Sweet Lamb of Heaven (55)
That has to be it.
“See Western medicine doesn’t come close to understanding the body, that’s part of what I learned in med school and my residency, for doctors, we have to act like we know things, ‘project an air of competence,’ is what they said to me”—here she used air quotes—“but let’s be serious, it’s a crapshoot, with anything in the least rare, whether you can get to a diagnosis that works and maybe jury-rig a cure for it. Medicine’s more guesswork than the AMA wants patients to even think about, if they knew how much of a gray area there is they wouldn’t believe a thing we said—”
“Mama,” said Lena, behind me. “I can’t find it.”
“Shh, honey. Just for a minute. I’m trying to hear Kay.”
“We’d never be able to tell our brains how to manage the body’s systems, so much more sophisticated than our self-awareness,” went on Kay, and now she was fiddling with an earring and in the process turning her face away from the computer’s microphone. “. . . colonies of microbes—billions! Not to save our lives! What I got from Infant Vasquez, what I didn’t have time to tell Navid, is that system . . . one aspect of deep language . . . the other—”
“Mama,” repeated Lena, apparently deciding Kay’s desperate monologue was background noise. “I can’t find the bottom LEGO piece, you know the one you make into the floor? I can’t find that big flat green piece to even build them on, Mom. I swear, I looked everywhere!”
“In a minute, honey, just a minute, OK?” I said, flapping a hand at her impatiently, but I’d already missed what Kay was saying.
Then Solly and his new girlfriend burst in the door stamping snow off their feet, his girlfriend whom I’d never met before was smiling at me expectantly, so I made my excuses to Kay and got up from the computer.
Language extinction has occurred quite slowly throughout human history, but is now happening at a breakneck pace due to globalization and neocolonialism—so rapidly that, by 2100, 50 to 90 percent of languages spoken in today’s world are expected to be extinct. —Wikipedia 2016
LUISA WAS SITTING with Solly and me in his kitchen/dining room/living room (Lena had gone to bed) when we got the call from my mother.
Solly put her on speakerphone.
Our father had been losing weight and sweating at night, she said—so much that he soaked the sheets. They’d gone in to see the family doctor and the doctor had sent them to a specialist, where he’d been biopsied.
“Why didn’t she tell us this before?” asked Solly, after punching the mute button. “A biopsy?”
“I didn’t want to bother you, in case it wasn’t anything,” she said.
I guess the mute button doesn’t work.
“Sorry,” muttered Solly, but he was already distracted by the import of that.
“I’m afraid it did come back positive,” she said. “A fairly common cancer of the blood. ‘Hematological malignancy,’ they said. We don’t have the staging on it yet, but we should know soon and I don’t want you to get too worried just yet. OK? It’s not necessarily a dire prognosis, depending on the staging, of course, whether it’s metastasized—it doesn’t have too low a five-year survival rate. More than half of all patients pull through. Maybe even three-quarters, we’ll see. So your father’s chances aren’t so bad.”
Luisa squeezed Solly’s hand, her dark eyes glittering. Solly and I looked at each other steadily.
“Do they have a treatment plan yet?” asked Solly.
“There will probably be chemo,” said my mother. “Possibly radiation, possibly surgery. I’ll share all of that with you as soon as I know more, dear.”
“Blood cancer,” I said, after a silence. I’d begun to feel uneasy—beyond even the facts of the case I felt a creeping apprehension. “That’s where . . . isn’t that . . .”
“It’s where the white blood cells divide faster than normal cells, or live longer than they’re supposed to,” said my mother. “He has at least a couple of primary tumors, which they tell me is a common presentation. With this kind of a lymphoma.”
AFTER WE HUNG UP I told Solly what Ned had said to me before: lymphoma. I described it to him before he left for Luisa’s place for the night, right before I took out my laptop and began typing this.
But he shrugged it off as though the detail either wasn’t accurate or wasn’t relevant. Our father has a disease, our father has a potentially terminal illness of the kind we all fear for the insidious poison of its medicine, the emaciation of bodies, shedding of hair, desiccating of bones and aging of skin. That was all Solly had room for, and I can’t blame him.
And our father will have to endure all that without ever understanding his illness. He’ll be like a child throughout the suffering, confused and blinking as my mother herds him gently on.
I think of those scenes to come and I also think of my father when we were young and he was middle-aged instead of old—how he read us stories using different voices, some deep, some squeaky, here a quaking mouse, here a growling lion. I think of how he carried us on his shoulders—“so you can pretend to be giants.”
He had so much dignity back then, but he was willing to cast it off to entertain his children. He tickled us until we grew out of being tickled, he made corny jokes until we grew out of those too.