A father writes to his 2 daughters on the loss of their grandfather to cancer
You two didn’t get a fair chance to really get to know your grandfather. Your ‘Poppy’ as he was known to you, was a great man. A man of character and love. He was always there for us when I was growing up. He made it a point to spend time with us in the activities we all liked to do individually. He would drop what he was doing and go out in the front yard to throw the baseball with me. He was always in great health. When he filled out medical questionnaires there wouldn’t be much for him to tell. He didn’t have any diseases and wasn’t on any medications.
One day when he was about 70 years old, he found a small lump on his right leg. He didn’t know what it was but he did know it wasn’t supposed to be there so he went to the doctor. His doctor didn’t know what it was either but sent him to a specialist. It took a good month or so to get in to see this doctor and in that time the lump grew. This specialist knew it was cancer and sent him to a specialist’s specialist. Another month went by in the process and the tumor grew tremendously. They said that even before the tumor was ever noticed, that it would have actually already spread into other parts of the body. By the time treatment started (radiation) the tumor was about the size of a grapefruit. He couldn’t walk correctly. He was very uncomfortable. Surgery followed the 5 weeks of radiation. Then another surgery and huge doses of chemotherapy followed that. He had a lot of pain and the recovery took over a year. The leg wasn’t healing and he was back in the hospital a few times with infections from it and fevers to 104 degrees. These re-infections led to more surgeries on the leg.
He was always so crushed that he wasn’t able to see you both more often. The chemo affected his immune system and being around children became dangerous. His energy level was completely gone from all the chemo. Over the 2 years he was sick, he went through so much chemo, radiation, and surgery, including a brain tumor (for which he underwent surgery), that he finally had decided that it was time to stop. He fought the good fight. His ‘life’ was no longer a life. It was filled with exhaustion, pain, sickness, and the disappointment of not being able to be with his grandchildren. There wasn’t really much choice. All the treatments combined were barely holding the cancer at bay. We were loosing ground each month and there was nothing we could do about it. He just wanted some time where he felt normal again, and removing all the medications provided that.
I’ll never forget being in the emergency room about 2 months later. After two months of relatively good health, he got to a point where he just couldn’t breathe properly. It was debilitating. After waiting two hours in the waiting room gasping for breath, he finally got in. They took good care of him. Your Grammy and I were with him. They brought in a chest x ray and did other tests. A little while later a hospital Chaplain came by. He talked with us and offered comfort. He seemed to just be making his rounds through the ER but it wasn’t until much later that I realized that he had been called by the ER staff to come see us. The chest x ray showed his lungs full of cancer and the staff knew that it was terminal. Grammy and I were out in the main doctors area and the nurse brought us over to the computer monitor so we could see the results of the xray. We were in such shock because very little time had passed since his last chest xray and the growth of the cancer was unbelievable. They basically told us he was going to die in the next week or two. It was overwhelming. Devastating. As we wept, the Chaplain was there. Since he had introduced himself to us (and to Dad) a half an hour earlier, he was familiar and available for us. He held us and just stayed there with us.
Dad stayed in the hospital for a few days with us desperately trying to get him home. Doctors didn’t want to release him until he could breath at an acceptable rate on oxygen.
When he finally got home I figured we had 1-2 weeks at the best. It turned out to only be about 12 hours. He passed during the night with Grammy asleep right next to him. As much as it hurt to have not gotten that extra day or two, I knew that the best thing possible had happened. Had he survived much longer, he would have suffered with labored breathing and a panicked anxiety from not being able to get enough air. The way he went was so peaceful. He had a smile on his face.
Grammy called the three of us kids at around 4 a.m. in tears. We all raced over there to be with her. She was obviously crushed and just wished that she had a few more days. Dad looked very much at rest. Somehow even CiCi-the-cat just knew. She loved Dad so much and would spend all her time in his lap. But, she completely knew he was gone and the body she was seeing was not Dad at all. His soul had left him.
My Dad will always be with us. He is in heaven, looking down and smiling on all of us. Grief is a difficult thing. It is harsh at times. Yet there is also something spiritual about grief that is cleansing. It puts you in touch with your emotions. It puts you in touch with your soul. It puts you in touch with your own mortality. And it makes you realize that you are alive. As Mom’s rabbi put it, grief comes in waves, like the rolling of the tides. The only difference is that there is no schedule of when high tide is going to come.
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