I was walking along a hall at the weekly newspaper that first employed me one afternoon when I heard footsteps at my back.
I turned, and right behind me was one of the paper’s grand old women, comically creeping along, hands reaching, fingers curled, ready to seize me like the “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“Old age is creeping up on you!” she declared.
I laughed. More than 30 years have passed since that episode, and it still gets a chuckle from friends and family in the telling. From me, eh, not so much. Cass has since passed, but her prophetic words linger.
Of course, that’s to be expected. Stick around long enough. It happens.
What I didn’t see coming was the terminal cancer, and the unwelcome monkeys — too many to count — the disease has shifted onto my back.
In keeping with those nasties, here is a sampling of the challenges I face morning, noon and night — “a diminished thing,” but still fighting to carry out the thousand routines and activities that make up daily life.
For starters, there are the twice-monthly blood draws and chemotherapy infusions that keep me alive, but whipsaw me between thankfulness that Ann and I can afford the treatment, and gathering dread as the infusion days draw on, promising nausea, extreme fatigue and chemo memory fog.
Ah, memory! It’s not that I forget anything altogether. It’s that now I need an average of six seconds to recall the first name of the person in front of me, or to remember the books, writing and poetry I have loved and known word for word since I was a kid.
There’s also the constant problem of finding food I can stomach. This is important, as my tastes appear to be in a state of permanent flux. I may dig something in the morning and loathe it by dusk. Tough to plan around that.
Likewise, there’s the vital business of staying on my feet. No, it’s not booze or anything like that. Just poor balance that has sent me tumbling down the stairs three times, opening up my head.
Other issues drag me down, too. See, when you’ve got cancer, aging, and with God knows what else is happening inside you at the same time, definite answers are hard to come by.
Yet here’s what I do know: giving up, lying down, and just letting this monster devour me won’t do.
Struggling to overcome the crushing depression that had overcome him after his brother President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was heard frequently quoting the following lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”
In it, the idle, greying king of Ithaca, a restless spirit on a still throne, ruminates about about sailing once more in search of adventure, just as he did in the olden days:
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides…
That which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
While the great pitcher, Satchel Paige, didn’t offer specific advice on nerves, his well-known philosophy for staying young and healthy includes this quote: “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.”
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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.
