Papi had cancer. It was too late to think about death.
The oncologist flipped through my father’s file, and he gave nothing away, not in his manner or his expression. Then he turned to explain what would happen next.
There would be rounds of chemotherapy, spaced at whatever intervals my dad could tolerate, to keep the cancer from spreading. Papi asked about other options, more surgery, any way to remove what was killing him. There was nothing else.
“I can’t cure you,” the doctor said. He was kind, but his words were matter-of-fact. What he would try to do was help my father live with cancer. For how long? The question went unasked and unanswered. None of us wanted to know.
Over the next 16 months, there would be dozens of treatments and occasional setbacks. There would be conversations — again and again — over blood tests and protein levels and whether to adjust regimens of drugs with five-syllable names. There would be discussions over my dad’s weight and his frailty, about his depression and his moods. There would be questions about what he could eat or drink and how to juggle the medications he had to take for diabetes and heart disease. But there was one topic we mostly steered clear of — death.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see why doctors don’t spend time talking about what can go wrong. Their job, after all, is to keep you alive. For the patient — and his relatives — there is nothing but that lifeline, and everyone just holds on.
Looking back now, almost two years after my father’s death, I wish that we had stopped to consider what was coming. To fully grasp how the poison coursing through his body was saving him and ravaging him at the same time. To understand that there would come a day when the better option might be to stop fighting.
One surgeon did tell us to give up and go home. The effort was pointless, he said. He came across as a jackass, more concerned with being inconvenienced than my father’s well-being. Perhaps if he had taken a moment to explain and behaved with a measure of compassion, we would have had that wakeup call.
As it was, Papi came away more determined to keep going, to prove that doctor wrong. He did beat the surgeon’s estimate, but just barely.
My dad knew that without chemo, his fate was sealed. Without chemo, weeks or months would have been lost. What he didn’t know — what we didn’t know — was what some of those weeks would be like. He spent them trapped in a haze and a hospital bed.
There’s a lesson there for all of us.
The time to think about how we choose to die — if we get the choice — is before we are buckling into a rollercoaster.
The last thing I learned from my father was about accepting the inevitable.
Maybe, years from now, if I’m lucky, I will have a choice, and I will face mortality with my father’s struggle still fresh in my memory. And hopefully, those who love me will let me go.