The day we told you, the sun was high and warm, and a very gentle breeze failed

to stir

branches that didn’t have any leaves. All that week the skies had been a cold chalky gray,

late snows fell, and for days the snows held on to the north and south of everything. The

nurse didn’t correct you when you told her it was winter. It had only been spring a week

and from your window it wasn’t very obvious what season it was. The skies cleared the

day we told you. I was angry the day was so beautiful. But there’s no reason you

shouldn’t find out in spring. That’s just the way things turned out.

You were so surprised. I thought some part of you would have wondered, maybe

not consciously, but some part of you. All you said was wow and boy and hmm. Mom

said the word terminal and for more than a few moments your face had a stretched and

flushed look, like the muscles in your face were trying to hide by being very still.

Mom had not wanted to be the one to do the telling. She wanted all of us to be

there, Rebekah and Naomi and me, but for a doctor to tell you, in a medical way, like we

had been told. I told her I wouldn’t stand for it, that I would feel robbed if a doctor told

you. Your cancer is a medical thing. Your death is not. Death is beyond where medicine

can go. There is nothing medical about death. More doctors should know that.

You should know I am not writing this to you. I am not writing this for you. If I

am perfectly honest I am not even attempting to resurrect you—that is, the you God has

already taken in the manner of His taking you. I am creating a you you never were. A

safer one to say all this to. I don’t know if that is a shortcoming.

I tried to hold your hand on the drive from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids. It was your release

day from neurosurgery and I was happy, but scared. I hope my holding your hand didn’t

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make you feel like you needed to have your hand held. You gave my hand a squeeze then

recoiled. I wasn’t sure why. I try to remind myself that you had that part of your brain

removed that handles language. Even expressions like touch have new meaning. (I don’t

really know what that last sentence means. When expression itself is what has been taken

from you, words like expression and meaning cannot have new meaning. Perhaps new

weight. Like limbs, or an anchor, or a cross.)

Your condition is forcing me to walk through a valley of my own understanding. I

have for several years now focused my spiritual energies on how in Christ the Word was

made flesh, that truth cannot be abstract, that it must be embodied, that language and the

intellect are embodied capacities, fully immersed within the biological human messiness

of household chores and stellar formation and the birth of children. It would be easier if I

still believed in ideas. I could look beyond your body to some ethereal and eternal

deathlessness. But that is not the world the Son of God died in.

Maybe you just weren’t feeling like handholding. I try to focus on the practical

options. I am afraid words like father and son have changed. That too is why I held your

hand.

Your cancer is called glioblastoma multiforme—GBM. It’s the most aggressive form of

brain cancer one can have. If untreated, it kills in less than three months. (I don’t

remember how fast it killed Rick Travnicek, but it seemed like weeks.) Chemotherapy

and radiation can increase life expectancy by a year. They call that “palliative” treatment,

which comes from the Latin word palliare, or “to cloak.” That sounds appropriately

euphemistic. After your February stroke there still existed the possibility of recovery. The

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pathology report following your March surgery ended that. The life expectancy charts

I’ve poured over these last days don’t ever indicate quality of life. They say five percent

can live as long as two years, even more. They don’t say if those five percent are

comatose or mentally and emotionally vacant.

Nobody knows why or how GBM comes about. (What is the proper grammar

here? Happens? Emerges? I despise the passive violence of all this. It’s not that

something has ceased to work well. Something has begun to work lethally well.)

The neurosurgeon successfully removed all advancing portions of the tumor, but

from February to March, between your stroke and your surgery, it grew from

unobservable to the size of your entire left frontal lobe. It will grow again. HIV and AIDS

are less violent. If AIDS were GBM, your T-cells wouldn’t become fewer, they would

increase in number, and defect, attacking your immune system. GBM is violent internal

overthrow, involuntary suicide, like hari kari, except the one handing you your blade is

God.

I hope it is obvious why we waited to tell you your prognosis. What would you

have done with all that information, other than (on your most lucid of days) just replied,

Okay, and then continued on, trapped within the solitude of your incapacity?

You’re resting now. I was too, a moment ago. Your hospital room was a zoo. I often feel

guilty and selfish at birthdays and other gatherings, around all the kids. My body gets

rigid and I move toward the television because I don’t want to have to be creative and

funny and playful, for hours. (The secret joy of being an uncle, rather than a parent, is

going home.) I was relieved today by the excuse to close my eyes and rest. As useless as

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those over-the-counter antihistamines are with my allergies, they did let me annex the

couch and drift away for a time. After I woke up I went to check in on you and you were

in the bathroom. I knew right away you were hiding. Your hands were on your face and

forehead, covering your eyes, as they have been more and more these days. I asked you if

you wanted me to take the kids down to the visitors’ lounge. You nodded your head in

resignation, and you looked so defeated. I didn’t know then if the defeat I saw was

exhaustion, from the chaos of little children, or an awareness, somewhere deep, of the joy

your grandchildren once gave you. I know they still do. Perhaps just differently. That’s

my hope. You were always a very patient man. Using the past tense feels like treachery.

James fell asleep on my chest yesterday, like I used to do on yours when I was an infant

(I’m saying that as if I remember it). I didn’t have any vinyl albums of Cynthia Clawson

so I sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star over and over until I was whispering the words,

and James was sleeping. Hospitals aren’t very quiet places actually, with all the elevators

and beeping machines and people walking about. I had to do a lot of singing and

shushing. But for nearly a whole half hour he slept right there on my chest. That was a

first for me. I was very aware of my breathing, trying to make sure that I didn’t make too

much noise, and that the rise and fall of my chest kept a constant rhythm. I did pretty

well, but after half an hour he woke up. He couldn’t see Rebekah anywhere and he cried

with that little cry of his. That half hour was remarkable. So much vulnerability, and so

narrowly and particularly located, between my belt and chin, just sleeping. I remember

the first time an infant sucked on my finger. Ella was her name, the daughter of my

friends, Chad and Jane. I expected Ella’s lips to just pucker around my finger, but her

4
little jaws and gums were strong. I was mesmerized. Everyone told me there was no way

I’d become a priest.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m not married. I’m glad you saw Naomi and

Rebekah married, that you have met their children, that you baptized little James.

I have been trying to remember our most recent conversations. A week or so before your

second stroke, the one in February, you met me at the airport, to see me off on my way to

Anchorage. A literary review had published one of my plays and I got invited up for a

staged reading. I had never been to Alaska. Neither had you. You wanted to talk with me,

at 6am at the airport, not about Alaska, but about sexual morality and how I was doing

with chastity. The café at the Cedar Rapids airport is not large, and one table over from

us sat a woman with her teenage daughter. I wasn’t sure whether to be incensed or

endeared, or maybe just humored by your peculiar sense of timing. So often we lived on

the edges of misunderstanding.

The night I got back from Alaska you had come out to the airport to drop off my

car keys. You left my apartment keys on the left front tire and, for some reason, kept the

car keys in your pocket. (Was the tumor already growing?) I broke into my car in search

of the keys you’d said you probably left on the car seat by accident. But you had to drive

back out to the airport anyway, since neither the keys you’d left on the tire nor the keys

you’d left on the seat were the right keys. When you drove up I told you that if

Alzheimer’s truly skipped a generation that I was in serious trouble. (Did I ever tell you

about when Grandpa tried to putt into a fairway flag? I didn’t have the heart to tell him.)

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The whole car key thing was funny, like so many of your mix-ups. Oh, Dad, I said to

Mom, You won’t believe what he…

I avoided you every day leading up to your stroke, still frustrated that you had

wanted to talk about sexual morality rather than Alaska. That was our last conversation.

The airport incident made me remember your fretted history with touch. (I always

believed it was because of Grandpa, because of how he would make you sit down on the

toilet, unlike other boys, and how he scolded you as a child for stuttering but then later

felt threatened by you, as you became smarter and more successful than him.) I remember

getting fake-mad at you for having called Mom an octopus, back when you two were

newlyweds and she would always want to cuddle in bed with you before going to sleep.

When Mom first told me that you had called her that, I didn’t believe her, but Mom has

never been able to lie or keep secrets, so I eventually had to admit she was telling the

truth. The octopus story enraged me, but only for a time. I eventually found it funny, the

way painful things can become funny once you have found a way to let them die. I hope I

will one day be able to look at these last months and discover a hidden humor.

The first time you were in the hospital, everything was so new and I was still hopeful. I

thought I might even use literature to help heal you. I thought I could read to you Donnne

and Hemingway and that, after everything, we might even have a connection we never

had before. This was very idealistic. There was still an after. When the nurse came the

second time to scan your bladder, you smiled, which meant neither that you did not have

to go, nor that you had to. I was trying to read you Hemingway’s Big Two Hearted River

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because of the simple sentences about trout fishing and canned apricots. I thought the

simple sentences might help your mind. You were born in Michigan, and we had gone

trout fishing and camping up around Lake Superior, and I was not long back from war,

just like in Hemingway’s story.

I made it to this passage, but no farther: He felt he had left everything behind him,

the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.

The nurse caught me crying, pausing between sentences. She tried not to notice. I

had been drinking wine more frequently. And falling often in love. But not really in love.

I have been very lonely. Perhaps that was why you had wanted to talk with me about sex

that morning at the airport.

I still feel guilty for reading you such a melancholy story. You have been given no

choice about thinking or writing. Everything is now back of you.

After the war I needed to reclaim something sensory and simple and good.

Something to take the place of the blood and the shit and the everything else. Watching

you suffer is not like war. Nor like recovering from war. I hate seeing you like this. I do

however like the me who has to do things for you more than the one who didn’t have to.

Tonight I tried to give you a hot towel shave. (I forgot my badger brush and neither of us

owns a straight razor. They’re not easy to find.) In Iraq I was often the company barber. I

was pretty good at giving people fades that didn’t have to be shaved off the next day for

not being regulation. You can grow a thicker beard than I can. (I’m somewhat jealous

really.) I feel boyish and fatherly all at once, doing for you what you taught me. People

say men bond more on a basketball court than in a café, sharing activity rather than

7
conversation. Being your barber is an intimacy I enjoy. (I nicked you above the lip,

though. I felt terrible. I’ll buy new blades.)

I recently received a letter, from Jared Travnicek, Rick’s son. I had written to

Jared the day after learning your prognosis. I had been thinking about Jared for weeks,

even before I learned his father had also had glioblastoma. Jared was fifteen then and I

was sixteen. I am twenty-nine now. I wrote to Jared about how his father had performed

emergency surgery on me that time I’d taken an elbow to the mouth during that soccer

game in Muscatine. You raced me back to Cedar Rapids driving ninety miles an hour and

Dr. Travnicek met us at his office on Mt. Vernon Road. And you two chuckled to each

other about having the same first name. So, what seems to be the problem, Rick? Well,

such and such, Rick. That’s very grave, Rick. And so on. I couldn’t say anything because

my two front teeth had been knocked back parallel to the roof of my mouth.

I told Jared that his father’s death was when I stopped attending Pentecostal

churches. I was so angry with Francis (I never called him Pastor or Reverend). I thought

Francis was being outright malicious in ‘claiming’ Dr. Travnicek’s healing, because he

was clearly going to die, and not even St. Paul had been healed by God when he asked

that his thorn in the side be removed. Men at church told me that Paul’s thorn was not a

physical but a moral ailment, lust, because he was celibate. I thought they were fools and

told them it says thorn. I wanted to ask them whether they felt more guilt than Paul for

lusting, since they had wives.

During one of Francis’ sermons about how God was going to heal Rick through

faith, I remember Rick’s wife in the front row, crying. Jared and Jonathan sat next to her.

8
Jonathan, Jared’s younger brother, also was crying. Jared was not crying. He looked tired,

and like his father, except for a smoother face. Jared had deep dark eyes and dark hair.

Both Dr. and Mrs. Travnicek had deep dark eyes and dark hair, but Jared more resembled

his father.

I remember also being particularly aware of all those flags and banners around

Francis. Opposite the American flag on the altar was the Israeli flag. (Or stage, as they

didn’t really have an altar). It was all too much, all that apocalyptic triumphalism.

Belief in the Rapture (a wonderful fiction not one human had ever even heard of

prior to the 19th century), when God, just poof, sucks up all the Christians, like in an

episode of The Twilight Zone, is nothing more, no matter how well intending, than a

naive attempt to avoid suffering. Belief in universal faith healing is an attempt to avoid

the suffering—the suffering which modern science has allowed us to understand the how

of but not the why. But it doesn’t take a prophet of God to know cancers and tsunamis

might proliferate in an age of bioengineering, nuclear warfare, and global warming.

If you want to read the Biblical book of Revelation literally, why not read an

ecological disaster? Revelation 11:18 says that God will return “to destroy those who

destroyed the earth.” Destroying the earth is no small order. It would probably take a lot

of destroyers. Like billions plundering the earth’s natural resources. People getting boils

and the moon turning red and the waters turning to blood sounds like what all of the

technologies we have created, which ever more distance ourselves from the natural order,

will eventually achieve: eliminating us from that natural order. Judgment is real. It’s a

law of physics. We ourselves advance our own judgment.

9
 But of course everyone has various Raptures to believe in. Others call it “nirvana”

or “medical technology” or “progress” or “evolution,” where a special chosen or

enlightened or advanced or progressive or naturally-select get to miss out on Natural

Judgment, the law of consequence, if only they join the upward march. At least with

evolution, suffering is still at the center: all those unlucky mutations with their tires

spinning in history’s mud. The problem, I think, is our obsession to be or become the

evolved (why are definite articles always so problematic?), to push evolution’s hand,

evading the messiness of now through a rapture into the not yet. Nothing causes more

suffering than the future, which is to say, an idea. And nothing lets you know you are

now than suffering.

Any attempt to avoid suffering outright is fraud, and typically it ends in violence.

Either we learn how to digest it—suffering—which I’m pretty sure means sharing it, or

we will push it onto others. I like to think of Jesus as a minister to all us unlucky

mutations yet to evolve into love: the willingness to endure rather than impose suffering.

I think the next stage in evolution has mostly to do with time, which is to say, love: the

ability to be present. But now I’ve gotten very far afield from Dr. Travnicek, and from

Francis and all his banners and flags, all those banners on tall shiny metal poles.

There was that one banner of The Lion of Judah, threaded with silver and gold

and violet and shiny black. It was large and very beautiful. The other banner I remember

was the dove of the Holy Spirit, woven simply of white thread, and silver thread that

looked like tinsel on a tree. And in the middle of all that was Francis, his hands up in the

air, waving, rallying, praying.

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 If you clutch on to His clothing, and if you pray and plead and pray and pray, and

if you come before the Lord with His promises—ask and you shall receive, knock and the

door shall be opened—then the lame will be made well and even the dead will rise.

After Dr. Travnicek died, Francis stopped quoting the passage of Isaiah that says,

By his stripes we are healed. I don’t remember him ever apologizing to the congregation,

or to the Travniceks. It still angers me. I don’t think anything angers me more than

triumph. Not even Christ escaped suffering.

I haven’t described the other night yet for a reason. I’ve needed time to digest. I came

back to the hospital, after having gone to work on yours and Mom’s finances, and you

looked so crazy (I hate to use that term, but it’s true). To me it was like when Mom for a

moment turned her back on you the day of your stroke and you had that awful seizure.

She heard you groaning and, when she turned back around, you were rigid and shaking

and foaming at the mouth. I don’t know if she’s described any of it to you. Anymore, she

has a hard time with even the word seizure. Well that other night I heard Mom walk

through the kitchen into the dining room. I called to her but she didn’t say anything. I

walked out to her and she was crying, she was inconsolable really, almost like after your

seizure. She said you weren’t letting her touch you and that when the boy who takes food

orders came, and Mom tried to order your food for you, you threw the menu and sank

back into your bed, biting your lip, your eyes closed, and you were sighing and shaking

your head.

She tries so hard to remember you are physically not well, that you’ve had

gravely serious brain surgery, but it’s hard for her, you’re her husband, she still needs

11
things from you. I told her I’d talk to you. She said, What are you going to talk to him

about? I told her, He’s lost a lot but he’s not all gone. But she didn’t want me to scold

you. I told her that you spent thirty-five married years transforming yourself into too

much of a man not to be held to it. I wouldn’t say she agreed with me but she told me

okay.

When I made it back to your hospital room you were seated on the edge of the

couch, in the corner of the room. I didn’t see you at first. The lights were low. Your legs

were crossed and you were hunched over your legs, and your head was shaking back and

forth jittery. You saw me looking at you, but you looked away. The scar from your

surgery seemed more pronounced that night, the back half of your head with all your hair,

the front half stubble. It made you look all the more split and severed. I don’t like

thinking about how you looked that night. I told you that we needed to talk and you just

looked at me, lost somewhere deep in confusion. Then you said to me, Yes, as if you

already knew why I was there and felt sorry, but didn’t know how to do anything about it.

I sat next to you on the couch and didn’t put my hand on your hand, or your leg,

or your shoulder. I told you that we were not coming down all the time just because we

were worried about you, or because you needed to be taken care of, but because we

needed to be near you, that even though so much has been taken from you, we still need

things from you. I mentioned death for the first time. I didn’t tell you everything, but I

wanted you to be able to feel something of our fear of losing you—because you’re not

dead yet. I’m not sure how much you understood. Your head was still shaking, nervously.

I told you I have no idea how desolate and alone you must feel, especially when we’re all

around you and you can’t tell us what you feel or think. People feel the loneliest around

12
other people. You can still understand much of what comes in, but you can’t generate any

of your own sentences or thoughts. I told you that you must feel just as alien inside,

because without language you can’t even tell yourself what you think or feel, which is

probably worse than anything. And you nodded your head and I just knew you

understood me.

“Do you know why you aren’t letting Mom touch or help you? Or do you not

understand what you’re feeling?” I asked.

You shook your head, and, after a very long pause, you said you didn’t know.

That felt honest, but sometimes you say you don’t know because it’s the easiest way to

put a stop to things.

I’ve been the only person these past two months who’s been able to get you to do

things you don’t want to. It’s because I press you. I tell you you have only one option,

and that it sucks and that it’s without doubt the hardest thing you have ever faced. I tell

you that you have only yourself to blame, my being so hard with you, because you raised

me not to run when things get difficult and I’m not going to let you do any different.

Sucks for you, I tell you, this is how you raised me.

You stood up and started pacing, looking at the floor and trying to touch your

right foot to floor tiles in a pattern, each time the same way. I don’t remember what I was

saying when you walked away from me. I had to go after you, grab you, physically

smother you. I lowered my arms but held on to your hand and said you absolutely could

not go off on your own. You said, No, and tried to walk on anyway. I kept hold of your

hand, then pulled you again to me. You hugged me for a moment, like when you

squeezed my hand and recoiled, on the ride from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids, but I didn’t

13
let go of you this time, and I told you I would not let you be alone no matter how much

you tried. This is your Garden of Gethsemane, I told you, and that even Jesus asked that

his cup be passed from him, and it’s okay to be scared, you’d be crazy if you weren’t, but

I will not fall asleep on you.

The nurse came over with a walking belt to see if you wanted to wear the belt and

take a walk with me, but you just went back into your room and sat down on your bed.

That was when your eyes finally came back and I felt I was looking again at my father.

You were still sighing, but your head stopped shaking.

The day of your surgery was the first time I had ever seen you scared and not able

to do anything about it, and it happened several times that day: in the bathroom when you

couldn’t bring your right hand to your face to shave and you said, Yes, when I asked you

if you wanted me to help you; in the ER in Cedar Rapids; and then again in the ER at the

University. I’ve had too many firsts lately. When the nurse came to take you into surgery,

you tried to remove the breathing tube from your nose and you grabbed at the rails of

your bed, raising yourself, trying to leave. Mom and I had to talk you back down. She

told you to imagine her on one side of you and Jesus on the other. I hated that she said

that, though, because I was afraid you weren’t going to make it through surgery and I

didn’t want you to get too comfortable with Jesus and angles. Seeing you lay back down

in your bed, unable to speak or think, was the bravest thing I ever saw you do. I heaved

and wheezed, walking away from you, thinking that I had abandoned you and that that

was the last time I would ever see you.

The other night was like that. It’s easier to think of you slipping beyond this world

than having to linger on in it imprisoned in such agony. When I walked in the other night,

14
you could have been possessed you were so lost inside yourself. When I left, all I could

think of was what might’ve happened had I not come, to scold you as Mom said.

I have been thinking a lot about the quiet of the world, the everywhere quiet of hills,

trees, stars, our bodies. I am easily overcome. Sometimes while driving, I look out at the

beauty of everything, and I want to stop the car and walk out into the hills. Then I realize

that if I did walk out into the hills, the hills would kill me. It would not take long. We

have to protect ourselves from the land. We do not often recognize the relationship

between beauty and violence. You were always so amazed by stars and astronomy, how

we can perceive the light of stars that no longer exist. I haven’t the foggiest, you’d always

say.

We also do not often recognize how much our personal worlds depend upon

precise patterns of specific sounds: voices, the rumbles of our environments, thoughts.

They say a baby in the womb, by the third trimester, can recognize its mother’s voice.

You are suffering an internal quiet I struggle to grasp. The silence inside you is

not the absence of certain words which you just can’t find. Your silence is outright

nothing. When you try to speak, to think, to understand your feelings, nothing arises. In

the midst of such lack, how can you possibly comprehend that very soon you will die? I

cannot even imagine this. How alien you must feel, to yourself. You are not suffering the

voluntary quietude of monks who take vows of silence, or of those whose vocal cords

have been damaged but who can nonetheless think and reflect, internally. Your silence is

not loss of speech. It is far deeper.

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