It was shortly after Christmas of 2000 when two police officers showed up at my door late one night. I was as confused by their appearance as their questions seemed to be. They told me they'd been asked to check on us, to see if we were okay, which was pretty odd, even despite the circumstances.
You see, that was day that my grandmother had passed away after her lengthy battle with colon cancer. She had battled the disease once before in years prior and come out on top, but as cancer often does, it returned with a vengeance made worse by her stubborn refusal to go through the 'embarassment' of routine colonoscopies in the following interval.
But the two police officers at the door, assured people were all right, went back to their car and then returned a short time later to inform us that my father, back in Glens Falls, New York where he and my mother come from, had had some sort of collapse in my aunt's home there.
The events became clear over the following hours. My father had hoped to be there before she passed away, but the thousands of miles seperating the branches of our family, as well as the timing, made that impossible, and as such we could only afford to put one of us on the flight to attend to the family. He rushed the flight, had a glass of alcohol on the plane, and then drank more with the relatives that evening.
It was that decision that saved his life.
He collapsed in front of my aunt and uncle, who immediately engaged in CPR while calling nine one one. It was one of those little moments where such a seemingly simple and routine decisions can have a profound, life or death impact. Literally, in this case. Had he chosen to go to bed, my family would've lost him and my grandmother on the same day. As cliche as it is, it was a moment in which you vividly know just how differently your life could've gone with just one small change, but didn't.
It turned out a medication he was on was to blame, alongside his lack of eating. His potassium had gone low compounded by the remains of an infection he'd been battling back at the time. The important part was that he was stable and that we still had the chance to have him in our life.
My father has never been an easy man to know. Often grouchy, often tempermental and prone to angry outbursts, but he was also a man who would go out of his way for his family. He put one son through college, carrying him on his back financially so that he could have what he still believed in as the American dream -- a better future for his children, as he never had the opportunity to go to college himself. The burden of that work later would play a great role in his deteriorating health as he entered his sixties.
Today, my father is nearly seventy one years old. And today he had another routine colonoscopy, determined not to make the same mistake that his mother had made and ignore that possibility. This decision too may have saved his life.
Today, they found five polyps on it, one of which was 'particularly bad' and may be 'suspicious of cancer', as the doctor put it.. It is being tested. We will have the results in two weeks.
In two weeks, everything may change. Or nothing might. We are now confronted with that unsettling anxiety that so many have gone through before when the word 'cancer' enters their world, whether it be for themselves or for their loved ones. My mind already chases down endless possibities about the future that I may or may not have to confront just as we are dealing with it.
It is here that I feel struck once again by a sort of smallness that puts everything back in check. It reminds me of how fragile the futures we can envision for ourselves are, how difficult it can be to pursue dreams when confronted by life's whims, and how misery can compound on misery and how those vulnerable can only get more so. We are, at this moment, living in a house that can be foreclosed on at any time, driving a car that's prone to breakdowns, and I am personally being sued by a debt collection service demanding I pay them $1400 I don't have and might never have.
But in the hours since I uttered the words 'My dad might have cancer', I have also been witness to barriers between people dropping, witness to the setting aside of small differences that have driven people apart when they need not have done so. We humans can be such petty and small creatures, obsessed with judging each other, blaming each other, deciding who 'deserves' what or does not deserve 'that' and I think that sometimes that is driven by anxiety about our shared fragility and a desperate desire to hold onto what is good in our own lives. That desire can be strong enough to drive us apart when it should bring us together to protect our futures and each other.
But I remain paralyzed, uncertain. And afraid for the future. We'll just muddle through.