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Homunculus

“Why do all the kids in these paintings look like old men?” Sabine asked, inspecting the legacy of some long-dead Italian.

I tilted my head back to drum up a few extra millimeters of breath, placating my air hunger for another minute or two, and replied, “I think those kids are supposed to be Jesus.”

“And why, exactly, does the baby Jesus have your dad’s hairline?”

I shrugged. “The immaculate recession?”

She rolled her eyes, but didn’t say a word. She couldn’t. It was my birthday. My fortieth, in fact. A day I had never expected to see.

In honor of the occasion, we’d left home for a trip down the coast in our wheelchair-accessible minivan, putting our faith in the traffic gods to deliver us through the San Fernando Valley and into the rolling hills of the Santa Monica Mountains without a blood sacrifice—though, as anyone who has ever served time bumper-to-bumper in Los Angeles might, we would’ve considered it.

Our destination: the Getty Center—a haughty fortress of travertine and glass that dominated a ridge of the aforementioned mountains, offering views without to rival those of the art within. Promises of French Impressionism had drawn us forth, driving us through the endless rooms of Renaissance religious artwork that the late oilman J. Paul Getty preferred—including, of course, prematurely aged baby Jesi.

“There’s a name for those little dudes, but I can’t remember it,” I said, nodding at another one of the proportional dwarves as we headed for the nearby exit. “They used to be all over the place in the Middle Ages.”

“Why? Was there a plague that made everybody forget what babies looked like or something?”

I exhaled something approximating a laugh. “No. Jesus was supposed to be a perfect being, so he couldn’t come out all needy and naïve. He had to be wise beyond his years from the start. He had to be perfect.”

“Yeah. Perfectly creepy.”

She opened the door for me, and we plunged into the searing sunlight of outside, exiting one of four spare, angular buildings in favor of an equally spare central courtyard clad in porous limestone. The courtyard, liberated from the surrounding urban sprawl, spanned the visible world, creating an interstitial purgatory less Hieronymus Bosch than Michelangelo Antonioni: sterile and lonely and vast.

No matter how much it may have looked like one, however, this place was no afterlife. In the afterlife, one likely didn’t struggle for breath, as I was at the moment. The schnitzel and stuffed grape leaves from the Israeli place we’d stopped for lunch bloated in my guts, shattering the illusion of inviolability as it squeezed the vigor of all creation from my scarred and atrophied diaphragm.

This wasn’t a new phenomenon for me. Once upon a time, I could breathe on my own. All the time. As my Duchenne muscular dystrophy progressed, however, I required ventilatory support overnight. And then during the day for a few hours. And then a few more. And so on, until my current schedule of three additional hours, three times a day.

But I was also a stubborn American, programmed for rugged individualism, suppressed emotions, and a hatred for all weakness. So I only ventilated in private. Beyond the relative obscurity of my home or minivan, I took my chances with hypercapnia and its mostly tolerable symptoms of headache, fatigue, and muddled thoughts.

From the outside, such masochism must seem baffling. Why would I, crumpled and cachexic novelty to all, care how I presented myself to other people? It would be like water worrying about its perceived wetness. More likely, I was trying to convince myself of something. That I wasn’t getting worse. That I wasn’t going to die. That, somewhere deep inside, I was still the same little blue-eyed boy who had walked the black sand beaches of Hawaii and fished the alpine lakes of the Sierra Nevada for the briefest of moments and taken it all for granted.

I never understood society’s aversion to taking things for granted. There’s no contentment in it. Better to pretend the status quo will last forever as long as you possibly can. Right up until the point you leave your ventilator in the car on the far side of a three-quarter mile tram ride and find that you desperately need it.

Sabine, looking as exhausted as I felt, collapsed onto a short wall for a quick rest and social media update. As she flicked through her phone, I glanced past her. The land fell away on the other side of the wall, revealing a terraced garden and then the entirety of the sprawl—a mosaic of well-organized cubes and haphazard garnish that paved nearly all the eye could see.

The toothy buildings of Century City rose in the medium distance, with the grasping skyscrapers of downtown well beyond. At the edge of perception drifted a hazy suggestion of the gossamer Pacific, remote to the point of obscurity, yet so much closer than the tsunami of revitalizing tidal lung volume that awaited me on the back seat of the van. I felt as stupid as I did inadequate for leaving the ventilator behind, but I wasn’t about to abandon the Getty because of it. Not until I saw me a Van Gogh.

Sabine snapped her fingers. “Homunculus,” she said, glancing up from her phone with a satisfied grin.

“Gesundheit,” I replied, forcing another breath and bracing against a world increasingly bled of color and sharpness.

“No, you dork. That’s what they call the weird Jesuses. It means ‘little man.'”

As she spoke, my eyes locked on a kid in a wheelchair with obvious Duchenne crossing the courtyard not far away. Check that. Two kids. One on either side of puberty. Brothers, no doubt. Puffy-faced and puffy-limbed like I had been at their age, before I emaciated into my current form–now more Charles Schultz than Peter Paul Rubens.

“Poor bastards,” I said.

“Who? The Jesuses?”

I nodded. “Everyone deserves a childhood. Martyrs most of all.”

The boys, surprisingly flanked by both parents, turned in our direction, and I fought the urge to hide, to spare them a glimpse at the specter of their future. I knew the life these two would lead, or at least the path that their debilitation would take, robbing them of everything they once were and could have been and replacing it with a terrified cesspit of traumas and regrets.

Growing up, I’d witnessed my destiny every three months in the silent, skeletal sentinels of the child muscle clinic. Now that I’d become that destiny, I felt only pity for my younger self. For these boys. I had become my fear. And theirs.

Sabine squeezed my forearm. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just getting old.”

“Me too.”

The boys drew nearer. Unable to escape any other way, I closed my eyes. If I couldn’t see them, maybe their passing wouldn’t be so bad.

“Forty years,” I said, shaking my head. “You know they stop keeping track of mortality rates for Duchenne at age twenty-four? Half of us are already dead by then, so I guess it’s not worth the hassle.”

She squeezed my arm harder. “But you’re not dead.”

“I know. And I feel guilty every day because of it.”

“Guilty? Why?”

“Like I said, half of us are gone by twenty-four. I’m forty. What have I done with all that extra time?”

“You found me.”

I opened my eyes. The boys were gone. Their parents too. But not Sabine.

“Yeah. I found you. A beautiful, able-bodied woman to love me and take care of me. I’m a god damn unicorn.”

She snorted, then stood up. “Come with me, Mr. Unicorn. There should be some Wheatstacks for you to eat in the West Pavilion.”

***

We headed into the appropriate building and blew through the first few rooms like in that old Godard movie, chasing the brass plaques as they ascended chronologically toward the mid-nineteenth century; there wasn’t enough time to see everything and I didn’t want to miss the good stuff. Story of my life.

I blame whoever first decided we should all live every day like it was our last. Carpe diem and all that. So much pressure. So exhausting. If I lived a single day like it were my last, I’d be too tired to leave the house for a week.

A sudden crowd announced the arrival of the Impressionism gallery. I skirted a slow-walker and darted through the congested opening, nearly colliding with one of the Duchenne boys making his way out. He didn’t look at me, and I returned the favor. We passed each other like those clichéd ships in the night. Two Titanics—one still chugging to New York, and the other already at the bottom of the sea.

His older brother followed, nearer the iceberg but not yet sinking, and I decided those of us with Duchenne needed a secret wave, like bikers sharing some dilapidated highway, though most of us couldn’t raise our hands anymore. Maybe a secret head wiggle would do.

There were barely 10,000 of us in the whole country, we brothers (and the rare sister) in disease. Why estrange ourselves from each other?

Inspiration struck me as I slipped past the second boy and I whispered, “What’s up, my brother?”

He either ignored me or didn’t hear, but his trailing mother must’ve seen my lips move because she smiled and mumbled a greeting. She knew what I was. So did the dad. I was a seer, and the news was all bad. Still, they had to be nice to me. If they were, it meant their own children might still know kindness in their debilitated future.

I had parents too–long-since divorced, but both still living—yet these boys and I were the three of us orphans, for muscular dystrophy is an orphan disease. It’s not common enough for a cure or treatment to be economically viable, so there isn’t one. In short, we’re not worth the effort. If only we had AIDS instead, our hope for the future might be something more than mere delusion.

We were literal orphans as well, despite our living parents. Like Mowgli or Tarzan, we’d all been raised by a species alien to our own. For no matter the love these Homo sapiens showed us, they’d never understand our kind completely—we, the Homo dystrophus. With our difference in lifespan, in presentation, in social interactivity, we were demonstrably “other,” and perhaps even deserving of our marginalization—like Neanderthal man, consumed by the fitter species until we were but broken threads in a wider tapestry. Ain’t internalized ableism grand?

Another breath and I was beyond the so-called family, deposited into the heart of the crowded gallery. I found an opening and cut right, stopping in front of one of several works by Claude Monet.

After a moment, Sabine appeared at my side. “Why are you looking at that one when the birth of Impressionism is right next to it?” she asked, motioning at a sunrise view of Le Havre painted in 1873.

But my eyes were locked on The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light, done twenty years later. I stared at the puffy, drab brushstrokes and wondered how many of the abbreviated, messy things streaked across the canvas. 10,000, perhaps? Discrete, yet all bound to the same repetitious, atrophied palette, and all working together to create the pale imitation of something holy to our pattern seeking brains.

I whispered the name to myself. Ruin. That was me—a ruin of my former self. A stained heap of marble going through the motions until I toppled into obscurity. Or perhaps it was pronounced “rue on.” Either would do for my purposes.

When I looked away from the painting, Sabine had moved across the gallery to check out Van Gogh’s Irises. As I turned to follow, the floor beneath me wobbled. No, not the floor. It was me.

I gasped for a breath that didn’t want to come. Sabine was too far away. There were people everywhere. Talking, walking, obstructing. The only opening was out, so I took it, veering through a doorway and into the elevator atrium.

The family was there. The mom saw me and smiled again.

“How old are you?” she asked.

The dad jabbed at the elevator button, keeping his eyes locked on a nearby gift kiosk.

“Forty,” I managed. “Today.”

“Congratulations.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. The world swayed beneath me. Stars wriggled across the room.

“It’s nice to see you out,” she said. “They won’t say anything, but I know the boys appreciate it.”

I glanced at the nearer boy. The older one. He winced, then stared at the top of his pudgy knees.

“Why?” I said, face flushed and heart thumping.

“You give them hope,” she said. She reached for my shoulder, then thought better of it. “Forty years old and you don’t even need a ventilator.”

My diaphragm forced an involuntary heave. What little color remained drained from the world. My vision tunneled. Air hunger crushed my spine behind my distended guts.

But I smiled anyway.

Probably best to keep up appearances.

##

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Shift

Think about a person who meant something to you; and by “something,” I mean at that time you felt like they were your whole world. They were the water in a gravitational pull with the Moon. The Earth tries to hold onto everything as the Moon tries to pull everything closer. Since water is always shifting and moving, the Earth is able to hold onto everything but its water. And so the moon pulls at it, and the Earth is constantly in flux. Alternating between high and low tides. So maybe that person was your Moon. Maybe they pulled you into their brilliant luminosity, and you bulged at the weight of that pull on one end and bulged at the weight of yourself at the other end. And you were a thing constantly shifting, just as the word “you,” depending on who you are speaking about and to, shifts.

***

I thought they were nuts. Perhaps you did too, at first glance. Their backs, bulbous and cratered like walnuts—like the landscape flying a mile above Utah—depressions that look almost whole and smooth, a tangible juxtaposition. When you turn them over, they are flat. Little stars carved into them. Think anise. A seed pod. I find its shape surprising and pleasing. I wonder aloud what they are and pocket a happy few.

But this was not a happy time, was it? Fort Bragg. Botanical gardens. You got the flu. And even before the flu: yours eyes, brown, had the cold wet of the sea about them, and your face, the pull of gravity. There was no light.

And maybe I knew this was a parting trip, something I needed, something that reminded me of somber and peaceful trips to the graveyard. I needed you gone, but wanted you near first—something I had to pocket before letting go.

The nameless seed pods are still a mystery to me. I look at them on occasion. They sit on a tray with my plants and accidentally get watered with the overflow.

***

We lay under the gentle pressure of a midweight down comforter—too hot for Chico—our skin warm and radiating. Us, tangled in sheet and thought. We talk about the coast. An upcoming trip.

I map the crow’s feet near your blue eyes with the tip of my finger. Like a car driving through the redwoods, I take the turns with care, think about the cargo, all it means to me, the three years and counting of building a life.

I mention the cookie-crumblers. There being a lot of them on the drive from Chico to Mendocino. You laugh, kiss me on the forehead (a stroke of genius!), and proclaim, “The what?!”

***

cookie-crumbler (noun): a hairpin turn of the road

etymology:

We folded into each other like socks in a drawer, but in the backseat of a tan 1991 Toyota Corolla. We lived an hour from the coast, but for three young girls and their parents, one hour slipped and stretched into eternity. When the hairpin turns begin after valleys swept with grass, under the watchful, almost sentinel gaze of giant redwoods—looming—a package of cookies sways on the dash in a pedantic fashion. Hitting the sides of the car that frame the windshield. Stopping. Sliding in the other direction at the next turn. Stopping. Repeating.

Dad, or is it Mom?, call the sharp turns cookie-crumblers. Us girls laugh from the sock drawer in the back. Take up the chorus, “Cookie-crumbler!” at each turn and carry the idiom with us, out and into the world, like something caught in the tide.

***

There is a photo of me and my sisters by the Pacific Ocean when we are little. We are on the beach facing the water and away from the camera. Waiting for the waves to crash at upon us. Waiting to meet them. And then to run away when they pull. With squeals of delight and rapture as our feet sink into sand and the water sucks and eddies at our ankles.

What unforeseen things lay at our feet in this still frame? How was I to know that feet in the sand at three or four would tether me to a place? I can feel it now. Pulling me in gentle susurrations. In what iteration of place will I come to greet the ocean, at nearly 32 years?

***

We talk the whole way. Four hours. We take a break at Ukiah and Redwood Valley. My hometown. The way there, I ask your histories. Take them in as I watch the road. Your stories tell me that the world asked you to do things with your hands while you wanted to do things with your mind. I empathize.

The valley is unusually foggy. We both comment that we like this: how sound dampens with the heaviness of the air and a sleepy calm prevails. We slip through it, on to higher ground.

I show you my histories.

Acting as a tour guide, I slowly drive through Ukiah and point out anchors of place. “That was the trailer park we lived in my first three years. Sunset-Something.” Or, “Oh, here! Here is the plaza I wrote about in that one piece. Where that stranger licked my face.” My timeline is not as neat and linear as yours. It is parsed by place.

I drive you down my old street in Redwood Valley. Pinecrest Drive. It is a private road, unpaved, and we are trespassing. Voyeurs of the past. I slow the car to a stop, and we take pictures. It looks different. A bigger fence fully encloses the space. A giant “D” rests at the top of the gate that guards the driveway, and I wonder what it stands for. It looks like they cleared the landscaping. I remember every bloom and leaf like it is a map of my youth. Have the trees thinned in the forest behind the house? I remember when they housed me.

***

We curl our toes into the sand. We look at names of strangers who wrote their names at low tide, curves and lines that will soon wash away as the tide comes in. It seems an ephemeral fancy to do so. Reminds me of William Carlos Williams, “Children pick flowers. / Let them. / Though having them / in hand / they have no further use for them / but leave them crumpled / at the curb’s edge.” We do not write our names. We cross a frigid stream to collect our own private corner of the beach. We walk out to the water and face it. Hold hands and wait for the waves to greet us. This could be a still frame from youth. Except the skies are not cloudy. And I am looking at this man. And I see him. And I see he sees me. And, by some small miracle, we are present.

We walk back to the car. Make sure our luggage is situated. That the plants we bought at the botanical gardens for our yard will not shift too much on the cookie-crumblers on the road home.

***

Going to the coast now holds a new meaning. A tender kind of hopeful meaning. A meaning I can hold in my hands and speak aloud my intentions to. It is no small wonder, but something vast that swells inside of me.

My love for myself, finally. My love for this man, growing. They tether me.

I think about the seeds we’ve planted and can name them: hope where once a hollow, a future exponential. The fact that we’ve planted them in the first place; who do we think we are? Us, who felt the heat of the soil in our palms and still dug in. Folded over the land in mindful heaps (is this joy?). Just look at how beautifully this garden grows.

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Share the Road

At the corner of Health Center and Health Sciences Dr. in La Jolla, California, there is a bright orange sign that states “Share the Road.” I had just exited the Moores Cancer Center after my third of seventeen radiation treatments for a patch of malignancy near my right eyelid. This was my second time in the ring with the big “C.” It wasn’t as life-threatening as the other, but reading this simple road sign somehow eradicated my fear. Like the proton beam that daily sliced through my cancer, it reminded me that I am not alone in this, nor any other aspect of my life, while I share the road with others.

The Rebecca and John Moores Cancer Center, at the UC San Diego Health’s La Jolla campus, is a brilliant building of sand-colored stone, aqua-colored tiles, towering glass doors and windows. When you enter the building, there is almost a feeling of arriving at a five-star hotel. A valet, with a smile, takes your car, and the front reception desk is staffed with welcoming guest relations representatives. People are swarming all through the complex, which includes other buildings, streets and parking lots. Large Torrey pine trees and brightly colored flowering shrubs divert attention from the capital letters—CANCER—on the building. Wheelchairs, bicycles, electric carts, Porsches, Mercedes, Range Rovers and old beater cars all swerve from one street to another, creating a blur that makes you wonder who is who and who has what.

Each morning as I wait for the technician to call my name, I sit in the radiation department’s waiting room that is large, bright and comfortable. The young dark-skinned woman who tends to the front desk smiles broadly and greets everyone as if each person has just arrived for the first time. Her hazel eyes never let on to the emotional and physical pain she must witness daily. Families who appear to have a loved one in treatment gather around her desk, sharing photos and stories, along with occasional laughs. Everyone, however, looks up to see who is coming out when the door to the inner sanctum opens. For the patients waiting—the hope is that it’s their technician, so they can receive treatment. For the families—a loved one who has finished treatment, so they can go on about their day. Each morning the door also opens, spilling out large groups of doctors, technicians, nurses, family. And one beaming individual in the middle of them. It’s graduation day for Patient X. Clinicians and family all gather around a golden bell on the wall, anxiously awaiting the patient to ring it with pride—marking the end of their treatment period and becoming the champion in the ultimate knockout round of their life. iPhones and such snap pictures. Tears flow. Clapping and hugs abound and, finally, all family members exit the department, hoping never to return. For many, that will be the case; for others, ringing the bell only signals the end of round one. The match is still on, and no one—nor any thing has been officially knocked out—yet.

***

Three weeks before starting my treatment, I was awoken at 6:50 am to the news that my sister had passed. I knew it was coming, and I couldn’t even cry. I was too tired from the constant care she needed over the past few months. I answered the phone with the only question left: “What time did she die?” I could tell my brother was taken aback, as his only response was, “Sorry, I was too upset to ask.”

On my last drive up to Newport Beach, to be with my sister the day before she died, I had left late enough to avoid the early morning crawl into North San Diego County and beyond. I was finishing up the last segment of the Serial podcast, hosted by Sarah Koenig, exploring the potential innocence of a man, Adnan Syed, who has been in jail for over fifteen years. He was convicted of killing an ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, while in high school. The weather as I drove up the coast to visit my sister was “picture perfect,” as my mother used to say. I couldn’t help but let my mind wander from the panoramic views of the glistening Pacific Ocean as I tried to picture this young man in jail, and the body of his girlfriend in a shallow grave. Neither ending for the young man or the girl was in any way picture perfect. Neither was the visual of my sister lying in bed, on her side with one eye open as she tried to mouth, “I love you.”

The board and care facility my sister spent her final days within was a nice residential-styled home along 16th Street, which was in the city of Costa Mesa, not Newport Beach as the facility’s brochure touted and, I guess, as I preferred as well. The home being in Newport Beach evoked, for me, an image of vibrant, albeit older, people in wide-brimmed hats—dressed in whites and yellows, living out their last days playing croquet, laughing and sipping iced teas on a sandy beach as they watched the sun slowly set in the western sky. Reality consisted of those same people, many dressed in stained pajamas, staring blankly at CNN on an aging wide-screen TV. Others tapped their feet to the imaginary music playing in their minds. Oxygen tanks littered the room, slowly delivering their last drops of life. There were no croquet matches and, certainly, no joyous graduation ceremonies signaling time to go home and about their lives. Only the television turned up full volume, drowning out the sounds of power-driven oxygen tanks and the chatter of Spanish-speaking caregivers in the background. Unlike the patients finishing their radiation treatments at the Moores Cancer Center, these residents have been knocked out and are just waiting for the bell to ring—signaling that their time on Earth has ended.

***

My first bout with cancer took place seven years ago. I was too young, but no one had told my prostate that. After getting a call from my doctor, who said he was “sorry” that I had cancer, I simply hung up the phone, walked into the kitchen and finished dinner with my family. The news didn’t hit home for me until I was well into my second month of exploring options for a cure. As a father, I wanted to make sure that I did what was needed to ensure my longevity. My son was ten, and I wasn’t ready, like any good parent, to give up on making his life a living hell! I also knew my husband wasn’t ready to take on that parenting role by himself. He had reminded me of that daily since 2001 when we adopted him. Being a prideful man, I felt screwed. I had spent the first half of my life pampering my body and enjoyed feeling sexy. My peacock feathers were molting. I could feel the walls closing in.

The ride with my family to the City of Hope cancer treatment center in the far eastern reaches of Los Angeles County felt like a scene in the movie, Dead Man Walking. I hadn’t killed anyone, but I did feel, however, that I must have done something incredibly wrong to deserve this punishment. After months of research, I was told that having my prostrate removed was the best treatment available, but all I had in my head were images of being sailed up the river to a penitentiary to serve out my last days. To a degree, getting my prostate yanked out of my body felt like a death sentence or, at a minimum, being sentenced to life. My sex life as I knew and loved was going to be over for a long time and, if the surgeon was having a bad day, maybe forever. As I walked into the center, I was expeditiously moved from the light and bright waiting area into the surgical unit where the sunlight died and so did my hope of leaving there the same as I entered.

***

I often think about Adnan Syed. The podcast left me with a lot of unanswered questions. Adnan was only eighteen years old when he was convicted. He was handsome, smart and well-spoken, but also a darker-skinned Muslim being prosecuted by lighter-skinned non-Muslims. The latter part may have doomed him, regardless of the crime. According to the charges, he bummed a ride from his ex-girlfriend after school, strangled her and buried her in the park. His best friend Jay, in a plea agreement with the DA, stated that he helped Adnan bury the girl but had no part in her murder. Adnan had informed his defense attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, about a girl who contacted him vouching that she knew he was innocent. Apparently, the girl, Asia McClain Chapman, had seen him in the library studying at the time the murder was taking place. Cristina never pursued the alibi, nor did she cross-examine a key witness brought in by the prosecution. One theory is that she was no longer able to concentrate on her cases due to declining health and personal financial problems, so she just blew it off. Unfortunately, she subsequently died, so no one can ask, or even post to her Facebook wall, WTF? 

If Adnan didn’t do it—then who did? Was he living out a life sentence that could have somehow been radiated or surgically carved out by a lawyer who did their job instead of saying “sorry” at the end of the trial? Bell has rung—you’re knocked out. Sorry! The good news for him, however, is that on March 29, 2018, Syed’s conviction was vacated by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. They stated that his legal counsel, during the trial, was ineffective because his original lawyer failed to call a witness whose testimony “would have made it impossible for Syed to have murdered Hae.”

I do wonder, however, regardless of guilt—what brought him to that point in his life? If he is innocent, was it just rotten luck or some sort of cosmic preordained karma that took his freedom away—like having one’s prostate yanked out, or being placed in Newport Beach’s senior version of the Hunger Games? There’s only one way out and regardless of the outcome—you’re not going to like it.

***

My sister’s illness wasn’t cancer related, but it was a death sentence. She went in and out of many similar UCSD medical complexes and City of Hopes like I did. She most certainly sat in many a waiting room hoping that the person coming through the inner sanctum door would deliver good news to her. Unfortunately, there was no special appeals court waiting to take a second look at her condition and tell her that maybe she wasn’t ill after all. She will not be coming through that door like Patient X. She will not ring the bell. In the end, she quietly slipped away and took with her a part of me. 

***

The drive back to San Diego, after my surgery at the City of Hope, was a long one. The traffic was heavy, and the stop-and-go action painfully cut into my freshly opened gut with each tap on the brake pedal. When I had left the hospital that morning, there was no celebration, no hospital staff to escort me from my room, clapping and offering hugs. Only an elderly gentleman pointing to the spot where a final signature was required on a long document, making me promise that I would pay the hospital, along with some paperwork describing months of recovery. I could almost hear my original doctor saying, “sorry!” They had simply done their job and done it well. I, in turn, had left a part of me at the hospital that would fundamentally change me forever. 

As we sped down the I-15 freeway back into San Diego, I was sleepy from the drugs that were still pumping through my system. It had been a long, quiet drive. I was feeling sorry for myself, and there were no podcasts to let my mind wander from my ill-fated circumstances to someone else’s. I remember smiling, however, as I thought about my family, including my sister, who had been there for me at the hospital. She didn’t let on to what was happening with her even though I now know her illness was starting to consume her body. I’m sure she didn’t want to worry me or to somehow cast a shadow over my recovery. At her memorial service, I wrote that “while she was dying she began to teach me, whether she knew it or not—and even whether she wanted to or not—that change is inevitable—but how we react to it isn’t.” 

The thing is, my perspectives on cancer, surgery, death, board and care facilities, family and even imprisonment have all fundamentally changed in the past seven years. How could they not have? Even the word sorry has taken on new meaning for me. Sorry, your sister died. Sorry, you got prostate cancer. Sorry, you ended up in jail due to a horribly distracted attorney. I wonder if anyone is really sorry or that is just the crutch word we use to protect ourselves emotionally. I would like to think that true sorrow still exists, and it’s not just a word society has taught us to use when none other makes sense.

As we merged from I-15 South to the 8 East transition, I got a glimpse, from the top of the concrete bridge, of that long road that leads from the Pacific Ocean to Phoenix, Arizona. The mood in the car had picked up a bit, and I was hopeful: we were less than a mile from home, and my recovery had begun. I had survived. My thoughts drifted during that last mile to the multitude of cars that were passing under me as we crossed over that bridge. I share the road daily with people who are on their way to prison, who will die that evening expectantly, who will find out that the cancer they thought was under control has again reared its ugly head. No golden bells will ring. No photos will be taken to memorialize the moment. There will be no clapping and no hugs. I wondered how I would react to their news in the future? Will I be distracted? Will I be enraged—looking for justice? Or, will I simply be like everyone else and say sorry. Sorry. So sorry.

##