‘I Had Never Been The Guy With Cancer’

There haven’t been many days off this fall, but, last Friday, the fates conspired to let me go down to Old Lyme in the late afternoon. I walked from Old Lyme Shores to Hawk’s Nest, where the beach stops, as the sun crawled down through a juicy mess of blue, purple and orange.

This was noteworthy because I had not stood on Connecticut’s coast for a full year. It wasn’t a beach summer.

One afternoon in June, my phone rang. My dermatologist. The thing he had removed. Just a precaution, he had said. Melanoma. You’re going to be fine, he said.

The melanoma was a quiet house guest. It had stayed in its space, never asking for extra pillows or blankets. And when it came time to leave, it did not — as these things go — make a terrible fuss. Two pieces of day surgery. Cut on Tuesday. Pathology report on Wednesday evening. Clean margins. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and pumped a fist in the air. Back to surgery on Thursday so that parts of my face could be artfully pulled together to cover up the rather large hole the guest had left behind.

Done.

Sort of.

I had never been the guy with cancer before. I had been the sympathetic guy or something. I could barely even accept that I had cancer at all. It seemed to me that a thing with cancer had been using my head as an Airbnb. I didn’t have a problem. The thing did.

Of course, other problems set up inside you. “To live is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain.” That’s Henrik Ibsen. The trolls had a field day with me. I needed therapy. I needed God. I needed everybody.

You need your friends. From what I can tell, 50 percent of the people in West Hartford who get a cancer diagnosis call Jim Chapdelaine. That’s who I called while I waited for my scheduled surgery. Jim, who has survived worse than what you have, sits there sipping coffee and talking and giving you the perspective you so sorely lack.

I explained my plan for the rest of my life, which essentially was to get rechecked by my dermatologist every three days and wear SPF 900 if I so much as listened to a Beach Boys record in a sunless bunker.

“You’re not going to be some kind of china doll,” he said. “You’re going to have to live.”

Well, yeah. That.

I needed the woman in my life. I needed my son, my tiny family. And, oh God, I needed my friends. The older the better. One of my college friends marched down to his synagogue and put my name on the prayer list. Another one just wrote, “Anything. Literally anything you need.”

Somewhere along the way, cancer got rebranded as winning. Those TV commercials of happy people on bikes, with the peppy rock song in the background. Sorrow is unfashionable. One day it occurred to me that I felt sorrow to have had this thing.

Labor Day came. There was a beautiful wedding. The father of the bride — the guy who had gone to the synagogue — stood up to give a toast. He told the bridal party, you won’t get a new chance to make old friends. The old friends you make now are your old friends.

After Labor Day, several friends died, including the composer David Macbride, who had just finished a new piece for piano quartet and narrator, written with me in mind. The Avery Ensemble and I will debut it Nov. 17, but David won’t be there.

You walk until the beach stops. You look at the sunset. Another day is done, irretrievably drowned in beauty. One day, eventually, the sun will set without you.

I took only one walk on the beach before the weather turned cold. I should have taken more. I’m not a china doll. But sometimes it just feels that way.

More walks. More saltwater birds. More time with old friends. More sunsets, until you go. There aren’t that many things that matter. They say that Goethe’s last words were, “More light!” Yes please. Colin McEnroe appears from 1 to 2 p.m. weekdays on WNPR-FM (90.5). He can be reached at Colin@wnpr.org.