One time, when I was little, we had a school project where we had to put pictures onto a tagboard that illustrated things about our lives. One of the pictures was supposed to be what I wanted to grow up to be. After some thought, I went outside and took a picture of my dad driving his tractor around the farm doing farm-stuff.
My mom was very pleased by this, and proudly showed the board to Dad when he came in for the day.
Dad looked at it and said simply “Honey, he doesn’t know what he wants to be, and he needed a picture, so he took one of me… he is not going to farm when he grows up.”
That’s my Dad, ladies and gentlemen — he’s always understood me better than I did. We have the same birthday, we grew up pretty much the same way, I even went to high school in the same building he and Mom did. We’re pretty much alike.
When he called me up today and greeted me with “hey Dude”, my heart nearly stopped. I’m fairly certain that’s the first time the word “dude” has ever passed my Dad’s lips in casual conversation since mid-February, 1950.
So I knew it was bad.
—
I’ve written this three times already. I keep deleting it.
This is one of those invisible lines that exist when you have a page like this. When is Information the same as Too Much Information? When does talking about your Personal Stuff go into the area of discussing Someone Else’s Personal Stuff?
There are reasons I want to write this: I’d feel better, having shared it (and thanks to those of you who’ve listened to me talk about it).
There are reasons I’m not sure if I should: although it impacts me deeply, it’s not entirely “my” problem — I don’t own it, and I don’t have a right to it, and it is personal.
Looked at that way, it’s a simple matter of deciding whether I want to feel better more than I want to consider someone else’s feelings.
Two things tipped the scale:
In some very basic way, this is still my personal journal — I’ve never kept a record of my day to day life (not reliably) until I started this, and I’ve already found it a huge comfort and help. This event is a big deal, and should be chronicled.
It’s been made clear that Dad’s not too worried about what’s said on here. :)
—
Here are the facts:
- My Dad’s been diagnosed with cancer.
- It is a highly-operable, very-successfully treatable form.
- It was caught very early, due to the fact that he has regular, yearly physicals (required because of high blood pressure — it’s ironic that his high blood pressure may have saved his life).
- I, like Dad, am fond of saying that worrying about something you can’t help is a damn waste of time. He told me the same thing today on the phone, so you can guess where I learned this from.
- Although I’m not worrying, I am still really scared and very confused. I wouldn’t know what to do if the man had a case of the flu — that’s how rarely he gets sick — so this is simply outside my realm of experience.
I’ve faced up to the reality of my own mortality (as I start to find grey chest hairs in amonst the thatch, and my always-pronounced widows peak becomes moreso), but this is very much like finding out firsthand that Gravity doesn’t always Happen.
I’m suddenly really glad that I was planning to travel back to South Dakota over the weekend of the Fourth.
