Young, athletic, cross-country coach, middle
school science teacher, referee, Mariners fan, dad.
It
was late spring 1989 and my father was 39 years-old—still rising to the peak of
his life. No one expected anything
different from him. He was the handsome,
idyllic leader of a happy family living on the Olympic Peninsula. Our well-kept lawn framed a beautiful
vegetable garden, carefully weeded and loved, teeming with vines and blossoms
that would become dinner all winter long.
Baseball
season had just begun and, outside of his family, Dad loved nothing more than
to watch his beloved team attempt not
to lose a game. In those days, we didn’t
win much, but there was no team with more heart than ours. We had a new pitcher, Randy Johnson, and
although we didn’t know much about him, he was tall and people remembered us
for that.
That
spring, Dad started having trouble breathing.
He had always been a healthy guy and proactive about going in for
check-ups, teeth cleaning, eye exams, and the occasional mole-removal. But this was something new, or rather, very
old. He hadn’t experienced breathing
difficulties since his days as a child in central Montana, when his lungs gave
up after thirty degrees below zero. No,
this wasn’t the same. It might have been
a cold, or the flu, but he didn’t feel
sick, and as week after week went by, nothing seemed to change.
I
remember that day, driving the old Ford pickup with Dad and sister to the
hospital. He assured us that the x-ray would
show that he had something called “pneumonia.”
This, he explained, would be gone before we knew if, after only a few
rounds of medicine. So, we played in the
waiting room, reading each other funny stories, eating carrot sticks, and
molding things out of our colored modeling clay. When he finished, Dad came and got us, still
smiling, but worry-lines that I hadn’t seen before creased around his forehead and
the corners of his eyes.
We
went to the movie store that night—a very
special treat, as Mom was one of those “kill your TV” crusaders. With popcorn and grape pop in hand, we sat
down to “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” while Dad and Mom quietly talked
in the bedroom. If we had been listening,
we would have heard Mom’s soft sobs while Dad rubbed her back and reassured
her, or tried to, that everything would be just fine. He had been diagnosed with “Non-Hodgkin’s
Lymphoma,”—cancer of his lymphatic system—and had an inoperable, softball-sized
tumor settled between his lungs and heart, pushing them out of the way.
Over
the next few days, things moved very quickly.
Grandma came from Montana to stay with us while Mom and Dad visited the Virginia
Mason Hospital in Seattle in order to develop a treatment plan. Little did we all know, but Grandpa would be
diagnosed with stomach cancer only a few weeks later. Still, at this point my sister and I knew
nothing and were just pleased to have Grandma there as yet another special
treat. To us, life was improving
daily. We had never had so much junk
food, TV time, or fun visitors in all our lives, and we had a hunch that gifts
were just around the corner.
Mom
and Dad came home the next day, looking tired, especially Dad. His face was a little green, and he wouldn’t
eat much but he still had his big bear hugs for both of us. Then, with Grandma and Mom in the room, he
sat us both down and explained everything that was going on. He left nothing out, because he knew we had
strength enough to handle it, but he worded everything as gently as a child’s
heart could understand. We knew the word
“cancer,” from library books and the news, but we knew nothing of chemotherapy,
tumors, or the lymphatic system. Then he
unbuttoned his shirt. On his chest, just
above his heart was a long scar, stitched shut—maybe the size of my hand.
“Did
they take out the cancer, Dad?” I asked.
He shook his head and explained that if they took out his tumor, his
heart and his lungs might get hurt. So
the doctor opened him up, took a good look, and sewed him shut. It all seemed a little silly to me to have an
operation that accomplished nothing.
But, I supposed, there is only so much one can see from a fuzzy x-ray,
and there is nothing quite like the real thing.
While I felt scared, I was also very interested in the medicine of it
all. I liked the idea of looking inside
someone’s chest and seeing a world I knew only from the World Book
Encyclopedia. Still, I didn’t think I
would ever like to look inside my Dad’s chest.
There are some places even the most inquisitive mind won’t go.
Spring
turned into summer, and Dad’s cancer treatment was in full swing. Almost overnight, the symptoms started. Normal canker sores turned into ten, then
twenty, and thrush spread throughout his mouth, making it impossible to eat and
even harder to talk. But even thrush
couldn’t affect his smile. One night, I
woke up with the flu and ran for the toilet, expecting to be alone in my
misery. There was my dad, hunched and
sweating, pale and tired, sitting where I should have been. I
could handle it. I had thrown up plenty
of times in my life, but this was something that I didn’t want my dad to
handle. He didn’t need to be there. He didn’t need to feel sick. I could do it for him. So we sat there all night long, one at the
toilet, and one with a bucket, and kept a tally sheet of who did it the
most. Funny, how even in our worst
moments, the Leinart competitiveness and love of the game came through, and we
actually enjoyed ourselves. Or at least Dad made it seem like fun, though
I don’t know how he truly felt.
Though
tired and weak, Dad never let life change much.
We still went to the movies, walked on the waterfront trail, fed the
horses around the corner from our house, and spent plenty of time at the
library. And when Mom’s back was turned,
we even got to go to the gas station for corn dogs on Saturday—something her
wheat germ-loving soul would never have tolerated. And Dad, tired and pale, never missed a day
of school. He scheduled all of his
treatments to be either in the evenings or on the weekends, so that he would be
fresh for his students, to teach them the Punnett square and poke his finger
for blood-sample slides under the microscope.
Symptoms,
though awful, were tolerable. But maybe
I’m wrong, because we were not the ones that “tolerated” them. Dad
got thrush, Dad gained weight from
his steroids, Dad threw up, Dad got tired and sweat through his
sheets every night. It was not us who was “tolerating” anything. But we felt that we were. We honestly thought that we had all the
symptoms along with him and were there as a team. And, I suppose, that’s the way it has to be
if a family can survive cancer. But one morning, it got to be too much for
me. Dad had gone off to school in his
usual routine, and Mom called me into the bedroom. She was changing the sheets—as she now did
daily—and pulled out a lint brush, handing it to me. I looked at the pillows; and there in the
crease where my dad’s head had been, was a handful of hair. Dad had explained that this would happen, but
it had been several months, and his dark brown hair and mustache that made him
look like Magnum PI, had remained thick and full on his head. I thought maybe we had dodged a bullet, and
no one, outside of our family, would ever need to know that Dad was sick. I couldn’t handle it if people teased him. After all, when Josh Butler got leukemia and
lost all of his hair, kids started asking a lot of questions. I never asked him a single one. I knew that he felt sick, and tired, and just
like my dad. I left Josh alone. But this morning, Dad’s hair had begun to fall
out. There was the evidence right in
front of me, and I was being asked to nonchalantly wipe it up. Seriously? Just like that? But I did it.
I didn’t let the tears fall because Mom had to be strong, so I did
too. Only my teddy bear saw my tears,
and it was soaked through.
Though
I read books, I never really understood “cancer.” After all, from what Dr. Widen had told me,
each cancer had its own name. There was leukemia,
lymphoma, melanoma, neuroblastoma, and on and on. So what was this “cancer?” Is it like calling the food we eat “supper,”
when it could be meatloaf, grilled cheese sandwiches, or tuna noodle
casserole? Or was it like music? We listened to classical, big-band, folk, and
rock and roll at our house, but I suppose they are all “music.” Still, I couldn’t wrap my head around the
individual diagnoses of the term “cancer.”
At seven years-old, there is only so much your brain can do. That being said, I didn’t understand. All the books I had read were either too
dumbed-down to a child’s level and spoke of things like “when a flower gets
sick, the sun and rain make it better,” or were so full of adult medical jargon
that I had too many questions and my poor mom didn’t know the answers. Of Keets and Shakespeare she could answer
anything; but of this, she didn’t know much.
So, over time, I developed my own, misinformed theories, the worst of
which devastated my dad.
Growing
up, I had always been “daddy’s little girl.”
For whatever reason, I shunned dresses, dolls, and the color pink, in
order to play in the mud and do anything that my dad did. He and I were inseparable from my birth, and
the only time we spent apart was while he was at work. Even then, at three or four years-old, I
would miss him terribly, so Mom would rub Old Spice on a pillowcase and I would
carry it around all day to remind me of him.
He took me on class field trips, to his Kiwanis meetings early in the
morning, and on basketball tournaments.
Even at two years-old, I could spend the whole day with him and never be
lonely or tired. But then cancer came to
my house, and I didn’t understand. Dad
got sick, then Grandpa got sick. I knew
that my mom’s mother had died from cancer, and with each headache or
stomachache, I thought I would die, too.
My folks always talked with my sister and me about what it was to have
cancer, how it made Dad feel, and how it affected us. But no amount of explaining would convince me
that I couldn’t catch cancer from Dad. I
was so afraid that it was contagious and that I would “come down with cancer,”
that I stopped touching him all together.
I wouldn’t hug him, I wouldn’t hold his hand, I wouldn’t kiss his
cheek. I still loved him dearly, but at
a distance. This was the man with whom I
“roughhoused” every night after dinner, with whom I rode cardboard-sleds down
the hill at the high school track, and with whom, I secretly read “Shoeless
Joe” and “Lonesome Dove” before bed each night.
And now I could only look at him and see sickness. I knew he was the same person, and that he
loved me, but I felt that he couldn’t protect me. The big, strong coach that had always pulled
me out of the way of danger, now was
the danger. He pleaded with me to come
sit with him and read stories, or play “goop” (cornstarch and water) at the
dinner table, but I couldn’t. I
wouldn’t. And he never cried either, at
least not in front of me. But I think he
did sometimes.
For
whatever reason, the one thing I didn’t fear doing with my dad, was playing the
piano. Our old Hardman passed hands from
Great-Grandma Daw to Grandma Leinart, to Dad when he was a boy, and then to
me. Seth Thomas tick-tocked a steady
rhythm that, in my imagination, protected me from the cancer. Music protected me. It made me stronger, and wiser, and wrapped a
sheet of cool hands around me. Grandpa
taught me “Heart and Soul” as my very first piece, and I would like to think
that I had much improved by age seven, though that is doubtful. But Dad and I would play simple duets on the
weathered keys, stopping only to pull on a sticky D. For Dad’s heart, and my fear, these times
pulled us through and let us know that there truly would be an end to all this,
one way or another.
During
the “cancer years” money all but disappeared.
We didn’t have a lot to begin with—Dad being a teacher and Mom staying at
home with us girls—but penny-pinching was the name of the game in the Leinart
household and we never went without. But
no amount of wishing or insurance can cover the cost of saving someone’s life,
or attempting to. I don’t think either I
or my sister noticed the overall belt-tightening. My folks carefully made do with home-made
toys like rubber-band guitars and yarn dolls, and we always had plenty of paper
grocery bags to do our vibrant “water paintings.” Although these disappeared as they dried, we
knew the bag remembered what they looked like, even if no one else did.
I
think my parents worried about Christmas that year. Fortunately, our extended family goes on for
miles, and when someone can’t, someone else always can. Grandma and Grandpa, though they were dealing
with things, as well, had plenty of money in the bank and made everyone feel
like kings. We went to Fort Benton that
year and, in the burning glow of Grandma’s “tinsel only, no needles” Christmas
tree, we opened more gifts than we had ever had before. I think about half of what I opened ended up
being Barbies—something that I would definitely be swapping for a baseball mitt
later on. Mom and Dad had never gotten my
sister and I Barbies before. I’m not sure
if it is the whole idea of body image, the fact that they are not based on any
children’s book (a must for my mother), or just that they are plain
useless. But no mind, my favorite gift
that year came from Mom and Dad. Using a
library book as a reference, they had built me a violin out of wood, rawhide,
and real strings. They had even soaked and bent the wood for a
bow. I had begged them for three years
for a violin. I knew that the violin in
the window downtown cost one-hundred dollars, and my pennies never seemed to
get that high. So here I was with my
very own—albeit unique—violin. I don’t
know that the rest of the family appreciated my new toy, but I made sure they
all got a concert before dinner.
Love
and support are funny things when you’re going through something hard. While Dad was sick, everyone tried their
hardest to make up for anything that they felt we were lacking. Aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, and
neighbors poured on the extra love. I
found this funny, because it wasn’t love that we were lacking. Our family loved each other more than we ever
had before. We were learning how strong
each one of us really was. I learned
that my sister—who was pale and skinny, and I always thought of her as “feather-like”—was
a pillar of strength. When Mom and Dad
weren’t there to protect me, she grew to a giant and stood in front with her
arms out wide, shielding my heart from everything in the world that could hurt
me. She read to me when Mom and Dad
couldn’t, she helped me bake cookies, she brushed my hair, and she chased me
around the yard. Those were her “mom
years,” and though she was only eleven years-old, I saw her with an Amazon-like
quality. So I always felt, amidst the
smothering, over-nurturing, nearly breast-feeding quality of the rest of my
family, that I was just fine. I had
everything I needed, thank you very much.
At
seven years-old, I felt as grown as I would ever be. Certainly, I wasn’t a baby anymore. I could walk myself to the bus-stop, I could
make a bologna sandwich, and I had several unwanted “grown-up” chores. But as the rest of the world knows, at seven,
I was a baby. No one in the first grade needs to know the
meaning of “responsibility,” at least not on any significant level. I did my best to quell that notion, and take
care of my family. But I suppose, in any
“hero child” role, there is an element of loneliness. I had plenty of friends at school, around the
neighborhood, and even a pen pal or two.
But if my little friends did not have a sick father or mother, or even a
sick aunt or two, there really wasn’t much to talk about. I had other interests in my life, but all of
them were permeated with the diagnosis.
I like baseball, but my dad has cancer.
I want to build a fort, but my dad has cancer. Happy birthday! But my dad has cancer. Going to slumber parties with my little
friends showed me their perfect lives with their perfect parents, toys, and
pets. I wasn’t asking for much; I didn’t
need American Girl dolls, or video games.
But I needed my dad to be well, and then I would figure the rest out.
Each
week or two, our family attended a cancer support group called “Operation Uplift”
above the eye clinic. I’m not sure if it
was meant for children to attend, but we always went. Sometimes adults were sick, sometimes kids
were sick; but it seemed that every time, someone was missing from the time before. Mary and I didn’t dare make friends, because
they were sick friends. We already had sick at our house, we didn’t want anymore. Plus, if our friend died, that meant that our
dad could die, or would die. So, no, we didn’t want any friends,
“uplifting” or otherwise. But each
session led to a family talk explaining where so-and-so went from last
week. After a while, we learned to stop
asking.
Much
of the time while Dad was sick and away at the hospital, we stayed with classmates
and family friends. Our relatives all
lived far away and came as much as they could, but it wasn’t enough for
cancer’s schedule. This meant that we
always kept a sleep-away bag packed and ready for doctor days or
emergencies. I was never one of those
kids that loved sleepovers. The concept
rang well, but as soon as bedtime hit, I longed for my squeaky little bed with
my books, blankets, and teddy. I never
dragged teddy along or my little blanket made by Grandma Swenson, for fear they
would get left and then I would never sleep again. So I laid there awake in strange bedrooms all
over town, counting the minutes until I would be home. Usually, if my friend had a big sister, my sister
came too. It being a small town,
everyone knows everyone, and there are children in all shapes and sizes for
matching up. But on the off chance that
we hit up a one-child family, then I would be all alone, making up stories
about the little people who lived in the popcorn ceiling as I lay there awake at
night. Inevitably, loneliness set in and
planned on staying a while. I had always
felt that my imagination left no room for loneliness. I had imaginary friends, stories, other
lives, and ghosts in my closet, all nestled away in my thoughts, just waiting
for a rainy-day moment. But over the
long months, I cycled through the same old thoughts of owning a pony, marrying
“Bob Farmer,” living in a coral reef, and flying away, over and over
again. Sadness can dry up even the most
active imagination and leave it crumpled like an old raisin. I had to come up with a plan or I’d go
crazy. That’s when I started talking to
God.
To
me, God was the best of invisible friends.
I had been to church and knew all the Bible stories by heart from the books-on-tape
I got at the library, but I felt that what I knew about God and what He knew
about me was special, and outside of everyone else. I told God about my good days and bad days, I
sang to Him, I wrote Him stories and jokes, and I thanked Him when we got pizza
or hamburgers for dinner. I knew He was
strong and protective of me, and I knew no matter how much I begged, He had a
plan for my dad that didn’t hinge upon anything I had to say. I wasn’t
afraid of God, thus never bound to be a Catholic, and I told Him so when I was
angry. I’d yell at Him or complain to Him
about Him, and all the while I
distinctly heard Him laughing from very far away. God was my
secret and my safe place. I felt selfish about Him and didn’t share Him
with anyone. I figured that He was
designated to me, as my helper, and so should not be bothered to visit with
anyone else. Again, laughing. And so it went on for many months in many
homes, that God became my mom and dad, when they were away. And I was okay with that.
Over
time, after many rounds of treatment, CAT Scans, check-ups, what have you, my
dad started to get better. His tumor
shrunk from a softball, to a baseball, to a golf ball, to nothing. And one day, Dr. Widen said “It’s time to go
home.” Dad was in remission from the
thing that held us so tightly for over a year.
Check-ups were weekly, monthly, yearly, and one day, gone. On that last check-up, Dr. Widen, now old and
wizened, showed me the crayon drawings from all those years ago, that decorated
his office. My seven year-old hands
exuded happiness even in time of fear and sadness. There I was, a little pillar, myself. Was I stronger then, than I am now? It would seem so.
Dad
never had a bad check-up, and never got lymphoma again. Grandpa healed, too, and proudly, they showed
each other their scars. I learned to hug
my dad again, to play catch, to drive a car, and eventually left for college, got
married, and had a child of my own. But
my old dad still talks to me daily, and we never forget what cancer was to us
as a family. The scars are still there,
physically, mentally, good, and bad. I
have never, yet, been able to sleep alone in a strange house; but to this day,
I have never stopped talking to God. I
am a little less selfish and have learned to share Him with the rest of
humanity, but I still think He likes me best and knows me better than anyone
else. My fears have changed over
time. I am not afraid now, and will not ever fear cancer. As I grew into a woman, I knew that, take me
or leave me, I am stronger than a diagnosis.
Cancer riddled my family in the form of skin cancer, breast cancer,
lymphatic cancer, thyroid cancer, stomach cancer, and throat cancer. It might happen to me, it might not. I really don’t care, because I know how to
fight, and I’m better than you, Cancer. But
if you come near my family, only then
am I afraid of you, Cancer. Take my
legs, my arms, my breasts, my brain, but leave my family alone because I am the
strongest.
In
later years, it was discovered that pesticides caused lymphatic cancer. Having a wheat farm in Montana, we were all
too familiar with pesticides. Apparently
those “family get-togethers” of piling into the grain truck, driving up to the
wheat, and pouring poison down gopher holes, was not the best decision. My mother makes all her own household
cleaners and weed-killers now, and refuses to buy anything with a label. Dad is retired and substitute teaching in the
Port Angeles School District. My sister,
Mary digs up history, as an archaeologist on the east coast, And me? I am here writing to you. So I guess we healed up just fine. Tragedies and joys have come and gone in our
lives, but strength remains despite all.
I suppose we have cancer to thank for that, but I don’t think I ever
will.
