Day 0

As Lynn and I tended to my father during the seven years after my mother’s death, I watched, as his life diminished into a “routine,” of pills, nebulizer and inhaler treatments, and PT with no hope of return to more than staying even.  In fact, for much of those seven years, dad’s life was to get up around 7:00 AM; dress with help of a wonderful nurse he hired; have his coffee and potato buns: do his medical routine; head down to lunch with “the girls”; come back to his apartment; do his medical routine/deskwork/doze; and await Lynn or me to make him some dinner.  We’d watch “Wheel” and “Cops” and I’d tuck him in, turn out the lights, and lock up.  As I watched, I remember thinking, “I would not do this; I would cash it in.”

As the days wear on here I often wonder, “Why I am doing this?  Why not cash it in?”  The thought did cross my mind.  Why fight, what in all probability will be a losing battle with quite possibly more pain and suffering?  I don’t know!  I guess I just can’t pull away from life’s table, yet.  Maybe it’s all the love and support I’ve enjoyed all my life and continue on to today. Maybe it’s just that life is a battle with mortality, and I am more than willing to be a temporary champion in that fight.

Anyway, I just want anyone who reads this to know how deeply, my family and I appreciate the well wishes from our parents, George & Marie, our brothers and sisters-in-law, our cousins and aunts and nephews and nieces,  our friends, our colleagues, my former students, classmates, and perfect strangers, and our biggest cheerleaders – our kids and their families.  Hope is easier to hold when so many are cheering this effort on.

(Aside:  If Geoffrey Chaucer were to write Canterbury Tales today, he might well use an urban hospital as the frame.  The diversity here is simply, as in Chaucer’s time:  the world.  Given that, it reminds me that the only real enemy anyone might fear is (as Elie Wiesel said in a commencement address at Boston University in 1992) fanaticism.  I would simply define that as an absolute belief that your god, your beliefs, you way of thinking is so fragile, it necessitates killing all who don’t hold the same.  The Pardoner of Canterbury Tales would have simply left it at avarice.  Actually, they both seem dead on.)  

Yesterday, was day zero.  Zacc and Mike’s stem cells went in.  Now go and engraft one of you!