Chapter 4: Cancer is Contagious

I remember when it started. My father had been experiencing terrible back pains, complaining of them every day, clutching his back, and often limping around the house. Despite his condition, we’d taken a vacation to the woods, stayed in a house in a forest, in Georgia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Driving up there, we stopped at a restaurant to eat lunch. It was a very waspy place. Sort of like a country club. Everyone there was White, blond, blue eyes.

We were the only Jews.

And I think the waiter knew this. I remember him, a chubby, red haired man, with a Southern drawl, and he dutifully attended to all the other customers, sweet as sugar to them, but he totally ignored us, didn’t take our order.

Finally, my father complained to management, and I don’t remember if we were served by another waiter or if we left.

Perhaps this was my introduction to antisemitism.

While staying at the vacation house, I watched “The Terminator” on Betamax tape, and after finishing the movie, I went to ask my parents if cyborgs were real and if they might kill us one day. The cyborgs didn’t scare me as much as the zombies, but still, there were a formidable, credible threat, to my young mind, and perhaps with AI evolving, they’re a realer threat than zombies ... Which most of us are these days, on our phones, but I, again, digress...

Worried about cyborgs, I walked down the hallway to my parents’ room. When I approached the threshold of my parent’s doorway, I caught my parents fooling around in bed, which was the first time I’d seen a grown woman naked.

I stared for a few seconds and ran away, ran for dear life, as if my feet were on fire. I was absolutely horrified by the moans my mother was making. It was far worse than the cyborgs!

I was also terrified that my mother’s pussy was hairy, and it struck me how different it looked than Michelle’s, Alice’s, and the several girls with which I’d played “I’ll show you mine...” To this day, I believe that seeing my mother’s hairy pussy, hearing her moans traumatized me and caused me to prefer a shaved or neatly trimmed vagina...

My father, while at the vacation house, began experiencing even worse back pains, like nothing he’d had prior.

When we got back home, he scheduled a checkup, and, after a couple further exams, the doctors found a cancerous growth, and that he had pancreatic cancer.

I still remember before the diagnosis, driving to the hospital, learning the words “benign” and “malignant” and him having a procedure to see which type it was.

Afterwards, he told me that there was a 50% chance he’d live and 50% chance he’d die. I’d discovered later that he’d told me this because he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth. The cancer was terminal, and he was given about a year to live.

In the months that followed, his health deteriorated.

He lost weight, became skeletal. His skin became jaundiced. His cheeks were sunken. His once thick wavy black hair wilted like a dead plant and fell out. He’d pass malodorous gas. He’d vomit. I remember us keeping buckets around the house for him to vomit in.

He and my mother would fight, screaming at each other, over what, I didn’t know then, but I’d found later that it was her trying to convince him to accept the reality of his situation and that it was impossible for him to come to terms with, like he thought it wasn’t really happening. He’d been convinced a quack doctor in New York, who was performing a “radical” cancer treatment, involving injecting alcohol into tumors, that that could cure him.

I remember asking him if he died could he please try to talk to me from Heaven.

He didn’t really respond to that.

He wasn’t religious, and, a scientist, he was an atheist, so I’m sure that on some level, he must have known the gravity of his situation. And as opposed to a religious person, who might find comfort in thinking there’d be a Heaven he’d see, my father didn’t have anything to look forward to. For atheists, death really is death.

Even though he was an atheist, maybe because his father had escaped the USSR, arriving to America by boat at age 13, and his father had been an atheist and done nothing Jewish whatsoever, not even celebrating holidays, my father wanted different for me. He wanted me to have the “Jewish” experience and had sent me to synagogue; we’d go every Saturday.

(Thinking back on it, he’d probably wanted the Jewish experience for himself too, was living it vicariously through me.)

Our rabbi was quite helpful during my father’s illness. He spent time with my father, as my father’s health worsened. They had long talks about life, science, the Torah. Despite my father’s lack of spirituality, he and the rabbi bonded immensely.

(Strangely enough, the rabbi was a Red Sox fan and my father a Yankees fan. Perhaps death is the only thing powerful enough to unite those factions... )

I don’t remember the rabbi speaking with me or my mother, however. I don’t even recall what he looked like.

I do remember a couple people from my father’s family coming over. One was my aunt, an apple-faced frumpy woman who wore heaps of garish makeup and musky perfumes and had come from England. As well as an uncle, a shaggy-faced hippy coming from California. I remember them staying with my mom, dad, and me at the house, during the ordeal.

My father’s family were in dismay, and like him, they couldn’t accept what was happening. They were who’d suggested my father to see the quack doctor in NYC who claimed he could cure cancer by injecting alcohol into the tumors.

They, my father’s family, and my mother fought a lot, much of it due to them expecting my mother to handle all the housework, cleaning, cooking, while she also worked and was attempting to raise and care for me as well as her dying husband.

The family, particularly my aunt, paid little attention to me or my mother, perhaps due to my mother never ingratiating herself to them, my aunt being very possessive of my father, too, and never bonding with, or even making much of an attempt to get to know my mother.

My aunt, my father’s sister, had had her own heartbreak, losing their mother to breast cancer fifteen years prior. My grandmother’s death also a slow, brutally painful one, her catatonic on pain pills, withering and waiting for death on their couch, in front of the TV, before finally passing away in a hospice.

Then my aunt’s father, my grandfather, died in a car accident, five years afterwards. My grandfather and his new wife, plus two other relatives of mine, driving on a bridge in rural New York state, the driver being my step-grandmother, the lady a very short, very elderly woman, who was barely able to see over the steering wheel, and the four, in the car, driving off a bridge, the gray Buick plunging into a river.

I don’t know if they died on impact. I hope for their sake they went quickly and painlessly. Drowning to me has always been one of the worst ways a person could die. Something about not being able to breathe, the pain, the horror, lungs filling with water. I really do hope that didn’t befall them.

(I never met either of those grandparents. Both died before I was born. I’d heard that my grandmother was a lovely, kind and caring woman. Before she went to a party in the Bronx, where she’d meet my grandfather, she kept saying to her sister, “I just hope they like me!” And fortunately, they did like her, as did everyone who knew her... )

((My grandfather wasn’t as well-liked. He was a quiet, sullen man, hardened by his upbringing, coming to America, from the USSR, on a boat when he was 13, with only $15 in his pocket. He didn’t speak English. He knew very few people. He’d had it tough, worked in factories, most of his adult life he’d worked in a factory that produced war planes and was, however, delighted that his planes could bomb the Germans and Japanese in World War 2.))

(((My grandfather and father had a strained relationship. My grandfather had come to America with Horatio Alger dreams of finding the roads paved with gold. But, in reality, he found himself slaving away in factories, living in a series of tiny apartments in the Bronx ... My grandfather practiced the old, cold Eastern European tough love, never praising my father to his face, but whenever my father wasn’t around, my grandfather was bragging to everyone about his boy. Sadly, my father never heard this, and he wanted to; he wanted just once for his father to praise him, show his approval, be kind and loving. After my father left for college, they rarely spoke, and were just beginning to reconcile at the time of my grandfather’s tragic and sudden death.)))

Back to my aunt, before my father’s illness, she’d lost her pregnancy to miscarriage, and her husband divorced her, leaving her mostly because he wanted kids.

Having just experienced miscarriage and divorce, it was incredibly difficult for my aunt to lose my father, one of her few last remaining close family members. They’d grown up together in a shoebox apartment in the South Bronx, back when it was a Jewish, Italian, and Irish neighborhood, and she and my father had remained close throughout their winding paths in life.