on which she left us.  As the months pass and the inevitability of life washes over us, these phantom birthdays serve as personal holidays.  A chance to remember, to celebrate, or at the very least, an occasion to look up, feel the breeze and whisper into it, “I love you, Katie B.”