November 2005 to January 2007, Upstate New York

By Jessica Langan-Peck

Dad drinks this juice now, fills his Nalgene up to the top, and carries it around with him all day. It’s thick, sort of peachy-colored, with pulp floating on top. He leaves it out of the refrigerator, on the counter, because he likes it warm.

“This looks gross,” I tell him. He ignores me. Or does a little mocking dance with his palms up by his ears. It’s pomegranate and orange juice mixed with green tea — antioxidant city. I stand and watch him mix it together over the counter and make exaggerated faces. “What’s with this juice?” I ask.

“Well I read this study.” He holds a blunt finger over the top of the plastic container while he shakes. “Men who’ve had prostate cancer who drink pomegranate juice have something like a 50 percent better chance of staying cancer-free.”

I nod, and he looks up at me and widens his eyes behind his glasses. I stop bad-mouthing his juice.

I am pulling my pancakes apart with my fingers and dipping them in syrup, really sopping it up. It’s November, my junior year, and I’m home for Thanksgiving. I’m booking a plane ticket to Ireland and feeling terrified, alternating between listening to Irish folk and swallowing nausea when I think about the particulars.

Dad came to get me yesterday, and I wasn’t prepared, running around on campus with my dirty hair up in bobby pins, handing in papers, feeling two cold sores coming on my top lip. He leaned up against the wall in my cavernous living room with his arms folded until I needed him to carry my computer out to the car, and he was oddly quiet for the two hours home. Now I’m sitting, pushing my feet down into the grate of the heating vent.

Dad is on the couch, face turned toward the picture window, and he says, “Hey I need everyone to come over here.”

I get up and slouch over to the straight-backed armchair. My brother sits on the window seat. I didn’t notice Mom move to the couch, but she’s there now, face neutral.

The sun is heating up wide sections of wood floor and rug. Matt is staring at a scab on his knee. Dad doesn’t clear his throat or pause before he says he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He says it calmly and slowly, with his hands folded in his lap and a blanket over his knees.

He looks at all of us one at a time. The sun comes in. The feeling, the sucked-out breath feeling, is almost familiar, and what I say seems rehearsed too.

“No. No,” I say. I listen to my voice, and it doesn’t sound dramatic, just quiet.

“Yeah.” He nods and explains that, at midstage, it’s treatable, and that there are lots of options. He says survival rates are high.

Survival.

Matt is quiet and pale, almost imperceptibly pressing his lips together. I walk slowly up to my room and call Paul, and when I tell him, I’m whispering and gasping for breath. He has to keep asking, “What?”

I say “cancer” a little louder. I hope they can’t hear me downstairs.

We go to the mall as a family. My eyes feel wide and dry.

“Come on, Jess, it’s going to be OK,” Matt says when we’re picking up and putting down T-shirts in American Eagle. “Mom had cancer on her face, and it’s totally fine.”

I want to say, “That’s way different. That was slow-growing - no chance of metastasizing. That was outside, not in.”

Later, we talk again in the living room all together, sitting in the same places.

“There’s surgery, where they just go in and take your whole prostate out.” Dad keeps track on his fingers. “Then there’s radiation, which seems like it really sucks. Then they have this new procedure, where they plant some kind of radioactive seed in your prostate, and it’s supposed to kill everything.”

I’m impatient. They don’t know how far along it is. I hate that it’s just in there. He tells me to calm down. I tell him I’m not going to Ireland; he tells me that I certainly am - that I have to go, in fact. It is not a choice. I cry. I buy a round-trip ticket so I can come home if I need to.

“We were afraid you would react this way,” they say.

We go to a play with the family friends, smiling and bumping shoulders and laughing, and everyone is asking me about Ireland, and no one knows. Dad doesn’t want anyone to know, doesn’t want people to feel bad.

“I feel good,” he says. I find this hard to believe.

I go to my room to cry, cover my head with a pillow because you can hear every goddamn thing in this house. I go down and run fiercely on the treadmill, try to listen to the thud of my shoes and my headphones instead of the loud blank noise in my head.

After it’s all over, 12 months of clean tests later, he starts keeping track of things. He always wrote in a journal, but now he logs hours in categories like Animals and Money Work. “I want to know what I’m doing with my time,” he says. “I feel like I don’t know where all my time is going.”

He lost some time to the cancer, a few months while he waited for surgery and then recovered. But really, he lost that infinite sense that people have. He talks about being old more. He talks about his body falling apart. He wants to look at his lists and see results, tangible hours that he can hold onto or smell or taste. The cows. The chickens. Those bookshelves. He has a lot left to do.

Back in Ithaca, I fumble around. I sit in my room, on the floor with my knees up and my throat swollen. I am shaken. I’m embarrassed that I’ve spent so much of my life worrying about things that will never happen. Except some of them do.

I open the door to my room, go out into the living room, then back into my room. Meg is in her room across the hall. I’m not supposed to tell anyone, and I’m torn between this kind of loyalty to Dad and the fact that I’m going to go crazy soon if I don’t tell someone. Absolutely fucking nuts.

Months later, in May, I come home from Europe, and Dad is back on the bike. We go for a ride, and he says, “Jesus, you’re really going pedal-to-the-metal! I can’t even keep up.”

I look sideways at him. I used to tell this story to everyone about a time we went for a bike ride a few summers ago, and he rode easily alongside me, while I panted, and asked me questions about my life, not even winded. He’s 60, and he could kick my ass, I always said.

Now I shake my head at him and say, “Jor, you had major surgery a few months ago. You haven’t even been on a bike that long.”

“Nah, I think I’m just out of shape.” he says.

I ride slower. We swing into the driveway at the same time, then walk it off stiffly. “Does it hurt?” I ask him, pointing at his shirt, where the long scar is.

I missed it all, really. The night before the surgery, I had to stick my fist in my mouth so my roommate wouldn’t hear me. I curled in the small white bed and bit down hard on it. I was several thousand miles from Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, the one next to the green Susquehanna River.

On January 20, I paced around the flat, lay down on the teal rug with my ear right next to the phone, dialed the 15-digit calling-card number to get the hospital and then my mom. “I’m sorry I’m not there,” was all I could think of to say.

“He’s OK,” she said. He’s OK.

I kept seeing him in the LaGuardia Airport, standing against some plastic chairs with his hands in his jean pockets and his gray hair covered by a wool cap. His hair was long then, curling out from under the hat and around his ears. He waved.

I saw him that way while I talked to Mom. “What time is it there?” I asked. “Is he sleeping? Did they get it all?” I tried, but I couldn’t imagine him in the bed, in one of those gowns with a colorful design that opens in the back. I couldn’t imagine an IV stuck into his tough wrist veins.

On the first anniversary of his surgery, Dad wants to go shopping for a new kiln for the pottery studio and maybe get some dinner in Albany.

I say, “That’s a great idea! Can’t believe it’s been a year.” But I’m on my way out the door to do some last-minute errands. I have to get back to school early so I can get a jump on job applications. The next day I call and say, “How was it?”

“Oh, it was a little too snowy to go, so the missus and I just stayed here and cooked a nice dinner.” I think of them toasting to no more cancer, Corona against Shiraz. Probably chicken and walnut stir-fry.

A few nights later, I have a dream about him dying, having a heart attack while smoking. Then he comes back. There had been some mistake, and he is annoyed about all the miscommunication.

When I wake up, my chest is heavy, and it takes me a little while to calm down. I’m always shaken by dreams like this, even though I know they’re common and usually have nothing to do with death.

“But he came back though,” I say out loud in the shower. “So it’s fine.”

Jessica Langan-Peck mostly writes about relationships, with family or otherwise, because she’s always been fascinated by them. This particular piece is part of a larger collection of essays about her family members, who are wonderful and reasonably OK with being written about.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, August 31st, 2007 | Email This Post

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