The Worst Year Ever

I’m going to say it started 12 months ago. That might not be correct. It may have been 13 months or maybe just 51 weeks or so. To keep things simple, I put the beginning at a year ago. I mean the beginning of the worst year ever.

I have cancer, of course. Terminal cancer. And I’ve had it longer than a year. About two-and-a-half years would be correct. It’s not surprising that the cancer is much worse now that I’ve been ill as long as I have. I get chemotherapy pretty regularly and it’s as bad as you’ve heard. That, too, has gotten worse in the last year.

Then there’s my brother, my older brother, Kevin. He had a stroke this last year. A one-time football player and a long-distance bike rider, he’s now stuck in a wheel chair, barely able to stand, unable to use his right arm. His dental practice? Kaput. My kid brother had cancer, now in remission. Lynne was ill, in and out of hospital several times. And now my mother's in the hospital with a broken hip and some strange mental condition that makes it impossible for her to clearly verbalize her thoughts.



This was exactly how far I’d written in this blog/journal entry a couple of days ago when my phone rang. It was my niece, my kid brother's daughter, calling from Clearwater. At first I thought she was calling about my mother. She wasn’t. She called to tell me that another of my nieces, Monica, had visited my mom for several hours, left my mother’s room to go to mom’s house, where she, Monica, was staying. Everything seemed fine. It wasn’t. For some reason I guess we’ll never know, Monica – an attorney, a beautiful young woman, smart and funny, much loved by her family – went into my mother’s bathroom and hanged herself.

What can I say or write? I feel terrible for my big brother, Kevin, and for Monica’s mother Mary Anne and her stepmother, Roz. I feel terrible for Monica’s brothers and sisters and cousins. I tremble at the thought of what this horrible news will do to my mother and am only writing this because I know she has no access to this blog.

I want to curse. I try to pray and I can’t except to tell my Higher Power that I’ve had enough, the family has had enough, leave us alone, please!

I talked to a priest yesterday, Father Bob. He went to Jesuit High School in Tampa with me and now serves at my mother’s parish. He said that his belief was that when someone took her own life, she was saying: "God, I’m in so much pain and trouble I simply can’t take it any more. I’m turning it over to you." That terrible last act, then, becomes a sort of prayer. Maybe someday that thought will really help. I can see how it could. For now, it doesn’t. I’m sad, terribly sad, and confused and frightened and angry that my niece, that wonderful girl I held on my lap and loved and whom my mom loved almost beyond belief, would do this miserable thing apparently without thought or care of what it could do to my mother, her grandmother and the rest of her family.

What I thought was the worst year of my life when I started this blog, became, in an instant, immeasurably worse.

I like to act as if I discover lessons in the situations I face. Lessons that teach me, and perhaps you, something about life or death or love or family or something worth thinking about. There’s no lesson here. None. None at all.

Hopes

I’m tired. It’s chemo and it’s cancer. These days, I wake up every morning when my alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. For many years – more than a dozen – I needed no alarm. In the old days, I always woke right at 3 a.m. I made a pot of coffee and started working on the freelance work I did to pay our rent and put food on the table.

Nowadays, I’m lucky if I have enough energy to work for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

Though I’m tired, I simply can’t sleep all day every day, so I spend a lot of time looking at a big, flat-screen television that’s about eight feet from my pillows. Sometimes, I watch shows I’ve already seen a few times. Those are always some version of "Law and Order" or one of the shows about Dr. House and his crew.

Sometimes, now, I’ll watch the Cubs play ball. I’ve been a Cub’s fan for more than four decades. My Cub cheers started in 1967, when I was a student at Chicago’s Art Institute, living just two blocks from Wrigley Field.

The Cubs were slotted by just about everybody to win the National League title this year, possibly to win the World Series. Lately, they’ve been playing terribly. They’ve lost eight straight.

I have mixed feelings about the Cubs’ losing streak. Well, really about their chances this year. You see, the last time the Cubbies were in the series was 1945, the year I was born.

The last time the Cubs won the whole shooting match was 1908. Just over a century ago.

So there’s a part of me hoping the team gets on the right track this year and wins all the games it needs to win to be the champs of the world.

There’s another part of me, though.

That part has promised me, myself, that I can’t die until the Cubs win the whole shooting match.

To be frank, that part of me has felt pretty good as the Cubs lost. If they don’t win the series, maybe, just maybe, there will be something inside me that will hold my cancer off, at least for another year.

We’ll see, right?

(After I wrote this, the Cubs won two games against the Pirates. I have mixed feelings. I guess all I can do is see what happens, right?)

Liberal

Liberal
I’ve been a liberal all my life.

I am liberal because that’s the way I was brought up. My dad was a working man and a union official. My mom – the daughter of a working man and union president – worked as a teacher and belonged to the teacher’s union. All my uncles and aunts were liberal. Most were unionized.

My mother – still alive – is more liberal now than ever. My brothers are liberal. Their wives are liberal. Our children are liberal.

I really like President Obama. I feel as good and positive about America’s leader as I did when John Kennedy was elected. Better than I have since then.

It’s been a long time. I was in the Air Force, stationed in Japan, Just 18 years old, when JFK was shot. I’d spent the night in Tokyo, heard of his death on a radio, and knew I had to head back to the base. I took an elevated train from the city to my base in Tachikawa and on the trip every Japanese man and woman who saw me bowed low and said how sorry they were.

Amazing. I remember weeping and flags at half mast and watching the funeral on television and rerun after rerun of the killing in Dallas.

I’d not voted for JFK. I was too young. But I sure loved his style and what he stood for. Rights for American people whose rights were being denied. Opportunities for all Americans. Increased support for arts and cultural activities. Of course I loved his Irishness and his Catholicism and his wife, Jacky.

I didn’t really think much about political action I could do until I got out of the service in the midst of the war in Vietnam. I fell for Robert Kennedy, was one of the ex-servicemen who marched in huge anti-war parades in Chicago. I turned into a hippie with a chest full of anti-war pins and hair past my shoulders. I demonstrated against the war and for equal rights for everybody. I started voting and voted liberal.

For years after the two Kennedy brothers were killed and Dr. Martin Luther King, it wasn’t much pleasure to be a liberal. I know there were a couple of democrats in the White House, Carter and Clinton. In fact, though, most of the power was exerted – often illegally – by Nixon and Ford and Reagan and Bush and Bush.

I wasn’t terribly active most of the time. But I did follow politics and I did vote every time I could.

Voting for Obama was one of the high points of my life. I’m glad my cancer hadn’t killed me and that I was up to casting my vote. I watch him every day and basically think damn near every move he makes is ideal. Of course he makes mistakes. Everybody does. I’m willing to place a big bet that he’ll not start an illegal war. I bet he will do something to make the tax system a bit more sensible and try to get health care for people like me and educate children and all the other stuff he talks about.

My cancer seems stronger these days and I feel weaker. I still hope I live long enough to see the Cubs win the World Series (this year) and Notre Dame win a major bowl game (early next year). I’m not sure I’ll be able to. I’m aiming at some closer targets, now.

I’d really like to see Obama name a winner to the Supreme Court. I think it would be great if he named a woman. And especially great if the woman was Latin. But I really want a liberal. A young one. Maybe we’ll be able to regain a court that makes some sense.

I’m not really going to be overjoyed when I’m in my death bed but I’d feel a hell of a lot better if the court was moving in the right direction.

Valentine's Day

The other day was Valentine’s Day. It was also the anniversary of my father’s death. I was lucky this year. I got to drive up to Clearwater to spend a few days with my mom and my brothers, Kevin and Pat. On Saturday, Valentine’s Day, we went to Roman Catholic mass together, in remembrance of my father’s passing.

My dad has been dead for 13 years. I’m not sure how old he was when he died. That’s because history seems to show that he was born in either 1906 or 1907, in Ballinahinch, Ireland.

According to my old man, he was born in his family farmhouse on December 26, 1906. That’s the day we celebrated his birthday though we didn’t celebrate much since it was the day after Christmas.

According to his birth certificate, though, my father was born on February 20, 1907. My dad said the difference in dates arose because his birth wasn’t registered until his father, John Doherty, made a trip to Cashel, the town where such things were recorded.

That’s possible. After all, when my dad, Patrick, was born into an Irish Catholic family in what is now the Irish Republic, things like his birth date weren’t so important to the British who ruled the island. Neither were his freedom or his health or his education or his diet.

He loved potatoes. Once, in a fancy restaurant, after the waiter had listed all the vegetables he could order with his meal, my dad asked simply for a few boiled praties. That’s the Gaelic word for potatoes. He loved potatoes. My mom said that if she kept serving him spuds, he’d keep eating them until he exploded. That’s because when he was a boy he was never sure that any praties he ate might not be the last available for a time.

My father came to America as a young man. He worked as a handyman for a time, then as a meat-cutter for Harding’s Corn Beef, then as a salesman, and – finally – as a longshoreman, loading and unloading boats on the Chicago River. He left the house before dawn and never came home before sunset. He was a hard man, big and strong and tough. I heard he was quite a boxer as a young man, the champion of Cashel, taking on challengers from other villages. I know he had huge fists.

He was tough with his family, as well. But he loved us all. In his world, that love was best expressed by putting food on the table in a safe house. He wanted each of us, he often said, to climb higher up the ladder than he’d been able to climb.

My dad and I loved each other, but we didn’t get along well during all those years when booze ruled my life. I became things, drinking, he never wanted me to become. In fact, neither he nor my mom talked to me for more than a dozen years when my drinking was bad. I don’t blame them. Those were years when I couldn’t look in the mirror.

Anyway, after I got sober things improved.

"I don’t understand your being a drunk," my father told me. "I don’t know why you can’t just stop when you want to stop." I knew it would make no sense to try to explain. "Anyway," my father said, "you’re sure as hell doing better these days. Keep the plug in the damned jug." Then he hugged me. It’s the only time I can remember that he hugged me.

At the mass said at my father’s church on Valentine’s Day, I got to sit next to my mother. She’s 93 years old now and a bit deaf and very unsteady on her feet. She can’t kneel any more the way Catholics are supposed to kneel during mass. But she was there. And when the priest announced that the mass was being said in remembrance of Patrick Joseph Doherty, my mother grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

I’m glad I was there.

Everyone dies

I’ve complained before about some of the senseless things well-meaning people say when they’re trying to make me feel better or ineptly expressing their concern.

The other day, for example, a woman friend said she thought chemotherapy would be a wonderful way to lose a couple of dress sizes. I was barely able to fight the sudden urge I had to teach her about the joys of chemotherapy by puking on her shoes. How about that?

Then there are the off-beats who swear that a diet of nothing but raw vegetables or boiled yak or palmetto fronds will cure incurable cancer and who become offended when I refuse to run out to buy vegetables, kill a yak, or climb a palmetto.

And, of course, there are all those who prescribe faith or good thoughts as cure-alls as if those of us who have cancer don’t have faith, enough faith, the right kind of faith, or are just too cranky to live. A lot of good, God-fearing people die of this disease every day.

And that brings me to the dolt who heard me talking to a friend this morning – another friend who’s fighting cancer – and interjected himself into our conversation.

"Well, everyone dies," he said after listening for a few minutes.

Wow.

Look, I know from my own experience how difficult it is talk to someone who’s got a terminal disease. I’ve done it with friends and, I’m sure, I’ve said some goofy things myself. But, really. If "everyone dies" is the best you can do, please keep your mouth shut.

I often wonder how these individuals who make such senseless comments will do if they find out they’ve got terminal cancer or they need a heart or kidney transplant they can’t get. I wonder how they’ll feel if the doctor looks at them, grins, and says, "Well, everyone dies."

Here’s what I know. If you have a broken heart, I can quickly tell you to move on, that it happens to everybody, to be grateful for what you have, and so on. When I have a hangnail, the only thing I can think about is the pain I’m in.

I guess everybody’s that way, to some degree. I guess that’s how it’s possible to say something as true and as ignorant as, "Well, everyone dies."

Enough

I got the call at about 8:30 Wednesday night. As soon as I heard Jacky’s voice, I knew.
"Kevin died this afternoon," she said. "Thank God it’s over."

I heard her catch her breath.

"At least he’s out of pain," Jacky said. Then we spoke for a few moments about what a great guy Kevin was and about how I wished there was something, anything, I might do. Of course, there wasn’t. Jacky cried and I tried not to cry and failed and then we hung up.

You remember Kevin? He’s my friend, the one who came down from Georgia last month so we could go to a Chicago Cubs/Florida Marlins game together. He’s the guy who learned just a few months ago that he had incurable pancreatic cancer.

When my father died about ten years ago, I barely wept. He was ninety and had already had bypass surgery. His death was no surprise. It made me sad, of course. It should have. But my dad’s death made sense, it was part of the natural flow, as proper as a tide or a sunset.

Not Kevin, though. He was too young by far. He left not just his wife but three little boys, the youngest of whom is only three years old, so young he’ll never remember this wonderful man who was his father.

And that’s why I cried when I heard the words. "Kevin died this afternoon." That and because of the truth that he may have been the best friend I’ll ever have and I miss him already, can’t believe I’ll never see him or hear him again, never laugh with him again.

Believe me, I grieve for Jacky and the three boys. I also grieve for me. And, dammit, I feel like it’s not fair and I want to tell God to lighten up. No more pain for a while, hunh?

How terrible is it when a wife finds herself saying, "Thank God" when her husband dies. To find relief – if any can be found – in the truth that "at least he’s out of pain."

Enough, God. Enough, already. Cut us some slack. Kevin’s family. And my friend Brian, the one I wrote about Monday. And Brian’s daughter. My friend Greg who just learned he has cancer. And me, too. And my wife.

Enough for a while.