Awaiting Banner Headline: “CANCER CURED”
I have been saving newspapers and magazines that report historic events since I was in the eighth grade and tucked away the Detroit Free Press of January 29, 1986, recounting the previous day’s in-air destruction of the Challenger space shuttle. The collection has grown over the years: In it are front covers and page ones from September 12, 2001; those recounting the deaths of princesses (Grace, Diana), Kennedys (Jackie, John Jr., Teddy) and icons of peace (Nelson Mandela, Yitzhak Rabin); others attesting to the election of new presidents (Clinton/Bush/Obama, each times two), and the forward march of freedom and human rights (fall of the Berlin Wall; marriage equality).
One of my favorites is a broadsheet that pre-dates me by two and a half years: The July 21, 1969 edition of the New York Times with the banner headline, “MEN WALK ON MOON: Astronauts Land On Plain; Collect Rocks, Plant Flag.”
The Times moon-landing paper is a prize of my collection because through the story it reports and the grainy images of Neil A. Armstrong, then 38, and Col. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr., 39, it reveals a moment in history that must have felt immediately iconic. Even if you weren’t alive when Mr. Armstrong made that indelible footprint, seeing photos of it (and of the Stars and Stripes waving in the lunar atmosphere) can make you feel nostalgic for a time when the nation set aside the cultural and political unrest of the late ’60s to rejoice in a shared scientific achievement.
That particular front page also matters to me because it had initially been saved for posterity by my maternal grandfather, Leo Goldberg. He died of cancer in 1987, when he was 74 and I was 15.
Leo was too young to die, but when it comes to death, most everyone is too young, or certainly it feels that way to the people who love them. At least my grandfather lived a longer life than my mother, his daughter, who died of cancer in 2005 when she was 60. Mom lived longer than my dear friend Lisa Adams, who died of cancer in 2015 when she was 45, and Lisa got more time than Chad Carr, who died of cancer last year at age 5, and whose story was covered by the national sports media — encapsulated by his nom de guerre “Chad Tough” and revealing of gross disparities in research dollars ear-marked for pediatric cancer. Chad’s story caught my attention because the Carr family is prominent in Ann Arbor where I went to college, my mother grew up, and my Grandpa Leo was a professor at and director of the University of Michigan’s department of astronomy and astrophysics.
Cancer has touched so many lives — which is kind of a sugar-coated euphemism for what it actually does — that it’s easy to find examples of those whose loss is more significant than my own. Recognizing my blessings, not in the absence of loss but in the context of it, has been a key coping mechanism. Eleven years after my mom’s death, a lot of scar tissue has built up around the wound. It still exists, but it’s pretty well insulated, and I have overwhelming gratitude for the 33 years I got to have her in my life.
So it makes sense to me, though not always to those I’m close to, why I sometimes get emotionally invested in the challenges of other families facing illness and death. I find their stories in news reports, or they find me on social media, and down the empathy rabbit hole I tumble. I feel a kinship with them and tough-to-explain obligation to show up and witness their sadness, as though I might be able to absorb a little of it for them.
When Beau Biden died at 46 of brain cancer in the spring of 2015, I felt anguished, as so many Americans did, in part because he was so young, in part because of the public and well publicized suffering the Biden family had already withstood, and in part because of the willingness of his father, Vice President Joseph Biden, to mourn so openly.
There was something that resonated with me about President Obama’s announcement last January establishing a “cancer moonshot” initiative to be lead by Vice President Biden with the goal of accelerating cancer research. The vice president is looking for meaning in his son’s death, and public service, with its promise of helping others as, perhaps, you yourself could not be helped, is a powerful balm.
For me, the idealism at the root of public service can sometimes seem overly philosophical, befitting rhetoric more than realism, and there’s no denying our culture’s current mood of anger and cynicism. But what is real, and really powerful, is science. I hope that the vice president and those working on this enterprise can take the empty promises, glacial pace, and special business interests out of cancer research.
These are the places my mind goes when I read or hear about this “cancer moonshot.” I also think about the first moon shot, realized some 47 years ago, and the emotion, if not pride, Grandpa Leo must have felt watching Mr. Armstrong set foot on the moon on a staticky, black-and-white television screen in 1969.
Leo was a research scientist and scholar who believed in the ideals of America, and an American who believed in the good of research science. He was deeply involved in solar experimentation associated with the Gemini and Apollo space missions, important precursors to the moon-landing missions. There are some discrepancies in family lore regarding Leo’s true feelings about manned space travel. Some relatives say he only became a proponent after astronauts helped save a wayward unmanned solar mission (showing that, even in outer space, all politics is local). But his career ambitions centered around the unmooring of land-based telescopy in favor of in-space observation. And so, in the big picture, he certainly was a huge advocate for space research and travel — a position that could and did meet with objection in the mid- and late 1960s. Amid President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” many saw space research as an expensive folly of ambitious politicians and elite scientists. “He would say that space exploration would improve life on Earth, including for those living in poverty,” my Uncle Eddie said of Leo, his father. “And he was right, given today’s technology, much of which likely benefitted from the moon landing.”
The first time I visited Washington, D.C., was in 1985, when my mom and I traveled there to visit Leo, then the first recipient of the Martin Marietta Chair of Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Essentially, he was writing his memoirs, highlighting his years as head of the astronomy and astrophysics departments at both the University of Michigan and Harvard University; his participation in 1958 as the astronomy representative on the Space Science Board, which advised the government on the creation of a new agency called NASA; and his role as chairman of the Astronomy Missions Board of NASA from 1967 to 1970. That weekend in Washington with my grandfather was probably the best time I ever spent with him.
My grandpa embodied the American ideal of overcoming childhood poverty (born Jewish in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, these being three demographic designations that when strung together rarely point to prosperity) and tragedy (his mother and a brother were killed in a tenement fire when he was nine) in order to make meaningful contributions to society. It was a point of pride for my mother that her father never worked in the private sector, where he likely could have done well. He was motivated by academic achievement (and, to be sure, all the attendant status) as well as a desire to collaborate on large-scale innovation. To him and others of his age, scientific innovation and patriotism — or more importantly, science and freedom — were conjoined.
Much of this I have learned only in the last couple of years, after having received in the mail from my uncle a large cardboard box filled with sticky-paged photo albums, crinkled certificates, and newspaper clipping of both historic and antiquated events — the sort of bits and bob that can help bring back to life family members and memories long since passed. I treasure every paper cut I have gotten while combing through.
Maybe one day my grandchildren (or better yet, my great-grandchildren) will sift through a cardboard box of my history (a cloud-based hard-drive lacks nostalgic imagery) and find this essay or even the book I wrote about my mom and her death, and by then, and to them, cancer will be something that used to kill people, like polio or small pox, a disease whose destruction is a matter of historical study, not contemporary reality.
That would be a giant step for humankind.
