The Last Act

 Amidst the mental confusion caused by his brain cancer, my dad had a moment earlier in the week of unusual clarity and lucidity. 

It was heartbreaking, because in the brief interval when the fog lifted, he seemed to have a glimpse of everything he had lost. "I feel like I'm losing capacity," he said. "I feel like I'm letting everyone down." 

But it was also cathartic for us both. He had a moment of empathy—not at all an unusual emotion for him in his normal state, but something that is harder for him to access right now because of the tumor pressing on his brain. 

"This can't be easy for you," he told me as we hugged. "Through no fault of your own you've ended up being your father's keeper. I never would have wanted to do that for my dad," he said.

"These conversations must be even harder on you than they are on me," he said. "You're just more organized in your thinking about them."

It was one of the most touching moments for me in the whole long and miserable journey we've been on since he was diagnosed with glioblastoma in January. 

And I dared for an instant to think that we were making progress toward something. That the clouds were lifting and the fog might be clearing permanently. It was like talking to the pre-cancer version of dad for a minute—and I wanted it to stay. 

But it didn't. The clouds rolled back in. The confusion and frustration returned in full force. What I had witnessed was not a breaking of the dawn but a brief glimpse of light amidst the general transit "from darkness to darkness," to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde. 

I am reminded of the passage from Gogol's Dead Souls: 

Some warm ray suddenly passed over his wooden face, expressing not a feeling, but some pale reflection of a feeling, a phenomenon similar to the sudden appearance of a drowning man on the surface, drawing a joyful shout from the crowd on the bank. But in vain do the rejoicing brothers and sisters throw a rope from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the struggle-weary arms—that appearance was the last. Everything is desolate, and the stilled surface of the unresponding element is all the more terrible and deserted after that. (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.)

In so many ways everything about this cancer experience has been far worse than I had feared. 

Dad has done his best to put a brave and positive face on everything. He genuinely seems to have enjoyed his radiation treatment and looked forward to it every day during the six weeks it lasted. "It's like a spa," he says. 

Every time we went into the clinic, he wanted to show me the room where the treatment occurred and introduce me to the staff who operated the machine. 

I never wanted to go in there—although I went a few times to humor him. To me the whole horrific ordeal of medical intervention was just "his cunning to make death more hard." (Isaac Rosenberg). 

There's a passage in B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates—about his friend's death from cancer—in which he describes the radiation chamber where his friend was being treated. It was "like a great bunker," he writes, "a scientific torture chamber[.]"

But his friend praises it. "Tony was always like that," writes Johnson, "[...] everything he espoused was always the best of its kind, to him, but I was in this case sceptical, for I could not see the hospital as very efficient, hated its atmosphere, of an army camp, even of a concentration camp. His in this case touching faith in doctors, in cure." 

But I feel terrible not entering into my dad's hopes; not joining him in that same "touching faith." 

The worst part of the whole cancer experience has been this constant sense that I am committing a betrayal. 

At the beginning of the story—when you first get the diagnosis—you don't feel like such a traitor. You feel that you and the patient are fighting shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy. 

But as the disease progresses and the person you knew for years starts to change and become less recognizable, inevitably there are moments when you feel that you have sinned against them in your heart. There are times when you grow frustrated; when you lose patience; when you ask the person suffering just to be their old self again—knowing all the while that this is an impossible and unfair demand. 

Johnson describes this as well. In the earlier stages of his friend's disease—when he still seemed largely himself, just more tired, he would try to interest him in his old pursuits. He would bring manuscripts for him to read, and try to get his thoughts. But his friend couldn't read, couldn't concentrate. 

"[I]t made me impatient more than once," Johnson admits, "perhaps unjustifiably impatient, it was difficult to understand, really, and the object of such impatience, anger even, could only be Tony himself, the bearer of the disease, not the disease itself, as for the deity, ha!"

A horrible thing to admit, but one all too familiar to me. No matter how many times one chants to oneself in one's brain: "It's the disease, not him; it's the disease's fault, not his;" there is no visible disease or deity to address and curse and vituperate directly. And so one finds oneself getting frustrated—unfairly, cruelly, unjustly—with the victim. 

I can't find any larger meaning in this. Neither could Johnson, he says. It is just "chaos," he writes. It is just suffering. There was no meaning to his friend's cancer and no lesson to be learned from it. It was just a terrible thing that happened.  

Except that I will say it has made death a more intimate and therefore necessarily less frightening acquaintance. My dad seems to me a pathbreaker into an experience that cannot be conceived, and I am filled with infinite gratitude to him for his bravery on the journey and his example. Because he is going there before me, he has made the path into that dark wood less terrifying. 

But what is impossible to accept is how indistinguishable the suffering is toward the end—how few of my dad's exceptional personal qualities and experiences seem to make any real difference in this final stage we are embarking upon. "The last act is tragic, no matter how happy all the rest of the play"—being an observation of Pascal's that David Markson quotes in The Last Novel.  

This, then, is one of the final, perhaps the only, mercies of death: it ends the process of dying. And then you can look back and celebrate the life that was—not just the painful conclusion. You can see the play as a whole, not just its tragic curtain-closer.

"So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps," says a character in an H.G. Wells novel; "but when you are dead you are all your life from the first moment to the last..." 

Stephen Spender likewise, analyzing Rilke, speaks of "that single unity which we attribute to the dead." 

Seeing the "single unity" of my dad's life—"all" his life "from the first moment to the last"—I can see all the good he has done, all the love he has bestowed and received, all he has accomplished, all the people he has touched. 

Living only in this present moment, however, while he is suffering and losing capacity each day, it is harder to see those things. 

But someday—all too soon; sooner than we hope—we may have access again to that "unified" retrospective view that Spender and Wells were talking about. 

But the ultimate injustice—the incredible, irremediable, unredeemable unfairness and cruelty of cancer and death and disease—is that dad will no longer be here to witness it when it comes.