When I interview someone, they’re stuck in the hot seat for an hour or more. I don’t mean it be that way; I just want to make sure I have all the details straight. So I go back over the same topics more than once. I try to nail down the timeline. I try to unearth the backstory. Basically, I just listen as long as people are willing to talk.

I’ve always sympathized with my interview subjects. I knew, at least on an intellectual level, that being interviewed by me is an exasperating, draining experience.

But I never experienced anything similar myself — until last night.

My niece, Linnae, called from Pennsylvania. She’s in junior high, and for a class assignment, she has to write a four-page biography of someone she finds interesting. She chose me.

I’ll admit, I’m flattered. I’m sure she put it off until the last moment and turned to me in desperation or something, but I choose to believe she truly finds me fascinating.

Linnae asked if she could interview me. I said yes, thinking that she’d ask a few questions and be done with it.

Instead, she subjected me to an hour-long interview that covered my life in 10-year increments.

She started out simple: parents’ names, siblings’ names, how many years there are between us. What were my parents hobbies or interests? Where did they work? What did I like to do?

Gradually, though, Linnae pushed for more in-depth questions:

“Were you in a fraternity? Why or why not? What did you think about the college you chose to attend? Where did you go on your honeymoon? What did you do there?”

On and on.

“Please describe for me your dating life between the ages of 21 and 30,” she ordered. “During those years, did you suffer any serious setbacks in your life? How did you feel about your existence? As you drew closer to 30, how did your attitudes toward aging change? How much did you earn per year during that time?”

She wanted names, dates, times, locations. She wanted me to explore my feelings about events in my past.

By the end of the interview, I was enervated, wrung out.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “I think I have enough to fill four pages now. Love you. Bye.”

I wandered out into the living room, told my wife what’d just happened.

“What do you think?” my wife asked. “Does she have a future as a reporter … or as an interrogator for the FBI?”

I’m thinking CIA. Al Qaeda wouldn’t stand a chance.

The editors have decided to hold the story to make sure they can give it the space it deserves in the newspaper. These are long stories with large photos, and they take up a lot of newsprint. They don’t want to cut the story or photos down to fit a smaller space.

As soon as I know when Chapter 3 will run, I’ll let you know. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Ken

Little things, mostly — playing Wiffleball in our sloping front yard, imagining the towering maple trees are outfielders and trying to avoid the poison ivy growing in the ditch; helping my brother rebuild an ancient flatbed trailer, shirtless in the summer heat; trying to chop ashes drifting from the burn barrel out of the air as if I was Luke Skywalker wielding a lightsaber.

I remember the smell of Lake Erie and the feel of the mist blowing off of it, moist and pleasant and alive. The extended family would get together there each summer for a fish fry, the kids tiptoeing across the sunbaked sand toward the water’s edge, watermelon juice drying on their faces. We’d go there, too, on the 4th of July. We’d lie on our backs on the steep slope rising up from the beach and watch the skyrockets explode above us, the light reflecting on the water below.

We were little, and the world was big, and death was a word with little meaning.

Now, somehow, we’re big. The world seems smaller. And death is all around.

It’s not just Jim or my brother’s adopted daughter or the almost daily e-mails informing me that relatives of people I work with have died. It’s realizing that my elder siblings are nearly as old now as my father was when he died, and it’s thinking about my mother’s memoir, which one of my sisters compiled and recently mailed to me. I haven’t seen the memoir yet, but it’s got me remembering pictures of my Mom from when she was young and beautiful. The photos are  faded black and whites, curled at the edges, and even when I was a child, they seemed old-fashioned.

We’re like that now, my sibs and me. We’ve become boring grown-ups, not running and playing but sitting together in crowded rooms talking about people and times long past. Our parents are gone. We have jobs and responsibilities. All that innocence that infused even the most boring of days with a sense of possibility has dwindled away.

I think of this especially when I talk to LeAnn and Jim’s children, Maddye and Ford. I’m in the midst of writing Chapter 3 of this series, which focuses largely on the kids. And time and again, I find myself comparing my childhood to theirs. For more than half of his life, Ford has shared a home with cancer. Even when Jim didn’t have it, the word was there, hanging over the family like the sword of Damocles. Ford barely remembers a time before cancer.

And Maddye. When I was 17, there was little room for anyone in my life except me. Selfish and childish, I regarded my parents as providers and inconveniences, people controlling my life with rules I didn’t like. Although my dad died just two years later, when I was 19, I rarely regarded him as mortal before then.

Ford and Maddye have always known their father can be hurt.

I wonder sometimes if they have Wiffleball or lakeshore memories — or if their childhoods were so colored by cancer that careless innocence was denied them.

And I wonder — all the time, it seems — how my sibs and I grew so old. In my head, we’re still young and vital. My brother has the trunk popped on his Chevy Nova, and Supertramp is blaring from the 8-track on his Jensen speakers. My oldest sister is there with her husband, hanging out on the porch swing and talking about “The Gong Show,” and my youngest sister has a Dorothy Hamill haircut and a t-shirt covered with a picture of a bassett hound. My middle sister is making a candle inside the kitchen, and I’m outside with a friend, swinging on a rope from one of those maple trees.

Summer was supposed to last forever.

In the day since I wrote my last post, everything went south. Tori is a 4-year-old girl my brother, Ron, and his wife, Patty, went to China to adopt. When they got there, they found that her health was terrible. Tori was hospitalized with a massive infection, but after some early scares, doctors said there was a 70 percent she’d recover fully. She seemed to be improving, and everything looked good.

Until today.

Tori’s temperature skyrocketed. Her breathing became erratic. When Ron and Patty were summoned back to the hospital, the little girl — as tiny as a 2-year-old — was surrounded by a dozen doctors. Her kidneys were too badly damaged by the infection. She is on a ventilator and failing rapidly.

Today — a day after Tori looked at my brother’s wife and called her “Mama” — Ron and Patty had to relinguish parental rights to her. She is again a Chinese orphan, and due to visa problems, Ron and Patty won’t even be able to attend her funeral. They leave for Hong Kong tomorrow, then head back to the states, grieving, hurting and without the little girl they’ve already come to love.

I never met Tori. I never will.

I’m sorry for telling you about her in yesterday’s post. I wouldn’t have mentioned her if I’d thought this was going to happen. Just by coming to the “Life is real” site, you’re exposing yourself to some pretty tragic things. You don’t need my family’s sadness, too.

About 1 1/2 years ago, they adopted their first Chinese child, Lianne, who is now about 2 years old. Lianne is a happy, healthy little girl, and Ron and Patty’s three biological children have welcomed her into the family. Ron runs a Christian radio station and teaches college in Pennsylvania. Patty takes care of older folks at a nursing home. They’re great parents.

They knew that Tori would be a challenge, though. She has major problems with her hip and leg bones and will require extensive medical treatment. She is also small for her age. Although she’s more than 4 years old, she’s smaller than Lianne.

But Ron and Patty weren’t prepared for what happened when they got to China. Tori was ill. She had a fever for days, suffered diarrhea and was hooked up to IVs. She was too weak to stand. Her condition quickly worsened. She was admitted to a hospital with rapid breathing. A doctor suspected pneumonia, among other things. Ron and Patty returned to their hotel room, only to be summoned back to the hospital. Test results showed steeply escalating blood sugar levels and indicated that her kidneys were not functioning, and doctors said there was little they could do.

Word spread that Tori was dying. Ron and Patty were frantic. They’d only spent a few days with Tori, but they’d been building up to seeing her for months. They’d sent photographs of themselves to the orphanage so that she would know what they looked like and received photos in return. They’d talked about her, planned for her. They loved her.

Experienced Chinese doctors were called in. One looked over the test results and decided that the evidence was misleading. The failing kidneys, the raised blood sugar — they were caused by a virus that had invaded her system and caused widespread infection. Kill the virus, save the girl. A new treatment regimen began, and now Ron and Patty were told there was a 70 percent chance Tori would live.

My brother sent another update yesterday. In an e-mail, he said that Tori is slowly improving, although she is still weak. She seems to be on the mend. Several high-ranking hospital officials came to visit them, bringing a “get-well” floral arrangement. Later, they were interviewed by a member of the Chinese media, and they have been asked to participate in a press conference, at which they will read aloud a letter they were asked to write praising the hospital staff. (Seems a bit early for that to me, but I’m not the one in a foreign country.)

It’s been an ordeal for my brother’s family, and it isn’t over. Hopefully Tori will thrive and survive and be able to come to the United States soon. In the meantime, Ron and Patty are stuck in China far longer than they’d planned.

None of this has anything to do with Jim Chastain, of course, but it’s been a life-or-death human drama every bit as absorbing as his story — and one more personal to me.

Have you read the section of this blog labeled “About Ken Raymond”? There’s not much information there, but it does include this sentence: “Cancer is his greatest fear.”

Ever since I accepted this assignment, I’ve debated with myself if I should explain why (beyond the obvious reasons) cancer is so scary to me — and why I nearly turned this story down. Today I came to this site and found a message from Sue Hale, formerly The Oklahoman’s executive editor. In her written comment, Sue talked about how readers rarely see journalists as people and don’t realize that the things we write about affect us.

That was the nudge I needed to step a little further out into the light.

So why do I fear cancer?

1) When I was 19 years old, my father began complaining of backaches and nausea. He’d come home from work and collapse onto the couch, lying on heating pads and beneath heat lamps. He was a big guy, 6′2″ and probably 250 pounds, and he’d been a blue collar worker his whole life. He was tough and strong, but now he hurt too badly to do much of anything. At first, we thought my dad, who was also named Ken, was being a baby. Lots of people have backaches, and the doctor couldn’t find any explanation for why he was incapacitated. Probably a muscle strain. Maybe a pinched nerve. But the pain continued. In the fall, when I had begun my sophomore year of college and football season had returned, a specialist finally realized that something was seriously wrong with my dad. It’s been a long time now, and I don’t remember exactly how the truth came out — an X-ray? an MRI? — but they discovered that my father had a mass growing inside of him. A few days later, he entered the hospital for exploratory surgery. My whole family — including my mother, brother, three sisters and their families — gathered with our pastor in a waiting room at a Pennsylvania hospital. We made unfunny jokes and tried to keep our spirits up, but I was strung so tight I could hear a high-pitched whine in my ears, and if I’d tried to smile, I think my face would’ve cracked. The operation dragged on longer than expected. After a few hours, my family was summoned into a long hallway. We stood along the walls. A grim-faced surgeon approached us. My father had pancreatic cancer, he said. At the time, the mortality rate was somewhere around 99 percent, and my dad’s cancer had progressed so far that there was no chance of survival. I have exactly two memories of that day that remain crystal clear in my head, as if they were somehow captured and pressed between glass. One of them will remain private. Here is the other: In that moment, when the doctor told us my dad would die at age 53, time slowed, and I watched my family members collapse like dominoes into the arms of those nearest them. My mother fell sobbing into the pastor’s embrace, and my siblings each reached for their spouses. I was the youngest, and I was alone. “That’s it, then,” I thought. “I have to be the strong one.” And I never let myself cry through the months ahead — not when I went alone into my father’s hospital room and told him he was dying, not when he suffered through every experimental treatment he could find, not as he wasted away to a jaundiced skeleton who could scarcely move, not when his voice became a scratchy rasp, not when he lost his mind and not when, two months later, he died on Oct. 28, 1989. He was buried on Halloween.

2) In April 2001, my brother called me at The Oklahoman to tell me to come back to Pennsylvania. He’d stopped in to visit our mother and found her incoherent and unable to get out of bed. I can’t recall if he knew then that she had cancer, but I know he said she was in bad shape and was asking for me. This time the tears came in a flood. Three of my coworkers, including the woman I would eventually marry, surrounded me as I tried to find a way home. I wasn’t alone. The paper booked me a plane ticket, and soon I was back home. My siblings were steadfast in their refusal to believe our mom could die, but the second I saw her, I knew. Months had passed since the last time I’d seen her, and in that interval, she had shrunk, and I could see in her the same thing I saw in my father so many years before. My mother and I … we’d always been close, but after dad’s death, we’d grown even closer. She was my best friend, and even though I lived more than 1,000 miles away, we talked often and about everything. Now this. I wasn’t ready. My mother had breast and lung cancer. The doctors thought it originated in her breasts and spread into her lungs. They tried to help her, but as with my father, the cancer was too advanced. She was sent to a nursing home to die, and she did, just three weeks after I’d returned home. Again, I have two clear memories. Again, I will share only one. My mother had a fat housecat named Snit. She’d named it that because the cat didn’t like many people and often seemed annoyed, as if she was walking around “in a snit.” The cat was a kitten when my father was still alive, and we had a photograph of my dad sitting at the kitchen table, smiling brightly with Snit perched atop his head. Snit loved only three people in her life: my dad, my mom and me. When mom was at the nursing home, she kept saying that she missed Snit, that she wanted to see her cat again, so I arranged with the staff there to surprise mom by bringing Snit for a visit. Mom was delighted, and Snit jumped into bed with her, curled up beside her and went to sleep. The visit lasted only a few hours, and then I had to reclaim the cat and take her back to my mother’s house. Snit didn’t want to leave. She hid under furniture and hissed at my siblings when they tried to capture her. Efforts to corral her dragged on for 10 minutes, as my mother sobbed. “I’m not ready to leave my baby,” she said repeatedly, and as my attempted act of kindness turned into a tragedy, the true meaning of my mother’s words fell on the room, making it small and somehow airless. Everyone there knew that she wasn’t really talking about the cat. She was talking about me and my siblings, crying out her pain and sorrow and fear in a way she wasn’t willing to do directly. Me taking her cat away had become a metaphor for everything she was losing, everything cancer was stealing from her, and I cried the whole way home. Mom died a few days later, less than a month shy of her 65th birthday. Snit came to live with me. She was an old cat, and several months later, her kidneys began to fail. The vet said the most merciful thing would be to put her to sleep. I spent 15 minutes alone with Snit in an examination room, petting her, telling her I loved her, saying goodbye. Then a vet tech took her away. Snit had become a metaphor for me, too, and losing her was like losing my mother all over again.

3) My wife’s grandmother, a spunky 92-year-old named Irene, is dying of exactly the same sort of cancer as Jim. It’s growing in her colon and liver. Like Jim, she refuses to dwell on it. Unlike him, she has declined treatment for it. Chemo took too much away from her, so she discontinued it. I saw her on Christmas. She looks good. She’s still funny. She’s a tough old girl, the sort who doesn’t believe you should have your mouth numbed just to get a filling, and she’s endured a lot. My wife is close to Irene (who famously grabbed my butt during a wedding photo), and I love her, too. I was worried about taking on this assignment while my wife is facing the loss of her grandmother, but she urged me to do it.

4) In 2008, I had my own cancer scare. I won’t go into details, but it was still fresh when my editors approached me with this assignment.

There you have it. More than you wanted to know and vastly more than I thought I would ever share. Cancer is the worst thing I know, and I live in terror that after taking so much from us already, it will come for the rest of my family, too.