Old Hands, part 5

Though my dad’s initial prognosis after his lung surgery had been good, he didn’t seem to be making a full recovery. He was tired all the time and generally didn’t feel well. It was easy to attribute this to chemotherapy, which made him feel sick and exhausted, but he never really bounced back. After several weeks the doctor found that he was anemic, but it took still longer to determine why.

The reason was that he was bleeding internally. He had another tumor, this one in the colon, so the lung cancer had metastasized after all.

By October it was clear that we were out of hope. “I’m a dead guy,” he told me matter-of-factly one day on the phone. He had always had a no-nonsense attitude about death. I took in his news—I felt shock, but not really surprise—and when I got off the phone I had a good cry. The girls and Mike were there with me, which I appreciated. But the thought of losing my dad—“I’ve had a great life, I have no regrets,” he said—well, it would be a tremendous loss.

Madeline and Sol Field, friends from Stamford, were visiting us that week, and I was horrified when I learned that Madeline had taken it upon herself to call someone she knew back home and have her tell my friends that my dad was dying. I jumped into my car and drove in to my 12-Step meeting that evening in a fury. I talked to some people at the meeting, and by the time I drove home I knew I had to be frank with Madeline.

“I’m very angry that you told Shelly about my father,” I said. “That was my information to give, not yours. And I’m especially unhappy that you told her to tell Amy. Amy is my close friend, and this is something I wanted to tell her myself.”

Madeline apologized and began asking if I was still her friend. I just felt more irritated that she was going in that direction. I had something serious going on in my family, and this was a distraction.

Fortunately, Madeline and Sol moved on to Barcelona, I got to speak to Amy myself, and Mike’s brother Brian and his friend Carrie came to visit next. Brian was a pleasure to have around—the kids adored him—and Carrie, whom we didn’t know well, turned out to be as much fun as he was. On the car ride to Segovia she taught us how to avoid carsickness by sticking just your fingertips out the window, and in Ávila she ran up and down the steps of the city wall with Julie and Lisa. We took them to all the best eating places and taught them to appreciate jamón and tortilla española.

We kept them so busy that they didn’t get a chance to do much shopping. On their last day I agreed to take them into Madrid and show them some of the stores before I went to my Spanish class. We made it through four or five key places in an hour, and they were dizzy. “This is so great!” Brian said. “If we were here without you, we’d still be on that corner over there, turning the map around, trying to figure out where we were!”