Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016.

I’m struck by how different the feelings are, between knowing someone is going to die (“He has brain cancer.”) and knowing someone is going to die (“He hasn’t woken up; with that much fluid build up, it’s unlikely he will.”).

The first feeling is a dare. When you hear someone is terminal, you do your best to develop to overcome the diagnosis, to flaunt what it predicts. As best I can figure, this usurpation of the supposedly inevitable can be carried out in one of two ways. The first is to beat the odds: to find the right trial, the diagnostic error, the needle in the haystack. To find the way out.

We try this way first. Tom is admitted into a clinical trial designed to increase the efficacy of the chemotherapy at reducing the size of the tumors (and halting their growth) by adding in a complementary medication. He is set up at home with all of the things to facilitate self-sufficiency — and the illusion (for him) of self-sufficiency — as far as we can figure it. We talk about the things we’ll do when he’s healthy, and earnestly try to participate in non-nonsensical conversations — the one that the cancer strands somewhere between Tom’s intention and his mouth. We hope that one day…

The second thing people try (I presume — we aren’t going to get here) is to squeeze all of the things that life was supposed to hold into “the time we have left.” You go to football games and foreign countries, and maybe the Grand Canyon. I’m going to stop here, because I don’t want to think of the things that we aren’t going to do. But this, from the outside, from my hypothetical view in, seems to make people happy.

The second feeling, when you know someone is going to die — when you actually know it — is sterile. There are things to do now, a clear set of steps that happen from here. The family (extended) has to be called, the funeral home contacted. The course of treatment changes. The paperwork has to be found (he’s 53, it wasn’t ready-at-hand) and corporate hotlines dialed. You have to learn the footpath to a new hospital wing — “palliative,” a word that means a good thing to people in a bad situation.

This feeling is where I am now. Numb, capable, with sharp and unpredictable jags of “this is as sad as you should feel” sadness that I wish was there more often — because Tom deserves that level of grief. But then I feel okay, that he’d understand that there are things to do to make this as okay as it can be. Because there’s things we have to do, and no really a choice to not do them. I’m never going to use the word ‘compelled’ as freely as I did in the past.

Right now — right now, right now: in this moment — mostly what I feel is scared; I am scared for I will handle it when I eventually come to understand the difference between knowing that Tom is gone, and knowing that Tom is gone. When knowledge of the head shifts, lowers, drops and, against wishes, becomes knowledge of the heart.

This is a part of a series of essays which I began while my step-father Tom — a good man — was undergoing treatment for particularly aggressive brain cancer. He began experiencing acute symptoms on March 6th, 2016, and passed away nineteen days later.

His family and friends started a college scholarship fund in his memory. If you would like to donate, you can do so at tombroadheadscholarship.org.

Eric.