An Afternoon With A Dear Friend Where Cancer Is The Uninvited Guest

I talk about heading into middle-age quite a bit. It’s obviously on my mind.

You know, ’cause it’s happening to me.

With that said,  I’ve been making a bit of peace with it. Now, if I could do anything I wanted to do, I’d be a world-famous media critic, world-famous movie critic, be living in a warehouse apartment in downtown Nashville, Knoxville or Memphis (or NYC), people would just randomly offer me jobs that offer a lot of money because they think I’m groovy, yada, yada, yada … or possibly I could  just win the lottery so I could go on a two-week cruise and then I could head to the South Pole to see a real live penguin.

Yeah, I have simple things I want to do. And I’m shallow. That’s me.

I told you about my friend who isn’t feeling well. Yesterday, Squirrel Queen and I went and hung out with him for a big part of the afternoon. He’s being moved to Memphis on Monday and is looking into a world of unpleasantness with surgery and chemotherapy.

We laughed. He was scared but dealing with things so honestly and bravely that I just wanted to squeeze him. He worked as a stand-up comedian in the past, and he talked about how scared he was the first time he went on stage. He is the GM of a radio station now, and he told funny stories about how he thought that Squirrel Queen, he and I were urbanites living in a rural community and how it was so bizarre that no one really gets that.

As there is a golf-ball sized tumor in his kidney, I teased him that we could really just hurry up the process by taking out his kidney and leaving him a bathtub of ice with a note on top of him that does that old urban legend about organ thieves about leaving the tell-tale note that says “Call 911. We have removed your kidney.”  You know the old tale.

And we laughed.

We talked about when we were in radio together (believe it or not, he did a radio show with Squirrel Queen where she did sports, then about a year later, I was a news director at another station while he was the morning drive guy.)

This was all about 15 years ago.

We all have history. We are all friends. He told us he loved us and we told him we loved him. He asked us if we believed in God. We talked about faith.  He said he was most likely an agnostic but then he wasn’t sure about that.

He said he thought though that God could be the universe and that if God is everywhere, then that all made sense to him.  We talked about the personal relationship we had with the universe. We talked about how organized religion wasn’t really our cup of tea.  We talked about having hope in desperate times.

And, three old friends sat in a hospital room and I left feeling a great deal of love and affection but, as it goes, I also felt powerless and helpless because my friend is sick.

He wanted to go to Vandy for treatment. Insurance won’t allow it. We were there when he got the call saying he would have to go to Memphis.  A very sad moment as he was processing this new information and how to tell his wife.  He was worried she’d be upset. We talked about how insurance was messing with his ability to direct his own health care.

The cancer has metastasized. It’s in his hip and shoulder now. He can’t walk. He’s having trouble with mobility.

He’s got a hard battle in front of him.

So, last night I came home. And I cried although that would piss him off. But I wasn’t crying for him as much as the tears flowed over the loss of innocence and certainty. That there are health battles, and other wars to be fought ahead as we have entered our forties and there is an urgency to get things accomplished more rapidly.

I cried because we have new journeys and they are as difficult as the old ones we had in our teens, our twenties, our thirties.

No one ever said life was easy.

And, I’m selfish. I wanted, for one moment last night, to just pack up and go but you can’t run away from yourself or the people you love.

Because, what I wanted to run away from was getting older.

And after I bawled my eyes out, well then I felt better for all of us.

Because, you know, we have each other.

And that is of the good. It gives me hope that in the end, all you really have is love.