Everything is About Cancer, Except Cancer, Which is About Me

by Caroline Little

The first day isn’t much of anything. I read a mostly terrible romance novel in one sitting. 

Usually, I don’t read romance. Usually, Dad isn’t in the hospital. 

My dad belongs to raccoon alley. He belongs to streetcars and skyscrapers, to a rhododendron cloaked in winter canvas. He belongs to jazz standards on an upright piano, warbling their way up the stairs to almost-sleeping ears. My dad is ill-fitting in this domain of single-use plastics. Lately, the plastics seem to disagree. 

If I could play his upright piano, Linus and Lucy would go skating, Oscar Peterson would take the A train, and he’d sleep just like I used to. Like I used to in our lilac bush maple tree house, bought the year I was born. In our centenarian house beyond the cemetery, I always sleep like the dead. 

But, we’re not in our house. I never learned to play the piano. And Dad is sleeping all the same.

The first day ends like a mediocre romance novel, or a rollercoaster, or a jazz song– it just stops.

______________

Ursa opens my fridge and says wow, you have so much someone-died-food in here. When I join her at our portal to florescence, I remember we have five different kinds of pie. I wish I didn’t know that you should always send food in a crisis, so the people you love remember to eat. I want to say if I could do it all over, I’d be the kind of person who sends flowers. Instead, I tell her the people who love us love pies. It lands somewhere between strawberry and rhubarb.

______________

Maddy meets Uncle Darren on a Friday in Toronto General. It’s a hallway flyby – you’re only allowed two visitors to a room. When he found out I was dating her, he said the only way I could ever offend him was to not bring my girl up north for Christmas. In between whiskeys, he once said he’d buy her a cowboy hat if I knew her head size. I’m not sure he remembers, but she does. I do. Since the last two Christmases have been in hospital, Uncle Darren has come to us. 

When Dad’s eyes start to droop, we migrate to John’s restaurant on Harbord. There’s a growing orange light as his hug picks me up off the ground, as he says kiddo, I can’t believe how well your dad is doing. I tell Maddy it felt the same coming here after the Santa Claus Parade, warming little fingertips over fry oil heat. John says dinner is on the house. Darren, who’s known him since they were my age, says he’s a dick. 

Mom winks at me while my uncle and my girlfriend debate politics, and I think this might be what coming out the other side feels like. I won’t know until sun hits my face, until my fingers are warm on their own. 

______________

Nick pulls me aside on New Year’s and says my mom has four months to live. Standing alongside guilt is the knowledge that only one of our parents is cancer free. I want to say that she’ll get better. I want to say that Auld Lang Syne always makes me cry. Instead, I tell him I love you. It lands somewhere between our ribcages. 

______________

A parade of people are visiting Dad’s neighbour in the next bed over. His wife tells us in the hall he’s looking down the barrel of eighteen hours on the table – double lung and liver. Everyone he’s ever known has come to wish him luck. His daughter, half my age with eyes just as wet, will spend most of the day waiting for her dad to flatline. I only had to wait six hours. We’re writing Christmas cards as they wheel him away, and Dad sleeps as he goes. 

Mom is taking this opportunity to fill in communication gaps – on a card to an old university friend, she writes WE GOT A LIVER FOR CHRISTMAS! Underneath she scrawls a facsimile of the liver, but it comes out looking more like Quebec. Mom’s address book is bursting in my lap, barely restrained by its three rubber bands. As I flip through for her cousin’s postal code, everyone I’ve ever known comes tumbling out. 

The office number for my pediatrician and my grade four class list and my therapist’s email and the street my grandfather’s second wife used to live on and the street my uncle’s first wife currently lives on fall to the hospital floor. 

I pick them up as quickly as I can. No more details of my life will touch the transplant ward.

There’s a Tragically Hip song for the feeling in my chest, but I can’t tongue its name. A nurse comes in to tell Dad if he ever has grapefruit again all his medication will stop working, and the liver will start improvising dance steps. 

The feeling passes. 

Later, we’ll pass double lung guy’s wife as Dad is discharged. She’s asking after the laundry – her husband’s wedding ring got lost in the sheets. As we leave that night in Toronto, with its checkerboard floors, I’ll notice they sell grapefruit juice in the vending machines on the transplant ward. 

I’ll hold my Dad a little tighter, so he’s not another thing lost in this hospital. 

______________

Mom gasps at her phone and says the results came back on Sheri’s husband – it’s bone, lymph, prostate, and lung. I have the good sense to feel guilt over the Dad-shaped pit in my stomach that yawned at her reaction. I assume everything is about my dad, these days. Can you blame me? I can, it turns out. I want to say I don’t have room in my body for anyone else’s grief. Instead, I tell her, we should bring Sheri dinner. It lands somewhere beyond the pit. 

______________

Home is a tricky word. I only get it in brief doses these days. 

A long weekend in Taylor’s Victoria basement rubbed on my gums, a week in Kyle’s Montreal high rise snorted up my nose, a phone call to Julianne in Toronto taken intravenously. I’m looking for my next fix, but can’t find it here. 

Here, these people don’t know the bones of me. I keep reopening old scars hoping it’ll heal over in a way they understand. 

Here, Catherine O’Hara dies from the same thing Dad had. The Americans among us don’t understand why I spend the day crying. 

Here, I have an alternative list of comedians, of fathers, I’d rather offer up to colorectal cancer. 

In every sense of the word, this is the longest I’ve gone without going home. Instead I’m here, admiring the colour of my bones.

______________

Dad looks over the puzzle and says Bud doesn’t have to come if he doesn’t want to. I can’t show my anger so I try to burn up the Globe’s holiday crossword with my mind. One who dies for a cause, nine letters. I want to say daughters fits just as easily as martyrdom. I want to say it must be so easy to be a little brother. Instead, I tell him we’ll bring Angus back with us. It lands somewhere within nine white boxes.  

______________

I saved up all my luck for this hospital trip, but I have nothing left for me. It goes like this:

I leave the hospital. I have a job interview. I go to the dentist. I have a cavity. Go to the hospital. We all leave the hospital. I don’t get the job. 

I didn’t believe in karma until Dad was diagnosed, but now I can’t stop buying good luck charms. I don’t realize I’ve bought them until they’re already in my hands. It goes like this:

A purple jade phone charm, a blueing wishbone, a ladybird, someone else’s liver, an elephant, a skeleton, a meat thermometer, a needle, a haystack. God is only real when you need someone to blame.

The dentist who’s known me since I came into possession of teeth tells me there’s a rot in my bones. Mom tells me we should test my blood, to see if I’m a match. Google tells me the liver can regenerate half its mass in a month. An oncologist tells me cadaver organ donation is ideal. They’re better whole than alive. It goes like this: 

Let me give you something, anything, have it all if you want it, it was yours first. There is nothing you could ask for that I wouldn’t give.  

It goes like this: 

I used up my luck by having you at all. 

______________

Tavio embraces me across a snowbank and says we’ll see you soon. It’s a tolerable lie – we both know it’ll be six weeks at best. It’s the first of January, and I’m hung over, and vomit has white washed the enamel off my teeth, and I want to say I’m dropping out of grad school. I want to say I’m moving home. Instead, I tell him I’ll be back before you know it. It lands somewhere in the cold.

______________

A hundred little birds land on the telephone wires of my heart. I try to name them all: Dad, Montreal, Catherine O’Hara, organs, wishbones. How lucky am I to have so much to lose?

---

ABOUT THE CREATOR

Caroline Little is a Toronto-born, Vancouver-based writer, poet, and playwright. They are a recent graduate from McGill University with a BA in English, and are currently pursuing their Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. They are a poetry editor with BITTER Magazine, and their work can be found in Crabapple Literary, chouette, The Veg, and elsewhere.

Instagram: @carolinelttle

---