The Polemics of Disease

Dad has cancer in his blood and bones. He says he can feel it.

I feel split open, a person walking with a giant gash from my collarbone to my stomach. Open to all bacteria and infections, every emotion can move in and out. Any feeling can come and go.

I have an early memory of watching dad walk home from the bus: I am behind the screen door in our ranch at the end of the cul de sac. He was a grain of rice, then the size of a key, then an outline of himself. His head was surrounded by a swarm of gnats attracted to his body’s heat.

During the first wave of the Covid pandemic—when dad looked well and no one had began to google to word myeloma—I drove with him to the coast for the day. We parked the car on the sand. “I’ll go left, you go right,” he said. “Like Abram and Lot.” I turned back to look for him, until he was an outline of himself. Then a key, then a grain of rice. Beach flies picked apart a washed up crab at my feet. A constellation of cancer.

After the beach trip, we had mom and dad in the yard for a Father’s Day picnic. No one had hugged them for months, but after dinner, dad asked me to cut his hair. I did terribly, we ended up buzzing it because of how much I botched it. But on the lawn chair, in the grass, I touched his head and shaved the back of his neck. He was a little tan and had powdered sugar on his shirt from beignets.

The lesions were already on his skull then, along with his rib cage, spine, and both hip bones. He is covered with them—sad confetti. They are smeared like hydrogenated birthday cake frosting.

Here, during the pandemic and the disease of racial injustice, my world has gotten smaller and sickness more visceral.

When my son was a baby, I have a clear memory of walking with him in a carrier to Caffe Vita on Capitol Hill. Two women were gossiping about bad dates as I walked past. “Ah,” I told myself then. “There’s nothing that can pluck you out of your head faster than caring for a baby.” The gift of a baby brought me perspective and focus on another person. It reoriented my sense of self. I’m quickly learning that the same reorientation of thoughts and priorities happens when caring for a sick parent. Instead of macro thinking—which for me has very much been focused on American politics, culture, and the church—there is the immediacy of dad and my family.

In an interview on Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens podcast, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about lights in the darkness, and the work of sitting for an extra 12 seconds in the dark before fleeing when we’re in fear or crisis. About the difference between moonlight and sunlight.

I’m here in the moonlight, and I know a lot of you are with me: Learning what it means to be a caregiver, a distance learning teacher. Walking with a living grief, or a pre-grief, and choosing to carry realistic hope. Knowing that we’ve just started, and the call of Jesus to not worry about tomorrow is the only way forward.

Dad says he’s in the belly of the whale with Jonah, and that he is going to be spit out a changed person. I believe it.