[Note to Amy: Don't click through on this until you're ready to read it. I warned you. :p ]

No, this isn’t some fear I have. This is something I have been needing to write about ever since Amy’s dad was diagnosed with cancer. It brought up a well-spring of emotions, some sourced more newly than others. I don’t feel like I can dump this all on Amy … the last thing she really needs right now is my little sob story. However, I need to write about it, and after a couple of misplaced attempts [read: I start musing off the top of my head via ICQ to Amy and she rightfully tells me to stop], I’ve decided that the proper place for it is here, on my site, in my own time and place.

The fear of dying isn’t something I have for myself personally: I know that I’m not guaranteed my next breath, and I’ve long accepted that fact. But I don’t like the disappearance of loved ones from my life one bit, whether by dying or anything else. The emotions that came to mind were from my mother’s stroke and the death of her father.
William Felix Adair was my mother’s father. He was probably the man I most resemble in my current life, which is a nearly-damning ideal for me to live out. You see, my Papa was nearly a god in my eyes, as anyone’s very loving grandfather is to them. This isn’t to say that I loved any of the rest of my grandparents any more or less as a kid–I just connected to Papa better than the rest of them.

I guess one of the reasons Papa achieved demi-god status in my mind was his amazing ability to fight off cancer. He had cancer for as long as I could spell the word, having been diagnosed with lymphoma back in 1979. Your humble correspondent, being born in 1978, grew up watching my grandfather go in for surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy–the last back in the day when chemo was described as “a way to kill the cancer slightly faster than the drugs would kill the patient”. Another cancer? Another body part. My grandfather had four forms of cancer over 11 years before he died on July 31, 1990.

One of the greatest frustrations of that time for me–and something I couldn’t formulate until much later in my teenage years–was that I didn’t get to see my grandfather before he died. Mom was down here in Alabama with him and her mother, and I spoke with him regularly on the phone. I never will forget one of our last conversations: “Son, next time you’re down here, you can make fun of your Papa … the chemo’s taken the last of my hair, and I’m as bald as a billiard ball.” He and I both laughed.

We were coming down to the South in another couple weeks … Dad’s parents were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in early August [the 8th, I think], and Dad had vacation lined up to take off and bring Doug and I down with him. In fact, I think we’d even started packing for the trip; it’s all kinda fuzzy now, 11 years later. Dad’s date of retirement from the Air Force was set for the 31st of August; we were getting ready to start new lives outside of the military world.

I never will forget waking up on the first of August. I knew my grandfather had died. Don’t ask me how, but I knew. I guess it was that Doug wouldn’t look at me in the hallway as he sullenly walked out of the bathroom and back to his bedroom. There was disquiet in the house, and so I timidly walked to the kitchen, where Dad was on the phone arranging things. He hung up the phone and told me. I don’t really remember a lot of the day after that, other than getting my clothes ready to go with my brother, who knew how to do laundry.

I never got to say goodbye … we were about to be there. That’s the thing that got me, and it gets me to this day. But he knew.

–

When Amy left me a voice mail a couple weeks ago on my cell phone, I had a dread in my heart. I walked outside the class building to call her. As the phone rang, I had one prayer: that it wasn’t pancreatic cancer. As we know, it was. I knew the statistics on pancreatic cancer, and I knew they weren’t very good at all. I was hoping it was another form of cancer, but hey–this is what Mr. Qualls is living with today.

The other visceral part of fear is that I know that, eventually, Amy will lose her dad. That makes my heart ache, because I know how scared I was of losing Mom after her stroke. All I can do is hope that I can provide some of the same love and support for her that my friends did for me during that blasted fall when nothing seemed important at all. I want to tell her to cheer up and smell life’s wonderful aromas, but … that’s not what you want to be told when you’re mourning and preparing to mourn. You want to be told that you’re special, that your pain is validated, that your hurt is understood. That’s all you want to hear … and you certainly don’t want to hear that someone’s “been there before”. They haven’t.

I know that I haven’t been there … I just had the fear that Mom would die. Amy has the certainty that her dad will die. I haven’t been there at all. I know that I might be there someday, but it’ll be one of my parents, with whom I have a unique relationship that no one else, not even my brother or the other parent, could fully understand.

I haven’t been there at all. None of us have. But all I can do, as Amy’s friend, is to listen and offer my shoulder. Presence is going to go a hell of a lot farther than words are at this point, because the words are empty, but the arms are full.