The Language of Cancer

I recently spent an evening with one of my best friends, a great guy who’s near the end of a battle with pancreatic cancer. We’ve known each other for almost a decade, grown close enough to say we love each other without any of the throat clearing or lack of eye contact that so often accompanies those words when said by two men. I consider him – his name is Kevin – one of the best men I’ve ever known. It was special to us both that he was able to come down to South Florida from Georgia so we could hang out together.

It was a great evening. We went to a baseball game between the Florida Marlins (his team) and the Chicago Cubs (mine) and though the Cubbies lost, we had a wonderful time. We watched the game, of course, and we ate hot dogs neither of us could really handle and we laughed a bit the way old friends should, at each other and things we shared. We talked, the two of us, how this disease has touched our wives and his young children and how we both wish things were different but just have to accept the truth. Of course, we got a little maudlin but that’s our right, I think. We also said "dammit" a lot and I think that’s our right, too.

Near the end of the evening we talked about the special language we share, along with other men and women who are facing terminal cancer. How when we say "goodbye" it sounds so final even when it isn’t because it has such a good chance of being just that, of being final.

Dammit.

How when we talk about being tired we’re talking about a tiredness that transcends any tiredness we’d ever experienced before this illness. And how silly it sounds when some well-meaning friend or family member responds by talking about how tired they are because they didn’t sleep well the night before.

We talked about how we know the names of drugs we shouldn’t know the names of and of medical procedures and different cancer stages that we wished we didn’t have to know.

We talked, too, about the fear we know, a fear it seems we can’t share with loved ones just because it would be too cruel to share it with them.

And we talked about how insulting it is to me and to Kevin or to anybody else with cancer when someone, anyone, tells us to keep a good attitude as if we or little babies with leukemia or Ted Kennedy or anybody else with terminal cancer got it because our attitudes were bad.

Dammit. Of course a good attitude is healthier than a bad one. But don’t use that fact to beat me up or make me feel guilty if I feel down or depressed or just like saying "screw it." It’ll pass.

Saying goodbye to Kevin after that evening was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I fear I’ll never see him again. And then who will I talk with?