Why
Stepping out of the shadows is one of the toughest things for old-school print journalists to do. In recent years, we’ve had to do it, at least to an extent. The industry has changed, and we can’t hide anymore. You see us on TV sometimes. We appear in videos on our Web site. We blog. For years, my bosses wanted my picture to appear online with my Cold Case series; I successfully avoided that, but now you can see my ugly mug on the Life Is Real site.
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.
