Good morning from Whiskey Creek, where we are smack dab in the middle of an adventure that many, many of you have experienced, and that is welcoming a new kitty into the household. His name is Stewart, he’s from the cat rescue up here in the mountains and he’s quite a looker. Stewie is Very, very independent, confident, even around four towering dogs, full of curiosity and play, which I guess is standard kitten, keeps moving but also not averse to cat naps, which he nonchalantly takes in the five or six or seven spots first warmed up for him by the dogs…in other words, THEIR favorite spots. In short, he’s fitting right in.
Since today is one of those “fifth days of the month”, a fifth Saturday, and no one is schedule for a Welcome column, I figured I’d share a story with you about my son, Phillip. The story starts on a warm July evening in 1997. I’ve driven to the BART station in Fremont to pick up my oldest son, Phillip, who’s traveled down from school in Berkeley so he and I can attend a little bluegrass festival together. Though we’ve gone to probably a couple dozen such events since he was a toddler, this one, the Good Ole’ Fashioned Bluegrass Festival, will be the first that just the two of us have attended, without the rest of the family, and the first Phil’s gone to as a ‘picker’. Always in the past he was dragged along by dad and his step-mom, by middle school kicking and screaming, and by high school, he’d quit going altogether. But this evening’s different—my son has been playing the mandolin for several months now, and singing too, and he’s ready to venture out and try his hand making music with other people, he’s going to jam. And I am thrilled beyond words.
On the way down to Hollister we stop at a Super K-Mart store to buy the necessaries…beer, bottled water, apples and cheese, peanuts in the shell and Irish whiskey, ice…and as we walk back to the old, beat up F-150 in the parking lot my son asks if I’d like him to drive. I say sure. There’s something different about this, something not quite the same as the adventures we’ve taken since my boy was tiny. There’s a camaraderie not unlike that shared by two friends, peers, and it makes us both a little giddy.
Once we’re on 101 the commute traffic slows to a crawl but we hardly notice. So much catching up to do, easy, relaxed give and take about his classes, my work and, of course, we now have the music…bluegrass…to talk about. We luxuriate in it, we joke and laugh and, for just a moment I find myself trying to remember if I’ve ever been happier. We’re headed to a bluegrass festival, picking buddies, with plenty of cold beer, a bottle of hooch and no textbooks to read or inter-office memos to write.
We consider stopping in Gilroy to grab a bite, but both of us are too excited to eat and, besides, we want to get to the fairgrounds before the sun sets to set up camp. Once we pull off 101 and are headed east on 25 the traffic thins to almost nothing. Even though the sun has begun its descent, the evening is still quite warm and, though we’d be cooler with the air conditioner on, we just roll the windows down to let the rushing wind wash over us. The pungent, musty smell of garlic, for which Gilroy is known, fills the cab. Fields of tomatoes and peppers and lettuce stretch brilliant green in all directions and beyond the Diablo Range begins to darken into gorgeous pastels of purple and mauve.
We’ve been quiet since turning east, the natural beauty of the lower Santa Clara Valley too richly textured, too beautifully painted by the gigantic orange sun behind us to have to compete with words. But then Phil reaches over, takes my left hand and places it on his neck.
“Feel that?” he asks, “whatcha think that is.”
“A ganglia,” I say, “I got ‘em all the time when I was your age. Or is it ganglion? Anyway, a cyst. That’s what it feels like to me. But you should get it looked at.”
“Right.”
“I mean it, Phil, you go in next week and have them look at it.”
“Yeah, yeah, pop, I will, I will,” my darling boy, my sweet little boy, the offspring I’d sworn never to bring into the screwed up world, promises.
“Well, you’d better. You go in on Monday and have it looked at. I’ll be checking to see that you did. Do you hear?”
“Yup, I hear.” And as quickly as that, with a just slightly impatient, “Yup,” the conversation ends and will be forgotten by me for sixty-three days and four hours.
I love to share with friends the story of how my oldest son got “hooked” on bluegrass. It’s an unlikely story and, really, it’s beginning had nothing at all to do with music. When Phil went away to college after high school, his mother and I had every reason to believe it would be a simple transition for him. Our son had always been very mature for his age, always up for adventure and never one to shy away from change; he was a confident kid who made friends as easily as some people nod and smile hello to a stranger in the check out line; and, after all, he’d be close by…the drive from San Jose to Berkeley was not much over an hour. For all of these reasons, then, Claudia and I, as well as Phil’s step mom and dad, where surprised when he came home for Christmas break and, without really admitting it, was showing clear signs of having been very, very home sick.
It was after pizza and a movie, (the notoriously bad Batman and Robin) the night before I was to drive him back up to his dorm in Berkeley that Phil came into my study and made a strange…really, you could almost say bizarre…request.
“Hey, you got any of those Grass Menagerie thingies left,” he asked with forced nonchalance.
“You mean the band’s cassette? Are you kidding, I’ve got boxes of them. Why, you wanna buy one? I can give you a good deal, buddy,” I laughed.
“Well, as a matter of fact, ah, I would like to have one. Of course I don’t want to pay for it if I don’t have to.”
I turned away from my Mac and looked at him square on.
“Wait a second, you want a Grass Menagerie tape? A tape of MY band? A BLUEGRASS tape?”
“Sure,” he said, “why not? What’s so strange about that?”
“Hmm, let’s see. Where to begin? Ah, you don’t like bluegrass music and never have. Your opinion of my band is, well, we won’t even go into that. You wouldn’t be caught dead listening to hillbilly music by your dorm friends. Shall I go on?”
“That is not true,” Phil said, “I like some bluegrass music and I don’t think your band sucks that bad. Just…are you gonna give me one or not?”
I studied my boy’s face, looking for signs of an impending punch line, but there was none to be seen. He’d learned to be a big kidder from his dad and, like his dad, favored edgy humor. But there was nothing.
“Sure, I’ll give you a Grass Menagerie cassette. I’d love to give you one, son. I gotta admit, though, I’m a little curious about why you would want it.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is. I like lots of different kinds of…” Phil stopped mid-sentence and his eyes teared.
“Okay, so I miss you guys. That’s all, I just miss you living so far away and that’s the reason I want the stupid tape.”
“Sonny boy, there’s nothing wrong about missing someone,” I said quietly.
“I know there’s not, so just hand it over, would you?”
The next time Phil came home from school there was no mention of being homesick, he was upbeat and talked in quick bursts about his classes, new friends, dorm life and especially living in Berkeley. He loved Berkeley, he said, and he couldn’t think of any reason he would ever leave it. It was his new permanent home. And neither of us mentioned the Grass Menagerie tape called ‘Buffalo Bluegrass’.
Unlike Phil Cornish, for Rick Cornish bluegrass music hit like a ton of bricks and was almost accidental. A buddy of mine, someone I played blues guitar and smoked wee with most Friday nights, called me mid-week back in June of 1977 and said we had to grab our tents and sleeping bags and go to a bluegrass festival that coming weekend.
“What’s a bluegrass festival,” I asked?
“Figure it out,” John answered, “blues, grass, get the picture? And dig it…the festival is in Grass Valley. GRASS friggin’ Valley.”
That was all I needed to hear. The following Friday at noon we headed off to Grass Valley. Of course it wasn’t a blues festival, it was a bluegrass festival, and John and I had no notion of what to expect. We wandered tentatively up to the stage area after setting up camp and sat on a log. After a few minutes five guys came out on stage, all dressed in dark suits, wearing ties and broad-rimmed cowboy hats and carrying instruments that were only vaguely familiar. John looked at me uneasily. The MC introduced Jake Quizzen-something and the Something-Something Ramblers. These guys were DEFINITELY not going to be singing any Lightnin’ Hopkins or B.B. King.
Jake’s first song was called Little Maggie, a lightening fast, pulsing, wild-ride of a song, a kind of music that was at once utterly foreign to me yet familiar in a way that’s hard to explain. And that was that…Little Maggie hit me like a brick to the back of my head. That one song, sung by Jake Quisenberry on a tiny stage in the middle of a pine forest with maybe 75 people sitting on tree stumps and folding chairs, was to change my life forever. It would gobble up every bit of free time I had, it would take me to places I’d never dreamed of going, it would introduce me to the best friends I would ever have and, quite a ways down the road it would add a dimension to the relationship I had with my oldest son that I could never have imagined.
Exactly twenty Junes later, I was back at Grass Valley, back to the annual Fathers Day Bluegrass Festival staged each year by the California Bluegrass Association, and was camped almost precisely where John and I had pitched our tents so many years before. In those twenty years, I’d learned to play the boom-chuck style of rhythm guitar so essential to bluegrass, had formed a band, amassed a collection of bluegrass and old-time record albums and CD’s that took up the better part of one entire room in my house and had not missed a single, solitary Fathers Day Festival. Two decades worth of the June festivals, plus any others I could find, put me squarely in the middle of a large, tight-knit bluegrass community. My camp at Grass Valley had, by the late 90’s, grown into sixty or seventy pickers, residing in everything from tents to broken down camp trailers like my 1952 twenty-foot Siesta to shiny forty-foot RV’s that could run as much as a tract home. The festival itself had grown from less than two hundred attendees to upwards of four thousand in twenty years.
I remember that particular June very well, and especially the second day of the festival. It was a balmy, early evening and a half dozen of us were standing around two huge bbq grills watching our dinner of chicken and sausage and baked potatoes cook. When my turn came around I banged out, without announcing the song, the first two slow, droning chords of High on a Mountain…D…Cmin7th…and instantly the entire circle fell deftly into the slow, wistful cadence of Olla Belle Reed’s beautiful ballad.
“As I looked at the valleys down below,” I began, “they were green just as far as I could see. As my memory returned, oh how my heart did yearn, for you and the day that used to be. “
And then, as I sang the first line of the chorus, “High on a mountain oh, wind blowin’ free” an amazing thing happened. From behind me, a clear, strong tenor voice came in above my lead, pitch perfect and phrasing the lyrics in exactly the same way I was. Without missing a word, I continued on the chorus…”wonderin’ where the years of my life have gone…” I spun around and there, to my absolute amazement…shock even…was Phil. Aside from humming along with his brother to the theme music of their favorite video games, I’d never heard my son sing a word…not a single note, and there he was, dead on the not-uncomplicated high tenor part of a relatively obscure Appalachian Mountains song. We sang the last two lines and ended the song.
“What in the hell are you doing here,” I asked, wrapping my arms around him, fiddle in one hand, bow in the other, in a tight bear hug. “You haven’t been to a festival in three years.”
“Well, looks like I’m back, eh?”
“But why? What the…”
“Where else am I gonna find somebody to sing High on a Mountain with,” he said with a broad grin, “these two guys suck at it.” He gestured toward the two dorm buddies who flanked him.
Over dinner the three told me the story behind the surprise appearance at the Fathers Day Festival. When Phil had returned to Berkeley after the Christmas holiday he played the Grass Menagerie cassette tape continually. Most nights the dorm residents…boys and girls, Channing Hall was co-ed…would come down to the unit Phil shared with his roommate, Kenny, (since pre-school my oldest son had always been pretty much smack in the middle of things) and share the music each had brought along to school. Phil’s contribution was Buffalo Bluegrass. At first the hillbilly-sounding music with its twangy banjo and down-home lyrics about mountaintops and rivers flooding and barefoot Nellies was a joke, a novelty.
“But after a while,” Kenny said, “I don’t know, the shit…” he stopped…”ah, you know, the songs on the tape, just sort of grew on people, probably because Phil played it so much. Kids would come down and ask to hear this song or that song on the ‘buffalo tape’.”
“Yeah, dude, it became ‘the Cult of the Buffalo’,” laughed Daemon, gulping down his third chicken leg, “that’s what it was called, and Phil was its Jim Jones. People would memorize whole songs and then sing ‘em together in the shower.”
“Yep,” said Phil, “that’s pretty much what happened alright. It was weird…but cool, too. And, no, dad, the showers ARE NOT co-ed”
Phil and Kenny and Daemon stayed through Sunday. Mostly they just hung out, checking out the girls, sneaking beers when they got the chance, but my boy and I did sing a bit more together. He really had memorized the lyrics to each and every song on the cassette, but, even more…and this is what amazed me…he’d picked up the tenor parts on each song and had the phrasing down…my phrasing. “So I could sing along with you, pop,” he explained. (In retrospect, of course, it wasn’t all that amazing. Bluegrass music, a fair amount of it sung by me, had been seeping into the poor kid’s head since just after he started walking. It’d been there all along and, almost coincidentally, it’d been awakened.)
When Phillip returned to U.C in September he asked if he could take along my old baritone ukulele, essentially a miniature four-stringed guitar, and a handful of bluegrass tapes. I said sure, wrote out a simple chord chart for him and pulled all five of the ‘Bluegrass Band Albums’, (a series of records done by the top five singers and instrumentalists in the business at the time that included pretty much all the traditional standards you’d need to get started.) And that, as they say, was that. The kid who’d never shown a lick of interest in music, except the kind that blared on underground f.m. radio, had all along carried around somewhere deep in his frontal lobe a remarkable gift. It seemed that each visit home from school Phil had some new discovery to report…a new band, a new cd, a new sub-genre within bluegrass music, a different way to split harmonies. By Christmas the boy had devoured the chord chart I’d given him and had begun working the uke’s fret board, and by spring he spoke longingly of a Kentucky mandolin he’d seen. “Where I’d get five hundred bucks to buy it,” he said glumly, “I just don’t know.” He knew.
A year and a half later, the summer between Phil’s junior and senior year at Berkeley, we attended our first bluegrass festival together “as pickers,” (the Good Ol’ Fashioned Festival in Hollister). By then my son was a passable mandolin picker, a better than average tenor and lead singer and we’d played a whole lot of bluegrass together. He and Ivona, the love of his life with whom he’d been sharing a tiny flat on Shaddock Avenue for a year, would take BART down to Fremont once or twice a month for the jam I held each Friday night. And he began showing up to Grass Menagerie gigs with his college chums and, before long, was being asked to come up on stage for a song or two. Truth be told, everybody in the band was getting a kick out of seeing this young kid soak up as much of the music we all loved as he possibly could.
It was because Phil had gotten some solid stage experience that summer sitting in with my band that in September we asked him to fill in for our mando-tenor, my long-time bluegrass pal Bill Schniederman, for our regular monthly gig at a little coffee house in Mountain View. Bill was stuck back in New York for the weekend and we didn’t want to give up the job. Cuppa Joe’s was situated smack-dab in the heart of Mountain View’s downtown district on Murphy Street and, with more than four dozen restaurants and pubs and clubs and shops, the place was jumping on a Saturday night. Phil was downright nervous, (a condition I was unaccustomed to seeing in my boy), leading up to his first, honest-to-God gig, but after attending a rehearsal the Wednesday night before and making sure he had all the starts and ends down, jitters gave way to pure, high-octane excitement. The second to the last semester before his graduation had just begun, he was living with the woman he planned to marry and make babies with, and he was going to do an actual job, as an actual musician, with his pop. Hard to imagine a kid flying any higher than my boy that last week in September of 1997.
Joe’s was completely full, with people lining the walls and waiting in a queue outside, even before we’d finished setting up the sound system. Phil had invited half the kids in his U.C. Environmental Studies Program, all of the old high school pals he’d left behind in San Jose and anyone else he could think of. Even his mom and step dad had driven up for Phillip’s ‘stage debut’. As we did our sound check, it was me who was feeling a little queasy, me who’d been front man and bandleader for going on twenty years, who’d played run-down coffee houses to elegant soirees, cheap dives to corporate picnics, music festivals and more weddings than a Methodist minister. But never, of course, with my boy standing next to me. He chopped into his instrument mic and then ran up and down an A scale, sound-checked his vocal mic with a dangerously high key of B tenor line from ‘I’m Lost and I’ll Never Find the Way’. And all the while he smiled that broad, not-a-care-in-the-world smile of his. I recognized it as the same smile he’d worn standing at the free-throw line in the All-League game held at the San Jose Memorial Auditorium, his last high school contest. It was the same vibe…exactly the same vibe. And I felt the same butterflies standing on stage next to my son that I’d had sitting alone in the stands four years previous. And then, I counted the “one, two, three, four…” into my mic and we were off and running, full tilt into ‘Ain’t Nobody Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone’.
And in what seemed like just moments later we’d finished the encore to our first set and were inching our way off the stage and through the tightly packed crowd, still thundering their applause and hoots and hollers of approval. “We killed,” I whispered to Phil. “We did,” he grinned.
I went straight out the door of Joe’s onto Murphy Street and straight back into Johnny’s Moonlight Lounge right next door.
“Old Bushmills neat and a Negro Modela,” I said to Sally as I passed the bar on the way to the men’s john. When I returned Sally had me set up and I handed her a ten.
“Sounds like the hounds were set loose next door,” the barmaid said over her shoulder while making change.
“Big crowd, bigger than usual. My boy’s setting in with the Grass Menagerie tonight and a big bunch of his friends came in to cheer him on.”
“Well, whatever it took to fill the Joe’s up, keep it comin’. We’re gettin’ major spill over.”
I drained the shot glass and took a long pull on my beer.
“You know, Sally, I’ve been doing this music for a pretty long time, standin’ up in front of crowds singin’ and playin’ my butt off. But I’ll tell you, I don’t ever remember having more fun than that last set next door. Being up there on stage singing with my kid…I don’t know, there was just an intensity to the experience that was new to me…brand new.”
“I can dig it,” she said, “tonight’s a special night for you, and that’s for sure. Would be for me. I’ll bet you never forget this night, Rick.”
“I’ll bet I don’t,” I replied and finished my glass of beer in two long gulps.
When I edged back into Cuppa Joe’s Phil was waiting at the door.
“Hey, come on,” he said, taking me by the hand and plowing a path through the long, narrow room. When we got to Claudia’s table he pulled her out of her chair and guided her forward through the crowd. Phil held both our hands now as we continued to snake towards the back of the coffee house.
“Come on,” he said, now leading us through the double doors of the brightly lit kitchen, past the busy baristas and finally out the back door and into the night.
“Too loud in there,” Phil said. He still hadn’t let go of our hands. It was a warm night, lovely and still, and we’d moved just far enough from the kitchen entry that only the light of the moon illuminated our faces.
“I found out yesterday that I have cancer,” Phil said, “and this is the best way to tell you. The three of us, me and my mom and my dad, here alone. Sorry, but this is the best way.”
Claudia gasped. I jerked my hand out of my son’s.
“WHAT,” I said angrily, “what do you mean? No, that’s not right…you’re not. No, I just don’t…”
‘It’s true, pop. I’ve got cancer all right. Kind of have known for the past week, but found out yesterday for sure from the doctor.”
“Past week,” Claudia asked in a whisper, “past week? How can that be, Phillip. How is it possible you’ve known for a week and not told your father and me?”
“I didn’t know, mom. I just kinda’ knew. They had to do tests and stuff, to make sure. But now they’re sure, so now I’m telling you.”
The clanging of dishes and cups coming from Joe’s kitchen and, beyond that, the low rumble from the room jam-packed with people, seemed far, far away. It was as though we three were in another place, soundless, featureless.
“What…” I began but then realized I could not make another word. I was in a kind of paralysis, my body’s only possible movement the involuntary shaking of my knees.
“I’m gonna be okay,” Phil said, “I’m gonna be just fine. The doctor at Kaiser says I’ve got a good kind of cancer…actually, the best kind I could have, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.”
Claudia began to sob quietly and covered her face with both her hands. Standing between his parents, Phil put one arm around each of us and drew us in.
“You guys need to trust me,” he said softly, I’m telling you the truth. I’ve got a kind of cancer that’s very curable and I’m going to be cured. That’s it. That’s the whole deal.” Our son pulled us closer together and Phil’s mother and I sobbed in his arms for a long while. We’d become the children, he the parent.
When the potency of despair reaches a particular level in the mind, certain natural phenomena are triggered and I’d been unaware of this fact until that weekend in September of 1997. One presented itself the very next morning after the show at Cuppa Joe’s. I remember so well, in such great, vivid detail, the seven or eight seconds of waking up to the sunshine streaming into our bedroom, my eyelids fluttering open, the nothingness of dreamless sleep slowly giving way to conscious thought, kernels of the new day beginning to take shape, then reaching back to find a temporal context, nine seconds, ten seconds, stretching, toes curling…and then the instantaneous and indescribable pain of remembering. The paralyzing sense of loss falling like a heavy, black curtain. In the days and weeks that followed I got used to this strange phenomenon, actually found myself half-way looking forward to the eight or ten seconds out of the days 86,400 that I forgot about my boy’s cancer and life returned to normal.
And there was another strange discovery I made after my life changed that night at Cuppa Joe’s. I found that my sensory perception, the way I saw and smelled and heard the things around me, shifted ever so slightly. I don’t’ know how else to describe it. It wasn’t a bad shift or a good shift…things just appeared different to me. The color of the sky, the smell of coffee, the sound of a car door slamming. I didn’t, and still don’t, know what to make of that, how to quantify it and certainly not how to explain why it happened, except to say that learning that my oldest son had cancer altered every aspect of my life, every cell in my body, every thought and memory and feeling, good or bad, that I’d ever had.
I need to give a little explanation here. It really was despair I felt. It settled over me like a heavy, suffocating blanket as the three of us stood in the shadows in the alleyway in back of Cuppa Joe’s. Despair is a powerful brew of human emotions, with equal amounts of intense sadness and terror, but mainly what despair is is total, complete hopelessness. Hopelessness is the key ingredient in the human emotion we call despair, and from the instant my son uttered the word ‘cancer’, it fell upon me with such a completeness that makes me shutter to this day. You see, seventeen years before Cuppa Joe’s my mother’s cancer had taken its sweet time to properly educate me about the true nature of despair. For just a little short of three years my mother’s cancer made its slow, plodding but inexorable march to the sea, winning small skirmishes here, wiping out whole cities and armies there. Each hope…a new test, a different treatment plan, yet another specialist…was in turn cut down and set ablaze until finally, I lost the most important person in my life. In those two years and ten months I‘d progressed through grade school, high school, undergraduate and graduate studies, and on June 23, 1980 I was awarded an advanced degree in the scorched-earth campaign that is cancer, and in turn learned the true nature of hopelessness.
So then, when on the Wednesday morning after Cuppa Joe’s all of the parents, Claudia and her husband Bruce, my wife Lynn and I, met Phil at Kaiser Hospital on West Macarthur Boulevard in Oakland I came fully prepared to see right through the inevitable line of crap we’d be fed by the doctors. Phillip’s upbeat manner, broad smile and easy banter, all unmistakably genuine, shamed the adults into doing their level best to put on buoyant faces; it was, of course, hardest for me, the only one of the four parents with an advanced degree in cancer’s special brand of despair.
It was clear that the people in Oncology had been expecting us. We were immediately ushered into a small, windowless conference room by the receptionist and hadn’t waited more than a few minutes before Dr. Thomas Gordon, the doc who, through a cosmic throw of the dice, had had our boy’s life placed in the palm of his hand, joined us. Gordon was of medium height, bald, trimmed facial hair, gold framed glasses and eyes that seemed just slightly too small for his head. He was, for the five of us who sat at the conference table when he walked through the door, the most important human being on the face of the earth. And when Dr. Gordon began to speak to us I knew within thirty seconds, maybe less, that he was a disingenuous asshole who wanted nothing more than to get himself out of the room and away from his patient’s family in the least amount of time possible. And here’s the thing—by the time we finished the sit down, which included an almost formal presentation by the oncologist, complete with slide projector, x-rays and thick packets of written materials to take home and study, followed by a question-and-answer period that lasted roughly twice as long as the presentation, what I thought of the doctor didn’t matter a hill of beans. A non-issue. (Years later, Phil would sum it up very succinctly…”Yup, Dr. Gordon had a fake personality. He tended to gloss over a lot of stuff and get out of the room as fast as possible every time I met with him. But I decided this was because I was an easy case and he had way more important cases to worry about.”)
My assessment of the oncologist who’d been given Phillip’s case didn’t matter a hill of beans because of what he told us about the Hodgkin’s type of cancer that was growing inside my boy. It was, he said simply, the ‘cancer of choice’ for young men and women Phil’s age.
“The cure rate,” Gordon told us, “even for patients at your son’s stage, is nine in ten. That’s pretty much the best odds you’re going to find in my line of work. So, that’s the good news. The GREAT news.”
“And the bad news,” I asked impatiently, well trained in detecting the old medical bate-and-switch, “what’s the bad news, doctor?”
“The bad news is that your son’s disease went undetected long enough for it to reach stage three. Again, infinitely curable but we’ll have to work harder…a lot harder. Longer, stronger drug therapy…chemo…and in all likelihood radiation after that. But again…and please hear me, moms and dads, this is extremely doable.”
And here’s the thing. Despite the nearly three years I’d spent twisting in the wind while my mother’s life slowly drained from her, clinging desperately to each new reason, in an endless succession of reasons, for holding out hope, I’d taken what my son’s oncologist said as the simple truth. The ‘cancer of choice’. Sure, I’d have plenty of doubts in the months that followed, I’d play back old, painful scenes burned into my brain a decade earlier, but I…we…were starting this battle on solid ground.
When we finished and were filing out of the room, I held back and positioned myself between Gordon and the others and turned just as the last person exited, effectively blocking his way out.
“Dr.,” I said in a hushed tone, “one last question. When you spoke of Phil’s cancer going undetected long enough to have to warrant radiation, what time frame are we talking about? For instance, if this thing had been caught, let’s say in early July instead of late September, might we be looking at a lesser stage of development?”
Gordon didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he said, “that’s a distinct possibility,” and with that he brushed by me and out the door. As I stood in the empty conference room, I looked over and saw that the oncologist had left the x-ray of my son’s neck and chest in the light box. It was still illuminated. I studied the dark spots Gordon had pointed out to us and I could feel my eyes welling up with tears. “Well, you’d better. You go in on Monday and have it looked at. I’ll be checking to see that you did. Do you hear?”
No amount of discussing,