When he was first diagnosed, I visited him every weekend with my dad. The first visit, we were standing at the doorway, shoes put back on, when he smiled at my dad, hugged his wife, and confidently told us all it was going to be alright. I could tell how badly he wanted to reassure his wife it would be okay even if he knew it wasn’t true. It was in that moment I thought how I would give anything up to cure him. The problem is, you can’t fight someone else’s cancer.
When 8th grade started, we were all gathered around my grandmother’s house post-bbq dinner. My uncle wore a baseball cap to hide the revealing symptoms of chemotherapy, and I spent the entire night making and running through quizlets with him to make sure he never forgot the alphabet, the names of animals, and household items. It was the only time during his entire diagnosis that I felt like I could do something to help him. For the first time, I was excited. I went home to make lesson plans, activities, and anything that would help his mental game. I never got the chance. Instead, months later, I spent my Thanksgiving morning coaxing him to get out of bed and join the family. He was grumpy, fighting depression, and he slapped me in anger. I sat stunned and turned to my dad for reassurance. He didn’t even ask if I was okay, because it wasn’t about me. He just kept talking to my uncle trying to get him up. Hours later, my uncle was finally sitting at his dining table when I offered to make him a cup of hot chocolate. He told my cousin, “Joseph, don’t make our guest make it. You should make it.” He looked to me and asked my name. I saw the years of schlitterbahn, six flags, and family vacations evaporate from his mind. A few weeks later, we celebrated our Christmas in a hospital. He sat in a wheelchair and stared past every family member and it wasn’t hard to see that the uncle who raised me was only a shell of who he was. That was the first time in a while that he woke up mentally. Out of nowhere he looked panickedly at my dad, and asked “What am I doing here? Why am I in a hospital? I want to go home.” The tears of confusion never made it out of his eyes because moments later, he was gone again. Reticent, and he never came back. I had never been more scared in my life. By the time 8th grade ended in May, we had written letters to our future self that we’d receive upon high school graduation. I wrote 2 letters, one to me, and one to the uncle who passed a week after I wrote it. The worst part about it all is that it really messes you up. It messes up what you think about death, because I lost the loving uncle I knew. It messes up your family, because suddenly everyone’s fighting silently to keep a façade of peace around your uncle. It messes you up, because in this battle you really are powerless. It was a journey of false hope because the statistics didn’t lie, 15-16 months. That’s all I got.
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June 2020
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