Metastasize

Men, death, fathers and sons.

My father is dying

My father is dying

Metastasize

My father is dying

I’m on the bus, riding to work. I silently try out the words - wondering if they fit, if I can use them. The cancer has spread to his lungs - I’ll tell them. It’s metastastisized, metatastisized, metastasized.

The weather has gone from the blustery wind I biked in this morning to a dull grey drizzle. Wind that brought unexpected joy, and long acknowledged anger. The rain finds me slow and sad.

I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to feel the great impacts of a life. Because I could think about them so calmly, so rationally - my children would be born and I would be unmoved - my father would die and I wouldn’t feel, and would hate myself for the lack. Then lovers leaving taught me that I needn’t worry. When it happens, I feel. This pond flows deep, and the emotions that swirl here rise fast and hard.

He will die and I will grieve. He is dying and I am grieving. I sit and practice the words.

“How are you doing?” They will ask.
“My father is dying,” I will say.

“The cancer has - ” metastastisized, metatastisized, metastasized. It’s a hard word. What if I say the word that is killing my father wrong?

---

I don’t want to go to the conversation about masculinity. Its held by a man I don’t particularly respect, and I don’t expect my voice to be heard - but Eithne is going and she wants me to come along. She’s boldly invited some of the toxic men in her life, and I want to support her. We go.

When I arrive, the first thing I see is Pecalah, standing in the door. Of course. I’d know she was part of Etch’s Theatre of the Oppressed productions, but I hadn’t really connected the dots. I relax into knowing people in this conversation. This as part of the small town I live in, where everywhere you go there are people you know. We go and sit next to Viccarius. He’s quiet and solemn tonight, giving us a rare smile when Eithne laughs or he’s cracked a joke, but generally feels as if wrapped in clouds.

The ensemble marches onto the stage - five people, two of which I know. I’d seen Bob - sweet man who lived near us as I was growing up, sweet man I’ve gamed with for years, and feel like I know his soul -  in pictures of the theatre. I didn’t know Penelope, my Waldorf kindergarten teacher, was a part of this, but I’m excited to see her here. The other three are new to me. Two men and a woman. They stand in poses, each introducing themselves in turn.

Then we move into the conversation, people voicing things about masculinity, and the actors reflecting back what they’ve heard. We spend a lot of time on men’s anger. A woman’s absent father. Another woman who takes over to try and teach. Then a man talking about not knowing how to be a father, a woman who wants to be an ally to men, a woman whose

son has gone off to war.

As expected I am not terribly impressed by the moderators, but the actors and format are surprisingly powerful. I don’t feel like any of the stories people tell are larger than themselves - none of these stories encompass the question of defining masculinity in its toxic and sacred forms.

When they ask if anyone would like to come up on stage and tell their story as the last one of the night, I look up and find my hand has raised. It's too late to bring it back down, they’ve seen it. Etch calls me down - pointing out that he’s known me since I was a child.

I tell them a story, and I think I tell it well. It was when I was thirteen, and Mama held a woman’s tea party at which I was permitted to serve. I don’t remember any of what they said, but I remember the sense of awe I had at how much wisdom they had to share with each other about being a woman. I remember wishing that there was that much conversation around how to be a good man.

I told the audience and moderators  how I had to learn myself, that masculinity means being hard and soft. How when I am hard when I need to be soft it’s toxic. Etch wants examples of being hard when I need to be soft, and I give them - then he asks for a picture of being soft and it working - betraying his bias as a soft man. I won’t give it to him and insist instead on boundaries that served me, hardness that kept me centered.

Then it's time for me to sit back and watch the actors reflect my story to me. I pick Bob to play me, Penelope for my mother. Bob begins pouring tea, and I see how well he knows me. How many times have I poured him tea? How many times has he seen me like this? He reflects it back perfectly - that age, that moment - me.

Penelope becomes archetypal mother “We are women! We bleed and yet we are not wounded. We listen to the moon. We talk to each other!”

“But where are the men?” Bob asks in my voice. “How do I embody this wisdom for myself?” Then he turns aside, pulling in a woman and arguing with her, first too hard then too soft, they turn away from each other in disgust.

When she leaves he takes a deep breath. He adopts a sword fighter’s stance. “Center! I am a man when I am centered! That’s good.”

A big man lumbers in scratching at his crotch and belching - swaggering in the way of testosterone men. “Who are you?” Bob asks.
“I’m you!” He exclaims. “I’m a man.”
“I don’t think so.” Bob has my inflections perfectly. “If there is no one to teach me then I will have to teach myself.” Again he centers breaths. “There is a time to be hard and another to be soft.”
Penelope comes in again. “If you didn’t learn something, it is your job to teach it.”
“Thank you Mama. I will become a teacher. I will turn boys into men.”

They freeze in their poses, all together. Bob in front - hands raised in the way I raise my hands. My old teacher behind him. The other three actors around him. Etch turns to me. “Does that feel right?”

I feel like I’ve just been seen in a way few see me. Bob who saw me grow up - he knows me. This community knows me. Loves me. “Yes!” I say.

“You know,” says Etch as I’m about to leave the stage, “I happen to know that there’s a men’s group open this Monday. I’ll get you the info. There’s a lot of men talking about what it means to be a man.” I thank him and go sit down next to Eithne with a breath of relief to be part of the audience again.

When we are asked as an audience to give words to what we experienced, I shout out “A conversation worth having,” and when the actors take their final shape - each repeating a phrase from the night, two of them are repeating things I said.

---

I’m always wary of men’s groups. My experience of them in the past is that, while full of good conversations and good work, they are never conversations that would not be made better by women's voices chiming in. Nonetheless I was invited and so I go.

When I arrive at the Men’s Group I see a number of familiar faces, but more that I don’t know. We’re all introduced and sworn to secrecy - to speak nothing of other men’s issues, and say nothing that would reveal their identities outside of this group. One man stands as “King” for the night, and guides us through a number of rounds. To begin we are asked to assess how ‘hot’ - or how emotionally volatile - we are at the moment, on a scale of one to five, by holding up our hands with that many fingers extended to easily read the room. I put myself at a three which doesn’t seem very high to me, but find that everyone else has held up ones and two’s. Only one other man, a member of the core group, holds up a three,which he says “Is normal for me.” I know and like this man.

Then we introduce ourselves - each giving a description of what the sacred masculine looks like. I go last and give my usual metaphor, and since Eithne isn’t there to embarrass I don’t hide it. “Masculinity is like a Penis. There is a time to be hard and another to be soft. There are many times in my life that I’m hard when I should be soft -” this elicits some chuckles from the other men. “Soft when I need to be hard -” They groan in empathy “and that’s toxic. But when I am each in its proper measure, then it is sacred.”

“If only there were a masculine metaphor for being hard and soft at the same time,” the man with the other three quips. It heartens me that he jumped to the same metaphor I did when I was writing about this.

Then I’m asked if I want to take center stage and they’ll hold space for me. I ask for a room check again in the vain hope someone else will have surpassed me, but no luck. One other new man presents a three, and I give him the chance to jump in but he can’t so I do.

“I’m in an initiatory space right now,” I explain. “I’m building a house. I’m in a relationship that feels like a forge. My father is dying. It feels as if everything is being held together by duct tape and eventually something has to break.”

“Tell us more about your father dying,” the King inquires. Who knows why he finds this most important, I think wryly.

“I tell people he has cancer, but really the question is what kind of cancer he doesn’t have. He has chronic Leukemia which won’t kill him, but compromises his immune system. He has skin cancer which they’ve been removing as it appears - and then he has cancer in his lymph nodes in his left armpit. They did surgery to take it out and didn’t get it, they irradiated it and it came back - and now its growing into his nerves. He’s in more pain than he’s ever been in in his life.”

“Is there anything you need -  to help you speak this?” The man with the other three asks.
“Nothing is going to move unless I’m being touched. I’m a very tactile person.”
“Do you want to choose someone to hold this space for you?”
“You?” I ask. He nods, beckons me to the center of the circle, and puts his hands on my shoulders from behind.
“Can I have someone else in front?” I ask.
“Of course - who?”
I point at the king, he stands and puts a hand on my chest, smiling benevolently at me.

“Is your father afraid?” The other Three asks from behind me.

“He’s the most easy person with death I know. He’s been suicidal since he was seventeen, it’s honestly amazing he’s made it this long,” I trail off.

They don’t press, just wait for me to begin talking again - and I do to fill the space.

“The other night I made dinner with him. It hurts him to do simple repetitive tasks like chopping vegetables. He wanted to make lamb stew and I offered to be his hands and legs. We had a wonderful night. He showed me exactly how he wanted me to chop the potatoes and the carrots and told me stories as I did.”

They’re touching me, so they can feel the way my body is shaking uncontrollably. The way it does when you’re shivering but it’s not cold. The way I shake when I’m feeling something intensely.

“He’s discovered the only place his arm doesn’t hurt is at his writing desk, so he spends a lot of time there. He jokes that this is the best thing that’s ever happened for his writing. He’s been writing great things lately. He’s been reading them aloud to me.”

They keep their hands on me, warm and welcoming me to talk.

“Most recently he read me a suicide note that he wrote. Playing with what he might say. It was silly - he wrote it in rhyme.” My body spasms with a whole body shiver and I laugh at the same time.

“Are you afraid?”

“I respect his acceptance of death. I think that as medicine gets better it becomes more important to choose to die. His father, my grandfather, just died at 91 and at the end he was just waiting to die. I respect my father’s right to choose his death and the time of his death if he chooses . . .” I pause, “but I guess I’m afraid he’ll take his own life without saying goodbye. He was saying it would be a spur of the moment thing.”

The men seem moved by this, several vocalizing sounds of sympathy. The King shifts his hand a little on my chest. “Have you told your father all this?”
“Not in these words. Not yet. But we talk about everything.”
Someone comes up and whispers in the king’s ear, he nods. “Can we assign someone to stand in for your father?”

I look around. One older man I don’t know had described sacred masculinity as his grandfather’s lap. He seems a good fit, so I point and he comes up.

He stands across from me and the king moves to put his hands on my chest from the side.

“There’s a feeling of helplessness,” I tell my father, “You are such an individual - so self reliant - and I respect you for that, but I also need you to let me help you. I like when you let me make you soup. I like the small ways I can be of service. I’m sorry if I bring in too much firewood but it’s because I don’t know what else to do.”

“I know,” Papa tells me. “I see the ways you help me, and I appreciate them.”
“I know,” I say - and it’s true. We don’t keep secrets he and I.

“Will you say the words in his suicide note?” The king asks me.
“Too much pain,”
The man embodying Papa repeats “Too much pain,”
“Not enough gain.”
“Not enough gain.”
“What to do with all this pain . . .”
“What to do with all this pain . . .”
Something that rhymes with that. . . I can’t remember the rest.”
“Something tha- he stops, laughing at himself.

Someone else comes up and whispers in the other Three’s ear and he voices it: “Since you said that touch was helpful could we all hug you?”
“Please.”
“Is there anything else you need to say to your father first?”
I pause “I love you.”
“I love you too.”

Then everyone gathers around me and touches me, and I rock in their arms.

“I just realized that I’m building a house to live in so that my father has a house to die in,” I come out of my reverie. “That seems right somehow.”

They ask if I feel like I said what I needed to say, and I feel like I’ve taken up enough space. I retire to my seat after we “de-role.” - I telling the man he is not my father, he telling me I am not his son. Then the other new man who raised three fingers on the second showing is invited to share and as he begins to speak he just begins to sob. He tries to swallow it back so he can talk, but the other Three urges him to simply cry. We don’t have to know.

We end up lifting him from the floor and rocking him in our arms, as one man sings a song about the ocean crashing on dry rocks. I, to whom tears come so rarely, empathetically cry with him, and it seems like the right thing for me as well as him.

Yet when I leave I am still raw and open - heart in a feeling space that I have never learned to close. I’m dropped off halfway between Eithne’s house and the house I am cat-sitting at several blocks away. I pause considering whether to go to her, or go home. I imagine her giving me the wrong response - how frightening that would be.

Then, realizing I am afraid of this, I turn towards my fear and head to her house. When I knock on the door she looks up from her computer where she’s sitting on the floor.
“I’m mad at you,” she says. Wrong response.
“Stop.” I say.
She stops, suddenly remembering where I’ve been.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m raw and vulnerable and my heart is open. I’m going to go take a shower in an attempt to re-enter normal space, and then if you want to come down and be angry at me after that you can.”
“Okay.”

I leave and make my way to the basement apartment. I’m imagining that perhaps I’ll leave the lights off as a way of helping me transition - but when I go to hang up my coat the black cat slips through the door and I trip over her a little and have to turn on a light to find her. I scoop her onto my lap and begin petting her. She curls around and takes one paw and places it on the center of my chest, and purrs into it as I pet her for the next half hour. By then she’s worked her magic and my heart is full of cat contentment. By the time I take my shower I don’t even need it.

---

When I get back home Sunday afternoon, Papa is sitting up at his writing desk and I go sit near him. I’m operating on five hours of sleep, having stayed up until four the night before, fighting with Eithne. I’ve arrived home from dance, where I danced giving words from my heart that are heard by Eithne’s non reactive self. I’m full of that, full of my men’s group and the theater. Ready to share.
“How are you doing?” I ask Papa.
He takes a deep breath. “So as you know I was going in this weekend for the preliminary pieces of the surgery in Seattle.”
“I didn’t know it was this weekend but I knew you were going to go - how’d it. . . ?”
“Well I didn’t end up going. I got a call from the doctor’s office telling me that they got the CT scan back and they found that the cancer had metastasized into my lungs. That there’s no point in doing the dangerous surgery. Apparently you can’t do surgery on lungs.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I did go in and see my cancer doctor. I like him so much, he’s so cool -” Papa smiles in obvious admiration.
“This is the one who asked how he can best be of service on the first day?”

“That’s him! He told me that at this point we have three choices: they can do grenade chemotherapy, they can do specialized chemotherapy - or the third option, he said, ‘is the most interesting.’” Papa pauses and laughs. “It’s a new thing where they send in these chemicals to motivate your immune system itself to attack the cancer cells. I had already told him my aversion to chemotherapy. Of course I chose the last one. And its possible, since this cancer isn’t acting like it’s supposed to, that the drug company will just give it to me free - using me as a guinea pig.

“I asked him how long he thought I had if I didn’t get treated. ‘Six months,’ he said,‘I’m not optimistic you have more than a year with treatment - we’re basically just slowing it down at this point. I can’t cure you.’ I told him I’m easy with death. I’m not running away from my death anymore. He’s so cool about it, he said ‘in that case - if that’s your philosophy, and if you choose not to take treatment -you’ll want to call in Hospice sometime around three months.’”

Papa pauses his narrative, and breaths “I asked him ‘but wasn’t it you who told me that my leukemia is compromising my immune system - how is that going interact with this treatment? He said ‘I don’t know - it’s an experiment.’” Papa breaks into a grin. “Great, I said, I’ve experimented all my life. I’m up for an experiment.”

He pauses, scratches his head, “So that’s my news. How was your week?”

“Hard to follow that,” I say.

“Yeah, but I wanted to get it out first - put everything in perspective. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

I do eventually tell him my stories. He’d heard reports of the masculinity conversation from Pecalah who’s living on the land and Viccarius who visits often. He won’t tell me much of what they said, but is excited to get my details. He’s thrilled to hear that Bob played me, and did it so well.

When I move into the men’s group and repeat to him word for word what I said, he gets emotional, choking up as I choke up a little.

“Washington is one of the states that has doctor assisted suicide,” he tells me, “Something like if you’re three months from a terminal illness. I meant to ask my doctor if this counts - but in my imagination we could have a doctor do it, and I would have -” he tears up at this, “you there holding my hand, and Pecalah there with my other hand -” my hand instinctively goes to my chest tapping it in the way I do when I feel something deeply that words won’t hold, “-and you could hold me through that transition, and we would say goodbye.”

We’re silent for a while, before we each get our voices back, and he tells me he hasn’t told Pecalah yet - plans to tell her tonight -and Viccarius too if he comes. We move into the practicalities of dinner which I offer to make, and his heater which I offer to set up. Then out into my fight with Eithne and our parting this morning after I’d made her breakfast in bed �"  the bewildering sweetness that comes to her so unexpected. How she hasn’t learned yet that my sweetness and my thorns are not mutually exclusive, but feed one another. I can be angry and sweet at the same time.

I’m drilling a hole through the wall for the propane line for Papa’s heater, when I hear Viccarius come in. I finish up, walk past him with a hello, put my tools away, and then wander out to my building site - just to check on it. As I walk in along the trail I hacked, I remember how I used to walk out to the woods to cry as a little boy. I suddenly feel him walking with me, as I pass through my Hawthorn tree archway and go beyond the building site looking for stinging nettles in the far patch, before wandering deeper on to our absent neighbor’s land.

When I am far enough away I stop, and then wail. It feels loud, too loud, obtrusive in my grief. I sit down and pull out my phone to call Eithne, find her in my contacts and stare at her picture.

I remember the scene the other day where she was changing and made me look away as she took off her shirt before putting on another. I remember realizing that, to her, my gaze is not mine, but male -all men looking at her, sexualizing her breasts and body. That I lying there on her bed, am not me, but a paper cut out of a man’s eyes -not an appreciating lover, not Pan raised a nudist, but an invasive male. It will only come to me later, the metaphor of wanting to be naked to each other, bare our breasts to one another, and the desire for her to see me naked in something besides disgust. Not as a man’s body but as mine. Not as a man, but as me.

Then I’m remembering her voice telling me “Maybe this is mean, but it’s not my problem. I don’t care.” I close the phone, I stand up, grab a stick and hurl it at a tree with bone splintering force, shards of wood exploding off its bark.Then another. Then I’m walking with a stick in my hands - a sword crushing everything dead in my path. I smell sulphur, brimstone bringing me into anger that is neither hot nor cold, but destructive in its intensity.

Crack, crack - “God damn mother f*****g . . . F**K! You don’t care? What am I? You don’t CARE?!” I’m heaving up logs and hurling them at trees to splinter into their dead debris. I don’t think the trees mind, all these dead things need to be broken down, and my anger is part of this ecosystem now. My stick lashes out at everything dead and dying, grinding it into dust.

This probably isn’t about her, a calm rational part of my mind reasons. Shut up! My anger replies. I can be f*****g angry about anything I goddamn want. I can be angry about the fact she doesn’t care. I can be angry at the fact I can’t even look at her. I can f*****g do what I want!

I keep moving, a destructive swath around me. The rational observer is a little surprised at my strength. How easy it would be to kill someone with this strength. This stick could crush a skull. I’m hitting with enough force to shatter any bone. There is no sweetness in this rage.

Maybe I should call her and tell her, I think, pulling out my phone again. I don’t even know why I’m in a relationship with her. What’s she worth? There is nothing in her that I want. She gives me nothing. I want nothing. This relationship is dying.

The Moderator vetoes this idea. Even if you can’t remember why you like her, maybe you can trust that a previous Pan did. Eleven months worth of wanting her - there had to have been a reason. I put the phone away for the second time.

I find myself saying aloud over and over, “I can metabolize my own anger, I can metabolize my own f*****g anger.” The rational bit realizes I’m talking about something I said last night, that when I express my anger to her it goes away, but it feels like she takes it in. “I can metabolize my own God damn f*****g anger!”

I come out into the clearing where the abandoned rental is. Don’t break anything, The Observer cautions, and only twice do I lash out at the rotten railing of this dying house - once with my hand and once with the stick - and blessedly it holds. I find myself standing in front of a mirror leaned up against the house, looking into my angry eyes. Seeing myself like this, as this thing I try so often to hide. “I can metabolize my own f*****g anger.”

Then, “Metastasize” - it’s a hard word to pronounce. I don’t know why - I say lots of big words all the time. I have a great vocabulary. Metestastisize. Mastastasize, I try different versions out in my head. It would be stupid to say it wrong.

“My father is dying” Another word that’s hard to say, difficult to pronounce. A long word. I don’t know why it’s so long, so hard to say.

“Metastasize” I have to practice.

“My father is dying”

Metastasize