The Return of the Prodigal Blogger

About a month ago I abandoned my old blog and deleted all but two of the posts. I had had enough of the process, and I found myself worrying about posts I had written, thinking that I should have said something else or I should have made some point more clear. The tone, purpose, and direction of the blog seemed to have escaped from my control, and I needed to escape. Almost immediately, I secured my domain here at WordPress, in case I decided to start the blog anew in fresh surroundings and with little of the baggage of the old blog. The WordPress site has lain fallow for weeks, though, and I was not sure when I would return to writing. Recent events, though, have made me wish that I had a space to relieve my thoughts. It has almost felt as if writing is some sort of waste product–sort of intellectual urine, perhaps–that needed to be voided to make myself more comfortable.

Readers of my old blog may remember that I traveled to Houston back in November to see my dad, who had been diagnosed with a large tumor sitting on his basal ganglia deep in the center of his brain. He had surgery, a long, long procedure, and had moved on to the rehabilitation phase of treatment. Although there were some complications (a blood clot at the venturi drain in the skull, an infection), he responded fairly well to treatment and came through his radiation and first round of chemotherapy with relatively bright prospects. A new MRI revealed that the bits of the tumor left by the resectioning had vanished under the combined chemical and atomic assault. We all cheered upon hearing this news.

But then, for some unfathomable reason, his condition began to deteriorate. He started to lose the neurological gains he had so painfully made in the previous month, and his confusion increased. He became too weak to stand. Doctors thought that the steroids that he was taking to reduce the swelling around the site of the tumor were causing problems, so he began to taper off them. Instead of getting better, though, he got worse.

My step-mom, who was doing virtually all of his in-home care (he was allowed six hours of in-home nurse care every other week by his insurance), was growing frantic, frustrated, and exhausted. He continued to decline, and we decided that this was not what my father wanted: he did not want to live a life that was a life only in the most technical of definitions. Instead of moving on to the third and final stage of chemotherapy of dubious value, my dad would receive palliative care.

That was about two weeks ago. My dad’s condition continued to slide inexorably down, and Julie called me on Saturday with the news that he seemed to be fading quickly. I purchased airline tickets and packed my bags. On Sunday, less than an hour before I was scheduled to drive to the airport, Julie called again with the news that my dad had just died.

I had known since November that the type of tumor my dad had was always fatal. The one-year survival rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30%, and there is essentially no long-term survival rate. From this point on, my consciousness was split. One side knew the necessity of planning for death while the other persisted in hope. The hoping side must have prevailed, despite the fact that the other side had logic, medical science, rationalism, and my respect for academic truths behind it. When I heard that my father had died, I realized that the idea of preparing for death is a largely symbolic exercise. You can anticipate it, you can realize it is imminent, you can know it on an intellectual level, but you cannot know it on the visceral level where we–or I, at least–seem really and truly to live.

Before my dad went in for the surgery, Julie and I told him, joshingly, that he had better watch out. We had discussed our plans for him, post-recovery. He was going to go back to school and finally finish his college degree. He was going to come up to spend some time with me in New England. He was going to sit down and do some of that writing that he was always planning. Did we know that we were, almost literally, whistling past the graveyard? I think I did, but again, that realization occupied only half of my consciousness.

I guess the point that I am trying to make is that death is a sneaky thing. It can rush up at full speed, in plain sight, and still be surprising. Trying to understand it is like trying to grab hold of a jet of water: it has a feel, a texture, even a shape, but it resists any attempt to encompass it. And grief, that chief of death’s entourage, is equally sneaky. It hides, waiting for you to turn around, and then it leaps out and enshrouds you in that dark blanket again. Yesterday I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye, and something–the set of my shoulders, the shape of my head, I don’t know–reminded me so forcefully of my dad. And there it was again–grief laughing like a maniac, ecstatic that it had caught me, again and again.