Slipping the Ballroom

The Human Experience

A friend of mine is dying of cancer.

He is 2,500 miles away. We see each other maybe once or twice a year. Yet, this one strikes so very close.

When you are young, deaths of people your age exist only as lightning. They are usually off in the distance. The clap may reach you, but it is dulled by your remove. There are accidents and injuries but they are seldom close.

As you get older, deaths of people you know creep closer to being weather than an extremity of it. It isn’t weather yet for me, but enough people I know have died for it to also not be a distant phenomenon.

I’ve lost grandparents, a parent, stepparent and mother-in-law. I’ve lost friends who were members of shared social circles. They have all been bolts in their own way but there has some faint remove of age or closeness.

I think that is what makes the reality of this friend’s terminal cancer such a sharp, crackling lightning strike to me.

It is like a bolt striking a field out behind a middle school. Only I’m not two-Mississippi away this time. I’m on the field. So are my friends. And one of them was struck. It feels concussing, dazing.

How? How did this happen? How can this be happening?

That metaphor is so very apt.

My friend with terminal cancer, I have known him since I was 12-years old. I moved to New Jersey before eighth grade. He was the first good friend I made. He is the reason I played on the freshman football team despite hating it. He’s the reason I became friends with the rest of our circle.

There were ten of us.

Those kids playing football in my little metaphor, that was us.

Forty years later, that is still us.

We don’t play out behind the middle school anymore. We play fantasy football online in a league in its 25th year of being more about staying in touch than the football.

After all these years, we’re still all ‘hanging out after school’. That seems like an impossibility to me. Not just the duration but the completeness. A circle of ten intact this long.

When we are kids, we think our best friends are going to be our best friends forever. We tell each other that we are BFFs because it feels that way. We aren’t just BFs. We are 4L, man. For life. We are Best Friends Forever! We’re such good friends, how could we ever not be?

It seems so blissfully innocent, doesn’t it?

So sweetly naïve.

So quaintly oblivious to how life just… goes…

As if there will be no growing up or growing apart, no moving away or moving on.

But there will be, of course.

Most of the childhood friends we think will be best friends forever eventually fade to something less or fade away altogether. Sometimes, we notice the fading out. Sometimes we don’t, it just happens. But regardless, it happens. It does. Connections weaken and fray and break.

However large your circle of best friends in grade school, it will likely not be intact by the time you turn thirty and almost certainly won’t be by the time you turn forty.

I was fifty when my friend was diagnosed with cancer. I found out in a group chat. The one I used to have to periodically delete and then add back or it would take up so much memory, it would bring my iPhone to a weeping standstill. In it is my circle of friends from childhood. All ten of us.

We all found out about our friend’s cancer at the same time. It felt like a lightning strike. One friend had been struck. Nine had been bowled over.

I remember that date, the moment. It was June 18^th, 2021. A Friday. Just after 3:00 p.m.

It had been crisp and clear and beautiful all day. Just an absolutely postcard-perfect spring day. The sky had been the kind of impossible azure that makes you realize ‘cloudless’ does not always mean ‘clear’. There is usually at least some vapor, some pollution, which, however faintly, dulls the deep blue sea to something softer.

I was particularly attuned to the weather because I had tickets to an outdoor concert that night. I was bringing my son. It was at a venue three hours away. On the drive up, I remember taking in what a beautiful a day it was and thinking we were going to need long pants and sweatshirts later.

I found out about my friend’s cancer when we reached our hotel room. I had opened my phone for the first time in hours to find 30 messages waiting in our group chat.

At the head of the flurry was a message from my friend telling us of his diagnosis but without details or prognosis. His message had only been a paragraph long. He had cancer. He was in for a fight. He was ready for it. He wanted us to know. That had been about it.

Unfortunately, cancer striking someone close to me is something with which I am pretty familiar. My mother-in-law battled cancer for 3 ½ years before passing away. I have written often about that… about the experience of being close to her throughout it. About how much it hurt. How gutting it was for me. How I never got over it and never will and don’t think a person ever does.

I’ve written about the experience, the impact. I have never really written about what you learn from being close to terminal cancer though. Not what you learn about the disease itself. Not about the science or medicine, the treatment, progression, or path.

Not what you learn about the elephant.

The things you learn from being in the room with one.

One of those things is how I knew my friend’s cancer was likely terminal from just one paragraph.

My friend’s message had a note of apology as if he was sorry to have to have to tell us.

When people are diagnosed with something beatable – an early stage cancer with a good prognosis - something which may suck and may be awful to endure for a while but will ultimately be a chapter not an ending – they are in the message. I can’t describe it exactly but they are… resident in their words. The emotions are theirs. The condition is theirs. The impact is on them.

When the person has a terminal illness or is facing a grim prognosis though, there is a turning of the light. The focus shifts from being on the person who is sharing the news to the people receiving it. The person sharing isn’t relating something they are going to struggle with; they are tending to people who are going to be hurt.

When I was 11, my grandfather walked into the five and dime where my grandmother worked. He had been to the doctor and was back with results. I was standing at the counter. My grandmother was behind it. He just walked up with a deliberate casualness meant to downplay what followed and said, “Okay, nobody overreact… but they found something.”

My grandmother was not a paragon of stress management. My grandfather had terminal colon cancer. He turned to tend to my grandmother the minute he found out.

That phenomenon is one of odd perversions of terminal illness. The dying often turn to attend to the living hurt by their dying.

My friend’s first text read as tending to us and from that, I knew the prognosis was not good and knew he knew that too. He was letting us know in the way people tend to when the illness might be theirs alone, but the pain won’t be.

I knew what he was doing and why, and I knew the dance that would come next and how it would play out.

There is a certain dance that takes place around terminal illness. I have done it myself. I’ve had times when I needed it. I know its steps by heart. I know what it looks like from the outside.

It is a tiptoe not on eggshells but around one.

It is a soft little moccasin-walk around a Fabergé egg.

The egg isn’t the person who is ill though. The egg is the truth. The unvarnished medical truth. The blunt, painful, reality that sometimes medicine can do no better than make indefinite a runway which is now finite.

That is the hard center. The reality that someone is dying.

The dance is a fraught waltz around it.

Eventually, some of the dancers come to not need it as much or anymore and then slip from the floor. The hard center still exists. Some of the dancers just reach a place where they can bear it standing still.

The person who is ill often never gets to stop dancing though. That isn’t because they couldn’t bear to themselves; it’s because they feel responsible for the people still out on the floor.

For as long as there are people who can’t bear the hard center, they will stay out there with them. Past fatigue, past exhaustion, long past the point when they could have really used a break from the waltz.

There is an odd, bittersweet tranquility that can come late in the evening. It arrives in the moments when the only people present are ones standing still. The ones who can coexist in the company of the hard center.

For the ones who can simply be despite what will be, the dance goes on… but they don’t need it.

They can just slip quietly from the floor out onto the patio.

Behind them, the thrum of an anxious triple-time. Above them, only the night and sky and stars. With them, people happy for the moment and present in it, a circle brought in around a soft center: someone loved.

There is a beauty in those moments. A perfection. It is crystalline but not fragile. It endures. It is a peace in the moment and a treasure long after in the keeping.

I had a number of moments like that with my mother-in-law. We did as a family. They are precious to me. They are just so fucking dear to me.

I have been somewhat removed from my friend’s illness these past two years mostly due to distance. The time we’ve had together has been rare and fleeting. It has been in the company of people who need the dance and probably always will. It has been loud and crowded and inside the ballroom.

There have been no opportunities to slip out through the French doors, no time to just escape to the patio.

I think it is time to go find some of those moments with my friend.

It isn’t midnight but the evening is wearing on. It is. It isn’t late but the night is getting on.

I want to make sure we get a chance to step outside and look up at the stars not to see the heavens but to be together here on earth.

I want to find time out on the patio to be just present, to just breathe deep the night air because he could probably use a break.

And because I know the things you hold onto after the dance.

I’m working on booking a trip maybe next week or the week after. Soon though.

I am both prepared for that and not…and that feels so very familiar.

That’s the things about dances. You never forget them.

I went to the junior prom with this friend. I remember that one too.

It was so long ago; it was yesterday.