Most cancers are a wrecking ball. Heavy, brutal, inexorable, cutting a swath of destruction across families, homes, childhoods, relationships, lives.
Melanoma is an assassin.
It lets you think you have killed it.
And it creeps in behind your defenses, waits patiently for years while the scans drop in frequency from a month to three months to six months to a year.
And it waits, laughing while you congratulate yourself because you "beat cancer".
And then, suddenly, one day you're in the Emergency Room at zero-dark-thirty in the morning, looking at a shadow on a tomography scan because Sara Lynn Eriksen, your wife of twelve years, is bleeding into her brain.
The assassin has come to call.
Young men, hard men, soldiers, sometimes jest with pride in their strength and ruthlessness, quipping that they, their friends, their unit, have "killed more people than cancer".
Young men are stupid.
Nothing kills like cancer.
Cancer kills from the inside, past all your defenses, down at the core of you. And you talk real brave, talk about fighting cancer, beating cancer, surviving cancer, winning... but that's just empty bravado, and what you are really doing is just trying to survive.
Trying to rake one back from the jaws of oblivion, whether it's you or your aging parents or your brother or your child or the woman you love.
You try to hold hands and say brave things and pump yourself up, that you have this.
But you're not really fighting at all. Because you can't fight. The assassin is inside you, inside him, inside her. And all you're doing is holding on, while you wait and wait, placing your hopes in technologies you only dimly understand, that no one understands without a lifetime of study.
This isn't coherent. I'm sorry.
I don't have a thesis.
I don't have a nice little Devon Eriksen packaged insight that makes sense of the universe, that assembles everything into an understandable story, promise to progress to payoff, with some character development in between.
Because sometimes there is no story.
Sometimes cells just go wrong.
Sometimes it isn't all part of a plan. What kind of plan would this be?
I can't make sense of this by writing. Because writing pulls the sense out of things, draws it into the light, shows it, explains it, reveals the underlying logic. But writing cannot sense out of nothing, cannot extract it from where it isn't to be found.
So I don't know why I'm writing this. Perhaps there's just nothing else I know how to do.
I've made promises to some of you. There are things you're expecting of me. I'll try, but they will have to wait.
I'm sorry.
I made deeper promises to someone else, and even as she sleeps in a hospital bed and I sit, alone, in my office in the dark, writing, writing because that's all I know how to do, somehow her little hand still will not let go of mine.
We give hostages to fate when we dare to love, a sacrifice fate never fails to eventually punish.
In the end, we are all dead. Perhaps some day, our arts and sciences will master this, so we stop aging, stop getting sick. Stop dying.
In the meantime, we have to claw for every breath and every second, and not give up.
I'll try to keep my promises to you, also. But first I must ask for your patience.
Excuse me.
I have to go and fight.
Or just hold on.