A Story from Mr Andrews

The “C” Word
-by Ken Andrews

When I was a little kid, I thought my parents were so powerful and wise. Now, as I approached my teen years, notions I had held of my parents’ wisdom and strength had long since faded away. In fact, I was beginning to find them nearly as annoying as my siblings. Like most children, I never paused to consider my parents as individuals, beyond their roles as “mom” and “dad”, to actually think of them as fully formed human beings, with particular strengths and weaknesses, with dreams and aspirations of their own. Their actual humanity didn’t really hit home until my father began his battle with cancer.
For many months, I didn’t actually know that dad had cancer. My parents informed my three older siblings (who were all teenagers by this time), but they decided to avoid scaring their two youngest children, protecting us from the awful truth. I don’t think Rob, my little brother, was ever really aware of the gravity of dad’s illness, so perhaps this decision spared him a piece of his childhood. He remained unencumbered. For me, however, it was a nightmare.
Despite everyone’s attempts to maintain an atmosphere of normalcy, the tension in our home was palpable. Dad was in and out of hospital for tests and treatments, and I overheard my older family members speaking about it in hushed tones. Although I never heard them utter the “C” word, I knew that dad was very sick. While my mother and older siblings grappled with these issues together, they unknowingly formed a support group unto themselves, a group to which I did not belong. I felt angry with them for not including me, and I felt guilty for knowing more than I was supposed to know. I sensed that I had stumbled onto some sort of secret. A dark shadow had entered our home and I wasn’t supposed to know about it, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to speak about it… not to anyone. I felt alone. I felt terrified. But I said nothing, and I watched and waited.
I watched as my father lost all his hair. I watched as he became thinner and thinner still, withering away, unexplained, before my eyes. Words like skinny and bald can’t aptly describe the results of the remarkable metamorphosis of a healthy man to a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy. He not only went completely bald, but all of the hair on his arms and chest totally disappeared. And his bones began to protrude from beneath his skin until he reminded me of the pictures of Aucshwitz prisoners that I’d seen.
“Who’s the freak?!” called Harley across the adventure playground one day, pointing at the shriveled, hairless man who was picking me up after school. The other kids laughed and stared as I slumped, with my head down, over to my father who was standing by the car. I felt humiliated. Worse, I felt ashamed of my own humiliation, sensing that I was actually concerned about him embarrassing me in front of my friends while he was quietly battling for his life. As we drove away from the school, there were so many questions I wanted to ask my father, so much I wanted to tell him. But I said nothing.


One day, my mother suddenly took up a job as secretary. Although she had been a full-time homemaker since before I was born, the significance of her abruptly joining the workforce didn’t register with me at the time. When I asked her about it, she said something about previously working as a secretary back in England, and something about Rob and I now being old enough to take care of ourselves after school.
I accepted mom’s explanation at face value. For some reason, I didn’t make the connection to the fact that dad was extremely ill and had been off work for many months. Prior to the cancer, dad had rarely missed a day of work, so he had a significant reserve of sick leave available to him. Behind closed doors, however, he and mom must have begun discussing what would happen if he couldn’t go back to work, what would happen if he didn’t survive. My father, true to his pragmatic nature, would have been developing contingency plans for our financial security should the cancer win.
Unbeknownst to me, the cancer cells were spreading throughout his body via his lymphatic system. The chemotherapy was not working. They planned to remove his spleen. As a physician himself, my father knew there were no real alternatives despite the significant risks.
Dad was back in the hospital again in preparation for his surgery. At the time, I didn’t know any of the details. I didn’t know that this particular stay in the hospital was different from the others. I didn’t know that the doctors had warned my mother to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. I didn’t know that he might not be coming home, ever.
Although nobody had told me about the upcoming surgery, on the night before my father’s operation I could sense the nervous energy permeating our home. By the time my mother returned from her evening visit to the hospital, my little brother and I were already in bed. I could hear the calm breathing of Rob sleeping soundly, while I lay awake wrestling with waves of anxiety. From beneath our bedroom in the attic, I could hear the muffled sounds of my mother talking to one of my older siblings.
Longing for mom’s reassurance that everything was fine, I crept out of bed and down the stairs. From the edge of the doorway, I peeked into the den, where she was sitting on the sofa with my sister. I knew I shouldn’t still be awake, but I pushed the door open and stepped into the room.
Mom and Jackie stopped talking, looking over at me. I expected them to ask what I was doing out of bed so late, but they said nothing. Mom wore a distant expression I’d never seen before.
“What is it, Mom?” I asked, standing in the open doorway in my pajamas.
For a split second, she hesitated, her face shifting into a contorted, nervous smile that she couldn’t hold. Then her mask disintegrated, tears filling her eyes.
“Oh dear, I’m just so worried about your father,” she blurted out, and her chest began to heave in muted sobs.
I just stood there, bewildered. I had never seen my mom cry before. In fact, it had never occurred to me that she could cry. Prior to this moment, I don’t think I had ever thought of her as a person, beyond her role as my mother. I was suddenly aware that she was a vulnerable human being, that she was frightened she might lose her husband. By the same token, I realized that I could no longer assume my father’s survival of this illness. He too was a vulnerable person.
As my mother dabbed her eyes with balled up pieces of soggy Kleenex, I rushed across the den and threw my arms around her neck.
“It will be okay, Mom,” I said softly, hugging her tight. “It will be okay.”
Jackie slid down the sofa and held mom’s hand.
“Yes, of course it will,” mom said eventually, smiling through her tears. “You’re all such good kids,” she wept.
Jackie slipped into the kitchen to put on the kettle. I stayed up with them for awhile and we drank tea together. Then mom kissed me goodnight and sent me off to my room.
As I climbed into bed for the second time that night, I was still worried about my father, but the acute sense of anxiety was gone. Earlier that evening, I had come downstairs in search of my mother’s reassurance. Yet it was I who had done the reassuring. Perhaps this experience should have rattled me, but instead I felt a sense of place and purpose; a sense that my fears were shared and that I was no longer alone; and a sense that I too had something to contribute to our family.


Before dad’s surgery, we had taken a family car trip across the border to see Star Wars. It was being hailed as a breakthrough science fiction film, and this Seattle theatre proudly announced “Quadraphonic Sound” in large letters above the entrance. The movie began and Rob and I nearly leaped out of our seats as spacecrafts whizzed across the screen and a burst of sound from all directions seemed to rush right through us. Like identical twins, I remember us turning to each other with enormous grins and simultaneously exclaiming, “Cooool!” And I remember the drive home afterward, all of us chattering with endless excitement about the special effects and characters. My favourite was R2-D2, the blue and white android robot with the endearing beeps and burps.
When I first visited my father in the hospital after his surgery, I tentatively glanced at his frail body in the pathetic hospital gown, apprehensive of the various tubes extending from his wrist.
“Come on, Ken,” dad said cheerfully. “Let’s take R2-D2 for a walk!” Smiling, he pointed at his mobile IV stand. I wheeled the IV pole along beside him as we strolled down the hallway together, and he cheerfully introduced R2-D2 to everyone, sharing his joke with nurses and patients alike.
I visited him many times in the weeks that followed, sometimes cycling the twenty or so blocks from our home to Vancouver General Hospital.
“How’s R2?” I asked dad every time I visited.
“Oh, wonderful! Beeping along just fine,” he always answered.
I was comforted by our joke, and my fears were almost washed away by his upbeat attitude and references to Star Wars. As we walked down the hallway together, I felt proud to be pushing the IV stand, to be helping my father.


In the end, after months of chemo treatments, the cancer was gone. Dad was one of the fortunate ones. He recovered. We all recovered, yet something had changed for me. I was now more aware of my parents’ mortality, and hence my own. My mother and father didn’t have all the answers. I now knew that they, like me, wrestled with doubts and fears, aspirations and regrets. And if they did, then we all did. To me, it somehow meant there was no longer a single clear path for us to follow in our lives, but many signs to guide us on our journey. Each of us was living a personal journey on which we struggled to find our own way, yet we could lean upon one another for strength and support.
During this tumultuous year in which my family recovered from nearly losing its patriarch, I had gained some sense of our shared humanity.