“I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream” - Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac
Yes, Jack had it right about the common dark of all our deaths. At this time seven years ago, I thought I had a swollen tonsil. So did the doctor. By Christmas, it was still swollen despite antibiotics.
He got a specialist friend to squeeze me right after New Year’s. Two days later, in the pitch-black dark of cold early January evening, my phone rang. The doctor asked if I could come down to his office.
I said no. Tell me what you need to tell me.
He said, OK, well, you have cancer.
That night, I had a lovely girl, a job that had been my dream to have. Things were coming together for me after some really hard times after I had flunked out of New York City and my writing dreams were left wriggling on the floor of a Bushwick row house.
I suppose New York, where I jetted off in September 2010, was the beginning of a long road I thought I would never travel.
I had left everything - given up my entire life - to move to New York and join a graduate writing program led by the esteemed writer Andre Aciman. In the four months I spent there, I spent my days writing in the Booker T. Washington Public Library in Brooklyn. It was so money-starved that it was only open a few hours a day.
I felt like I belonged in that library because I was money-starved, too.
Sometimes I wrote on the second floor of the Barnes and Noble bookstore off Union Square. The A/C was so cold that it chased me out.
One morning, I hired a car to drive me to LaGuardia. I got on a Southwest flight for Albuquerque and returned to Santa Fe with empty pockets and “sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid.”
Hard, humiliating years ensued.
By 2016 I had finally climbed back into the American Way.
That fated phone call led to seven weeks of radiation and chemo. There were two surgeries, not counting the insertion and removal of the stomach tube I used to feed myself Ensure. I chose chocolate flavor. I have no idea why. I couldn’t taste a thing.
When I got well enough to return to work, I was a different man. That newspaper job was no longer a dream. It was a curse. I could feel the death of the industry. I felt hopeless.
Then I got fired. I was not expecting it.
I will leave this part of the story and say what came after was unemployment, fright, desperation, and not a little hopelessness. I lost the girl, too.
I had time on my hands. So I wrote an entire novel. It became Bad Motor Scooter. You can buy it at that link. It has earned me less than $20.
When a person finishes cancer treatment, there is a period of spaced-out visits with the oncologist. She checks blood and feels for lumps and, hopefully, sends you on your merry way.
Finally, there is the last visit. She happily told me I was cured. I had survivor’s guilt in the worst way. There were so many I met in chemo, or in the endless IVs I had for dehydration in chemo. The couple in the waiting room for radiation, her head half shaved and scared. They still smoked cigarettes.
I walked out of her examination room and into the hallway. Two women met me in the hallway. One of them had been the publisher of the newspaper I had left to go to New York. She was not a very good leader, but I liked her. She had wise ways.
Later, I found out she had gone in the same room and met the same oncologist and was told it was over. The end.
I cried a lot when she died. Not out of sorrow, though I felt it, but in despair that somehow I had been condemned to stay in this world. In some ways, life is a death sentence for all of us.
It is a fine fall day in Santa Fe. This has been a warm autumn, with sunny days and chilly nights. Yesterday, I stood witness to an annular eclipse of the sun.
There it is, I said.
I loved reading this. "Life is a death sentence for us all..."