WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE

Legacy building in oncology signifies a preemptive strike against the impermanence of our broken bodies. Patients facing finitude make a conscious effort to leave an indelible impression on their families, long after the creases and indentations of their wisdom-filled heads have disappeared from vacated pillows.

I recommend such deliberate memory-making and knowledge-imparting to the terminally ill to restore some locus of control, to remind them that, though the present is fleeting, they still have power to shape the future.

If you will permit me, dear reader, I would like to practice what I preach, and do the same here for my own children.

To Emma: forgive the cliché but you really are wise beyond your years, and I suspect your sagacity will always stay a few enlightened steps ahead of your chronologic age. Walk wherever your brilliant mind and sweet servant heart lead you. Know you are pluripotent as the most protean seeds in the core of your being, blessing you to blossom from green stems of good cells.

Please be patient with your brother, who has not been quite so fortunate with his roots (the shrewdness conferred upon you by your second X chromosome is an entirely different matter, about which I suggest you have a quiet word with your mother & grandmothers; you may discover why no one ever talks about “a man’s intuition”).

To Alan: I am so sorry to have given you “the tummy troubles” which have already begun to bother you in childhood, your own special brand of growing pains. However, in your resilience, I can already discern that your spirit is willing where your body is weak. That robustness will keep you grounded through the thousand natural shocks your flesh is heir to.

I may be better poised than others to know what you will go through, son. But please do not overuse me as a benchmark. Though we share a mutation you are a unique person, and my path – however long or short it proves to be – ought not to define your own. You do not have to be borne ceaselessly back into the past. Rather you can and should forge your own way.

Attend more to keeping your path straight and narrow than to estimating its length. At best, guessing the number of your days will send you on a fool’s errand, squandering precious time on the earth you tread; at worst it will lead you to stumble with the missteps of self-sabotage.

When I was in middle school there was a quarter-mile track outside that we had to run during gym class. Even now it remains my gauge for distance. I picture it in my mind’s eye, then unbend it as if mentally straightening a paperclip, laying it down along my path to estimate how far I need to go on foot.

Similarly, I’ve used my Dad’s longevity (or lack thereof) as a measure of my own mortality. He died at 49; therefore, I have never expected to reach fifty. But this is faulty, maudlin logic which has a funny way of justifying itself. You may become a lesser steward to your body once you’ve convinced yourself that it is your fate to be short-lived, which then might bring about the very premature demise you misconstrued as destiny.

In spite of the Psalmist’s optimism, we are not promised “threescore years and ten”, and certainly not “fourscore years … by reason of strength”. Your grandfather called cancer a midlife crisis that could prove closer to his life’s end than its middle. He was, absolutely and tragically, right.

Take it from this false prophet that there’s no way to know how long we have. The key, my son, as Kipling urges us, is to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.

Now, some advice for you both: because your Mom and I were only children, we marvel that two such different personalities could emerge from the same parentage. Thanks to your occasional squabbles, sibling rivalry is no longer foreign to us. However, in many ways, having had solitary upbringings, we envy your inimitable kinship, so take care of each other.

I will also ask that you be kind to your mother. Having just lambasted life expectancies as truly unknowable, I still have every reason to believe she will outlive me. It is not uncommon for wives to outlast their husbands, and in our case my genes are demonstrably more flawed than hers. It is certain that she would cope better with my absence than vice versa. In the relatively brief intervals when we are parted by travel I realize just how lost I am outside of her immediate presence.

It is not practicing false modesty to say that I always thought she was the better parent by far. As you will see when you too become grown-ups, her skill set extends far beyond the study of pediatrics to which she has devoted her career; she can care for adults just as capably and compassionately as she can for children.

And as much as I admire her mind, I am even more enamored with what William Butler Yeats called his beloved’s “pilgrim soul”. As the son of a classicist, I grew up immersed in mythology, and when I met your mother in high school I must admit I was first struck by her beauty, as captivating as Helen’s. In The Iliad the Spartan queen is introduced by a breathless string of superlatives to emphasize her ageless loveliness – “brows like lapis lazuli, eyes like bowls of marble” – and I could similarly run out of adjectives trying to put my stunning wife’s looks into words. At the risk of my sounding superficial, she remains the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen. Racing home at the end of my longest days at work, I simply cannot wait to be greeted by her smile, which never fails to be a sight for these sore eyes.

It is only over the years, though, that I’ve realized she is also as patient as Homer’s other female protagonist: Penelope, the bride of Odysseus, who waited two loyal decades for him to finish his circuitous voyage. When she vowed on our wedding day to remain by me “in sickness and in health” I don’t think she could have envisioned that her groom would share the fate of her late father-in-law. But through all the seasons of our marriage – many bright and joyful, but others darkened by illness – she has never once left my side when I needed her. I so dearly hope you each find someone who cares for you as deeply and unconditionally as she has for me.

Be careful with hearts, of others and your own. But also risk vulnerability from time to time. Fear becoming insensate more than you fear sorrow. You have seen me come home looking sad. I do my best to mask it from you but sometimes my work makes me cry. That said, I worry about numbness more than I dread the pain of repeated bereavement.

When you love someone you enter a social contract with an expiration date. It means that, one day, you will no longer be able to see them in the flesh. But that does not mean they are completely gone. You don’t have to see if you truly believe; that’s what makes it belief.

You never had the chance to meet your grandfather Alan but that doesn’t prevent you from knowing him. He wrote a book too. I heard him do it. My bedroom was adjacent to his office and many evenings he would retire to his study to write. The reason this process was audible was that your granddad used to write on a machine called a typewriter. He did this even when he was tired & sick (and presumably also sick & tired). I could tell the nights when he felt most exhausted because the pace of his keystrokes would … slow … to … a … crawl. And yet he wrote into the wee hours, his son tucked under the covers next door, eavesdropping on his inspiring industriousness.

Part of his legacy involved leaving that something others, including you, his then-unborn grandchildren, could treasure long after the author himself had departed. His book Between Cross and Resurrection is a profound meditation written in the shadow of the valley of death. One day, when you are old enough, I suggest you read it.

Meanwhile, in his near-tireless scholarship, there is already a lesson to be learned about persistence and diligence: work hard at what you believe truly matters, even (especially?) if you don’t see immediate dividends. Aspire to be more than conquerors; be bricklayers. Structure your life as if you are building a cathedral, a vaulting testament to the glory of God. Even if you will not see it completed in your own time, you can still lay the cornerstone, leaving the buttresses and spires to be the work of the later generations of your own children & grandchildren.

 Your grandfather did not live to see his book in print. It was only shepherded to publication through seven posthumous years of Grandma’s own hard work as she tried to piece together his manuscript and decipher his scribbled annotations (believe it or not, his handwriting was worse than mine, and he didn’t even have the professional excuse of being a doctor!)

Penmanship aside, the elder Alan set a commendable example. He truly didn’t care about wealth, and as result I suspect his entrance to heaven was far wider than the eye of a needle. No tycoon (or camel!), he would have been welcomed with open arms to that great cloud of witnesses by a well-pleased Father.

Perhaps most admirably of all, he was not angry about his foreshortened fate. Sad? Yes. Disappointed that he would not live to meet you? Of course! But as much as he admired the poetry of Dylan Thomas and the exhortation to rage, rage against the dying of the light, he was remarkably accepting of his own life’s truncation. Indeed, he considered himself fortunate, to have the privileges of foresight, emotional support, and access to healthcare as his own end approached:

Even today a death in bed, blessed with some dignity, at the natural end of life, or at least with medical aid to mollify the worst agonies of disease, is a luxury denied to many human beings. Dying for millions continue to be violent, unnatural, and grotesque – the malign incursion of natural catastrophe or human bellicosity, the grim harvest of primitive economics or modern means of travel … [T]he final moments of any human being’s life may just as easily be filled with loneliness and terror as with serenity and hope.

As you can likely tell just from this excerpt, he loved words (along with MEN1, I suspect a fascination with the lexicon is heritable in our family). I have been justly accused of often using a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent one will do, but, with apologies to Mark Twain, know that: a) I come by grandiloquence honestly, and b) I’m British and never really figured out the exchange rate.

Moreover, he loved The Word, and the Bible was a steadfast presence in his life from boyhood onward. His encyclopedic knowledge of English (not to mention Greek and Latin) was necessitated by his own Herculean intellectual efforts as a theologian to express the ineffable truths of Christianity. He delved into the original Gospels to perform a fresh exegesis, excavating kernels of our millennia-old faith and vivifying them in modern-day language. I believe you can be forgiven for searching far and wide for le mot juste when you’re trying to convey ideas to your audience that verge upon indescribability, towering toward the heavens in their grandeur.

I must admit that, as I’ve aged, I’ve come to see Scripture differently myself, if never quite through your grandfather’s erudite eyes. To my shame, in my angsty adolescence, I seldom opened the text, a sure symptom of this troubled teen’s hubristic self-reliance. When I did return to its under-thumbed pages with a latent sense of atonement, I tried reading the Bible straight through. But I got bogged down in the Methuselah-length generational lists – all that begetting!— and haltingly mystified by Leviticus’ prohibitions of shellfish (issued to desert-dwellers who presumably didn’t have ready access to mussels).

Persist regardless. There is incredible wisdom to be found there in the Pentateuch, and your grandfather had tremendous respect for our Jewish brothers & sisters, as should you. Absorb the Torah, then read on. Once you finish Deuteronomy, keep going into the wisdom-rich Proverbs and Psalms. But most crucially to our faith, you should continue to the glorious sequel of the New Testament, where we Christians can find our true identity in the suffering & salvation of Christ.

Even then there are different approaches to the Crucifixion. As an angry son who burned with filial rage after losing his Dad to a fickle Creator, I identified with the God-forsakenness of Matthew & Mark’s accounts. In my later years, though, I have come to appreciate the declarative calmness with which the Lucan Jesus commended His spirit and the triumph with which John has our Savior announcing his terrestrial existence complete, for now. All of these Gospel descriptions of the scene at Golgotha will resonate with you at different points during your own earthly lives. Sometimes you will feel as if you too are being martyred, suffering beyond reason; other times you will feel the warmth of the Lord’s sun-like countenance smiling upon you like a well-pleased parent. Keep the faith regardless, and do not allow these troughs and peaks to sum to numb neutrality.

In terms of advice, though, it’s impossible to best the Beatitudes. Take to heart your grandfather’s wise synopsis of the Sermon on the Mount: When Jesus summarized The Ten Commandments in terms of love, this abbreviation of their details was anything but a relaxation of their demands.

Omnia vincit amor. And in these words, lingering in ink long after I’m reduced to ash and dust, please know that my love for you and your mother endures undimmed, like a star that still shines in the sky whether you can see it or not.