I've Been Lately Thinking About My Life's Time: Contemplating the End

            

            

The sun rose through the windows of the Denver Terminal, finally starting a new day after the longest and most tempestuous day of my life.  Having not slept during my midnight run over the Rockies (which was good, as I was the driver), the news that I had a brain tumor was still sticky in my bedraggled head.  I hoped with the all-nighter, I would sleep on the flight down to Cancun. Unfortunately, Frontier Airline’s seats are specifically designed, if not to actually cause Sciatica, then to completely prevent any chance of sleep.  Loading the family into the back of a fortunately empty rear of the plane, I defied the stewardess’s unbalancing the plane warning to occupy an empty row by myself behind my kids.

Having some elbow room and time, I sat down to process all of this as best I know how, I wrote.  I started the message I wanted to send my family when it was time to share, I have always been a better writer than a speaker.  My wife stole glances at me here and there as I wiped my eyes repeatedly as I put pen to paper (or finger to Notes app).  The juxtaposition of my unsuspecting and excited children a few rows in front of me with the words I was typing out on my phone added to the surrealness of the events of the last two days. I was charging into an unknown junction between life and death with little knowledge of what to expect.  There was also an unexpected closeness to God.  Being deeply religious my whole life.  There was a side of me eagerly curious to see what was on the other side. I won’t lie, the lyrics “sir, I want to buy these shoes… if mama meets Jesus tonight” with self-modified wording tragically rolled in and out of my head until we landed.  I hate that song.

The decision to keep the tumor news in our pocket until the end of the Cancun vacation, lent two distinct flavors to the trip.  The first flavor was the time my wife and I were alone. We spent much of that time processing all of this together which included a fair amount of the planning for the family if I didn’t make it. After all brains can be a might bit particular and don’t enjoy being opened up for a lookie loo.   In my typical coping mechanism, I littered our family’s conversations with wildly insensitive puns and veiled head references.  With the kids not suspecting, no one caught on, but I was laughing, and Julie seemed to roll her eyes at me more often than normal.   You have no idea how many idioms and comments use the word head.  The second flavor of the trip was that the uninvited cranial golf ball triggered my “carpe diem” instinct by embracing each moment as if it could be my last.   Figuring if I died on that operating table next week, I wanted no regrets for not wringing out every moment on this trip with my kids. It helped that the place was amazing. I made the right call in coming despite the bad news. With that perspective, I tried to stretch every evening out on that trip. If a kid wanted to stay out, I stayed out. If a kid wanted one more swim, I jumped in. If we needed sushi in Mexico, we got sushi.

A couple of nights into our resort stay, we saw a notice for a movie on the beach that night. Sprawling into beach chairs on the sand, with Horchata and popcorn in hand, we watched The Greatest Showman under the palm trees with the ocean lapping in the background.  A fun movie would be a good distraction where I could suspend the uncertainty of my own reality.  That was short lived as the Million Dreams song comes on early in the movie. The pent-up emotions of the past few days and the fear of what all of this meant for the time I had left, finally poured out in a chest heaving cry which was masked by the dark beach and the noise from the blaring soundtrack.  Having most of my kids around me in such an idyllic setting, I yearned for more moments like this.  There were still plenty of unfinished dreams remaining for me in my life.

A particularly sobering moment came the day we visited the Tulum ruins, this was the day I was supposed to call and schedule my surgery.  I held back, letting my kids walk ahead with Julie, and hid under a tree to call my doctor’s office.  The surgery scheduler asked me to explain what surgery I needed as she didn’t have my records in front of her.  Having to say it all aloud while hiding from my kids made me feel like I was betraying them somehow and it made it suddenly feel all the more real.

I had a plan for telling my kids. Though I had them all together in Mexico, I did not want to tarnish that trip if I could avoid it.  I pictured a Father-Knows-Best moment where I sit all of my children down and reveal the ill news and then we could all cope together.   But alas getting all my kids in one place was like nailing warm Jell-o to a wall. I couldn’t even completely wait until the end of the trip. My Marine son had to run off to his monthly drill two days before the vacation was ending for the rest of us.  I was going to have to do this piecemeal.  As we drove to the Cancun airport at the break of dawn in a cruddy little rental, I broke the news to him.  I pictured myself being much more eloquent than I was; instead I awkwardly fumbled through it.  It caried a bit of a coming-out-of-the-closet vibe, without the kissing dudes part. My oldest son took it well and that encouraged me that this would not be as hard as I thought.  He agreed to keep it quiet for a few more days other than to share it with his fiancé.  With that preview, I put the pin back in the tumor grenade until vacation was over.

Despite being one of my family’s favorite vacations and having an ominous few weeks ahead, I was looking forward to the trip being over so I could address this challenge head on.  Thus far I felt as if I was fiddling while Rome burned, rather than addressing my problems head on.  I needed to feel like I was doing something, even though there was nothing I could personally do, other than plan for the worst, but hope for the best.

Seven days on this dream vacation (but for a little brain tumor) was over.  It ended, just like it began, with an overnight drive through the Rockies, this time with no semi fire.  The drive, like the first one, was heavy because this time, I needed to pin down my kids the next day one by one and tell them. Four tumor-reveals without the aid of colored confetti pops was not the making for a fun day.

Upon arriving home, I had to jump right into action, my second son was in college at BYU, 15 minutes north of my home. Like all of my other kids he had plans all that day, so after pulling into our driveway at 5:30 in the morning, I needed to drive him back to his place.  I used nearly the same script as I did with my first son with pretty much the same result.  He took it stoically and assured me that I would pull through.  Two down. 

The third one was going to be tough, my youngest daughter who was a Daddy’s-girl, so long as a “Daddy’s-girl” included being fiercely independent.  She is in a girls tackle football league and had a game that morning at 9:00 AM.  I had wanted to tell her after the game and then go out to lunch and talk all this out because I knew this would be toughest on her.  Unfortunately, she would be going home with her mother, whose home she’d be at the next week.  She had boy plans right after the game and she was intent on getting a move-on right after the game.  All of my efforts to making this a tender moment were swimming against the current of a teenage girl’s personal life; i.e. hopeless.  So, I pushed the easy-but-not-necessarily-tactful button; by literally grabbing her by the shoulder pads after the game as she was trying to run off to her mom’s car.  She was impatient because she had plans.   When I insisted, she stop for a moment and talk with me; her defenses popped up instantly and she went into worried-daughter mode.  We walked away from the field a bit.

“There is something we need to talk about.” I began.

“What?  What did I do? Am I in trouble” figuring she was being chewed out for something.   In her defense a good chewing out often began that exact same way.  The next line would turn the table on this conversation.

“I got my MRI results back last week,” I didn’t make it much further as she broke down right there.  This was the response I was dreading.  Putting my arm around her pads, I pushed through.  “They found a brain tumor in there.”

“No! No!  You can’t die on me. You can’t leave me. You can’t!” she cried.  Now up to this point, I had spoken to my neurologist for 15 minutes and my neurosurgeon 5 minutes about expectations and survivability.  Yet despite saying things like the tumor was in a “good place” and “highly operable”, they were rather non-committal as to the end results.  With the absence of contrary data, I extrapolated the data in the most favorable light I could get away with.  Lawyers are rather adept at this.

“I’m not going to die.  The tumor is in a good place and highly operable.   It looks to be a slow growing tumor.  My symptoms, those vision issues were seizures, have been pretty much unchanged for nearly 9 months.  So, it looks to be slow growing.  We got this.  I’ll be fine.”  I assured as best I could.

“You better be.”  She ordered.  “See, I told you to get that looked at.”  She gave me a big hug and cried herself dry.  Teammates, seeing her crying, slowly gathered around to comfort her.  I am certain they were wondering what kind of idiot father tells his daughter that news at a football game.  One mother also joined in telling her that a family member had had the same thing.  Later after my daughter was out of earshot, she let me know that though he survived he was never quite right.  Best keep those “assuring” stories to yourself, mam.

Promising I would not die, she went home with her mother.  That could have gone better.  Three down two to go.  Returning home, my 12-year old son hadn’t been picked up by his mom.  This was the one child I actually had the chance to sit down with and talk to. Yet despite, actually having that “moment” with one of my kids, he seemed completely unphased, like I had just told him we were out of milk.  A few days later when I asked him where he wanted to live if I died (the joys of a blended family), he shut me down saying “I don’t want to talk about this.  It makes me too sad.” It was then I realized his response was in the best of boy traditions of not acknowledging emotions and preferring to assume everything will workout. 

Lastly, I needed to contact my Norway bound missionary daughter via Facebook who was spending a few weeks in Wisconsin waiting for a visa.  Since communications with missionaries is limited to one day a week and she shared a SIM card with two other missionaries getting a hold of her was not going to be easy.  After a few Facebook messages and a call into her mission office, she called me on Facebook messenger. Again, the out of ordinariness of my request for a call tipped my hand and had her immediately on edge.  I had actually had a seizure while on a video chat with her a couple of weeks before, this seizure consisted of me stalling in the middle of the conversation and looking lost.  Concerning but not in imminent danger, she knew I was getting an MRI.    

“I have a bit of news about your old dad.  I got the results of the MRI back.”  She froze on the call waiting for the shoe to drop.  “It looks like they found a brain tumor in there.” She broke down right away.  I hated not being able to give her a hug. Just then, her two missionary companions materialized on either side of her on the screen to envelop her in the hug that I could not give. Pushing through tears, I gave her my best spin that it was a slow growing tumor and that I should pull through, despite still not having been seen by my neurosurgeon. Having conveyed and mitigated the bad news as much as possible, we ended the video chat.

What I failed to mention was that it was our last day together before she left that was my most ominous sign that things could go wrong. The day I sent her off was a beautifully picturesque moment as we tried to finish a puzzle we were working on as we listened to Loreena McKennitt in the middle of a sudden snow squall.  I actually thought at that moment that if something happened to one of us while she was gone, this was the perfect moment to end on.  I seemed to have had a disquieting number of those “moments” recently.

Finishing that call I collapsed out on my bed.  The combination of the new meds, the all-night drive, and the stress of having to come out of the tumor closet to my kids was draining. Getting up in the afternoon, I dropped a rather long text in my families group chat.  I did not want to face any more family in person with bad news and I am a better writer than I am a speaker.  Getting the news out quickly allowed my family to modify the presents for my birthday we were celebrating belatedly the next day.  I got lots of hats.

Having the emotionally hard part behind me, now came the part I was better at, planning and strategizing.  I had finally got my surgery date from the doctor.  Surgery would be Wednesday April 20^th, that gave me 10 days before my brain would be exposed to atmosphere (pro-tip here, they are not indented to be exposed to room air).  I spent that first full week tending to the administrative side of ones life being in peril or the risk of being a vegetable, this meant taking care of short term disability, a will, life insurance beneficiaries, work and church responsibility delegation.  Though hoping for the best, I knew I had to plan for the worst, this led to my refrain of needing to be ready to be dead on Thursday.  Not that I was all dooms day, feeling bad for myself.   But as my surgeon had said, “Brains are tricky things” and anything could happen.  What was most surreal was that never before could I pinpoint an exact day in the future where my life would be in a material level of danger (other than re-entering the dating scene at 40).

Having the important life-in-order aspect locked down enough, I wanted to plan some “last-meal” type activities, just in case.  I am sure many of us have wondered if you were given only a month to live, what would you do?  First on that list was to take my family on an amazing vacation somewhere tropical, by coincidence, I just happened to have such a trip booked the day I found out I had a tumor (which I found a bit ominous, wouldn't you?). With a vacation behind me, I then began to line up my “last week” activities.

My siblings organized a family dinner at one of the fancier restaurants in my neck of the woods, Magleby's.  Throughout the few weeks after I received the bad news, the song Poems, Prayers and Promises by John Denver kept running through my head. Magleby's on Friday nights has live music playing.  So as we were being seated at our table, the solo guitar player started singing right on cue: 

“I've been lately thinking about my life's time,

All the things I've done, how it's been,

And I can't help believing in my own mind,

I know I'm gonna hate to see it end,

I've seen a lot of sunshine, slept out in the rain
Spent a night or two all on my own,

…

I have to say it now, it's been a good life, all in all,
It's really fine to have a chance to hang around.”

            The evening already had a touch of a wake feel to it and though apropos, the song nearly pushed me over the edge. I fought back tears as we all got situated around a massive round table, feeling like songs and moments ringing in the last chapter of my life were following me around.

Having the doctor push the “off” button while inside my cranium was my primary concern, I was equally worried he might push the “nervous system off” button in there, limiting my motor skills. With that fear in my head, literally, I needed to slip in one last ice-skating session with my kids. While going through my divorce, I self-medicated with ice skating and music.  So I needed one more hit.  For that night my daughter, and fellow music lover, put together a FUT playlist. (Forget Ur Tumor). An eclectic and touching set of songs, featuring “I Will Survive,” “Cancer, “Hurt,” “Shadow of the Day,” and “Stay Alive.”

                This left me with one last evening the night before my 5:30 AM surgery report time.  Regardless of how all of this all would end up, we needed a party.  I made tacos (with extra guac).  If I am going down, I’ll be going down eating tacos.  Dinner being complete.  I wanted to give the kids a chance to be involved, so I put them in charge of the head shave.  This actually became one of the most painful parts of the entire endeavor.  My daughter having never used clippers, seemed to confuse it with an Epilady and tried pulling my hair out by the root.  My Marine son, well versed in the way of clippers, came to the rescue and helped cut an attempted mohawk.  It didn’t quite work, so we completed the job and went full cue ball.

                My evening plan was to finish up with a campfire in the backyard.  With a light rain falling and the weight of the coming morning baring on me, I was ready to call it a night without the fire.  Just then we hit a break in the weather and we lit up the fire.  As we sat around the fire, I pulled up my John Denver playlist (a campfire tradition) and of course, the first song out of the gate was Poems, Prayers and Promises.  Yet there sitting around the fire that night with my kids around me enjoying the warmth of the fire on my unfamiliarly cold head, the other lyrics sank in:

The changes somehow frighten me, still I have to smile,
It turns me on to think of growing old,

For though my life's been good to me there's still so much to do,
So many things my mind's never known.

     Despite the twists and turns, it has been a good life, all in all and if I cashed it in the next day, I could hardly say I was cheated.  And a lot like old John, contemplating some of the more “poignant” moments of my life around a campfire, it’s been a rich life; I’ve I traveled the world, slept out on a Caribbean beach, spent two years in Outer Mongolia, lived up among the clouds in the Rocky Mountains, climbed the Great Wall of China, loved, lost, and loved again, and most importantly I had just eaten tacos with these amazing kids sitting with me around a campfire who managed to make shaving their dad’s head the night before brain surgery a party with laughs, love and hope.

 

While I continue to love writing, my fine motor controls took a beating after brain surgery, so writing this has been an adventure as typing is tragically hard, so I thought I’d include an unedited paragraph of what my typing looks like before editing:  I truth I hae never been a strong yper but this is next vel bad trying to get all of my workds on pateper, particualry because my speling is horrbie to star tiw hand I seen tm push the spacebar and weird time swhn  not inended or I miss pushing sertain of intended keys  or just fire anoff an push ekeys randomly. So forgive typo when you sseone.

-Breettt  (I literally have misspelled my own name dozens of times over past year - and this was not intentional)