Someone Else

Kevin Schoolfield
EVWP Summer 2009

April 2003

When I called my father to ask how he was doing, I expected that it would go exactly like all of the weekly check-ins during my college years. I thought we would chat about how work and class had been going. I figured I would hear some funny anecdote about the hazards of getting older; he had his first colonoscopy that morning. I had the picture of the conversation drawn neatly in my head.

“Hey Dad.”

“Hey Kev.” Something is wrong. His voice is shaking. Panic creeps into the edge of mine.

“How did everything go?”

“Well, not very well. I don’t know how to tell you this son.” Short breath. “I have cancer.”

Detachment.

If you have ever heard the sound of a record scratching just before it skips and stops, this is what happens in the brain of a 19 year old boy when he hears that his father might die. How quickly a human brain can spin when sufficient emotional trauma occurs. The mind enters into a smoking tire-like peel out, like when the roadrunner gets ready to run away from the coyote and his feet spin in those crazy circles. Then thought finds traction and your mind takes off on a staggering burst of questions, fears, and concerns. Cancer is something that you see on statistical breakdowns and CNN tickers. It doesn’t happen to you. It is always happening to someone else. Amidst all of that, your mouth stammers, “What?”
Reality returns.

“Yeah. The doctor found a six centimeter mass in my colon. I have cancer.”

“Oh my gosh! Dad. What does that mean? What happens next?”

I am frozen to my dorm room desk chair. I no longer see the web page on my computer screen. My roommate Eric is startled and turns as he notices my shock. I am suddenly aware of the time, only a half-hour before I am supposed to leave for my tutoring session in downtown Lynchburg. I am thunderstruck by how little all of this matters at that moment. Dad is answering.

“Well, I have to go in for surgery in two weeks. We won’t know how bad things are until then. When the surgeon gets in there, he will see if it has perforated my colon and gotten into my lymph nodes. If that has happened, I could be in real trouble.”

Detachment.

When the father of the 19 year old boy speaks the word, “cancer,” death swarms rapidly into place hanging like a dark cloud inches above the boy’s head. Life becomes a shadow of what it formerly felt like. Everything is extreme, while at the same time everything is dulled. The boy’s emotional immune system breaks down in a split second, as he reaches critical mass. Death has not yet taken place, but it looms in the very near and possible future.
Reality returns.

“Dad, I’m so sorry. I love you. Is there anything I can do?” I am painfully cognizant of how silly that question sounds.

“Thanks son. I love you too. Just pray.”

I hang up the phone and fall sideways out of my rolling chair face first on to the cheap red area rug taped to my dorm room floor. I begin to shake, pray, and cry. Death changes everything, and it has not even arrived. I am repeatedly jolted by the realizations of what life after my Dad’s possible death would be. I see my future wedding that would not have him performing the ceremony as I had always planned. I see the lives of my future children, filled only by the stories of the grandfather they would have loved so much. I see the family holidays missing his prayers before meals, and room filling chuckles as we share stories and play games. These events pass through my mind in a long storyboard, with a hole cut out of each picture in the perfect shape of my Dad.

“What’s going on man? Are you okay?” Eric asks, scared to death.

“My dad has cancer.” Shock.

Ten days later.

I am sitting in the living room of Eric’s Charlottesville home. The clock reads 11:30 in the evening and everyone has left for the return to school except Eric and Jolie, two of my closest friends. I am falling toward the tail end of the worst two weeks of my life. I have done my best to remain stoic and jovial in front of the people with whom I spend each day at school. Those who know me best know that I am barely hanging on. They are scared. I turn to Eric and Jolie from the end of the soft wraparound couch in an effort to close the distance between us.

“Guys, I’m really not doing very well. I am trying, but I just don’t know what to do. Could you please pray for me?” I barely finish the sentence. The agony of being 200 miles away from the rest of my family has become too much. As they pray aloud into the stillness of the late night, my body is racked with sobs. I sob in release of the emotional torment I am living. I sob, bathed in the love and support of close friends. It is the hardest I have ever cried in front of people who are not my family.

July 2009

In the year and a half of intense chemotherapy following my Dad’s successful cancer surgery, he would come within moments of death two more times. The first was an allergic reaction to anti-nausea medicine. I watched alone; his face swelled, and throat closed as we waited for the ambulance to arrive at our house in Maryland. The second was a blood infection that was found when he came down with a fever that would not break. Each event added to the legacy of agonizing memory left by cancer.

My Dad has been cancer free for six years, but my family will forever live with the knowledge that our names can be found on the list of families who know cancer personally. For the first time in our lives, death was not something happening to someone else.