We were both exhausted.
Shortly before leaving on his trip, Dad gave Jan and me long lists of tasks he wanted us to complete in his absence, involving the ongoing interior decorating work and a number of other matters.
When Dad and Theresa returned on September 10, he looked jaunty in a wide-brimmed Australian outback hat. He was tired but in good spirits and shared many funny jokes he had heard in recent weeks. I told him the feedback I had received from the people in New York who were publishing our book, that two out of three editors loved it, while a third thought we had begun extremely well and then lost course a bit. The editors had suggestions for changes, which we set to work on. These were relatively minor, but would take several weeks.
On the second day back, my father went to Group Health Hospital for tests, saying his stomach was still bothering him, and he had lost weight and energy. When I looked at him closely, I noticed that he was pale and drawn. Still, he was in a good mood, with his sense of humor unbowed. When Jan said something to him at dinner about economy air fares, he quipped, “I took a budget flight once. I had to bring my own folding chair!”
On his sixty-fifth birthday, October 8, 1985, Dad showed me the cover proof for Man of Two Worlds, which Putnam had just sent to him. We agreed that it was well done, though privately I noticed a Dune feel to it. I commented that my name was in lettering of equal size to his, and Dad said, “That’s right. I arranged to have it this way.”
We spent the morning working on Man of Two Worlds revisions. My shoulder and neck were bothering me, and Dad’s stomach was really acting up. He said he wasn’t processing fats, that they made him ill, and he was having to eat extremely lean foods. He had to watch what he ate at his birthday dinner.
A few days later we completed our novel and mailed it to New York. Thereupon I set to work on Prisoners of Arionn, my uncompleted science fiction novel.
Later in the month Dad and I were in my car on an errand, and he said his film agent, Ned Brown, was going to seek a large amount of additional money from Dino De Laurentiis, since De Laurentiis had allegedly used portions of two books (Dune and Dune Messiah) in the movie, but only paid for the rights to use one.* Dad said Universal had lost money on the movie, but De Laurentiis had made a “bundle” on the venture—a profit of thirty to forty million dollars.** I didn’t see how that could be possible.
My father began to refer to his medical condition as an intestinal malady. It might be one of half a dozen parasites, he thought, possibly acquired in Mexico in 1983 during the filming of the opening scenes of the movie. Just to play it safe, Group Health was going to perform a biopsy, inserting a long fiber optic tube down his throat and taking “a bite” out of his small intestine. His weight was down twenty pounds in recent months to 150, and he looked thin.
By Wednesday, October 30, 1985, I had developed a bad case of flu and congestion, in addition to my continuing shoulder and neck problems, which I thought might have something to do with stress. In fact, I couldn’t recall the last time I hadn’t felt high stress. Slowly, without warning, it seemed to have crept up on me. A lot of it had to do with my concern over Dad.
He spent the day going back and forth to Group Health facilities in Seattle and Redmond with specimens, along the same highways and roads my mother had traveled when she was so ill. That afternoon he telephoned with good news on Man of Two Worlds. In addition to our sale to Berkley/Putnam, a big foreign publisher, Victor Gollancz, wanted to publish it in the United Kingdom.
At preschool the next day, Margaux, just shy of her fourth birthday, became terrified of the costumes other children were wearing. It was Halloween. She had to sit in the headmistress’s office during a party, eating cookies and drinking milk. That afternoon we stopped by Dad’s and gave him a plate of cookies. He gave us a pumpkin he had carved for Margaux and some pumpkin seeds he had roasted in the oven, referring to them by the Mexican name, semillas. It brought back old memories. That evening I dialed the phone for Margaux, and she thanked “Pop-Pop” for the special pumpkin.
Margaux felt very close to her grandfather. Even when he didn’t have the patience to be around her for long periods, he tried to be sweet and invariably gave her a hug and a kiss. He got a big kick out of her nickname for him.
By the first week of November, doctors were telling Dad they thought he had Crohn’s disease, a chronic intestinal disorder that sometimes involved inflammation and sometimes other problems. If he did have one of the forms of this malady, it looked as if it had been caught early, which was good. It was treatable with sulfa-drugs, and doctors were speculating that the condition might have lain dormant in him, surfacing after the stresses of Mom’s death.
On Saturday, November 9, I visited Dad, and he looked very weak and fragile. He said he was down to 140 pounds, and I noticed with alarm that his handwriting was shaky. The house, with construction activity still going full tilt, was noisy, dusty and depressing. Scaffolds had been set up inside the high dome area, and as I looked around it seemed to me that Dad had taken on too much for his age and condition. Normally he liked to have things under construction as a creative outlet when he had finished writing for the day, or when he took breaks from his study. But now, with everything torn apart, he was too sick to keep up with what he had begun.
That evening he was watching Dune on cable television but fell asleep during it. We teased him about this. His own movie!
Two days later, he was feeling a little better and started working seriously on “Dune 7,” as yet unnamed. To begin, this involved carefully reviewing the other six books in the series for the threads he wanted to continue in the new work. He used a yellow highlighter pen, with which he marked key passages in the books.
After a few days, Dad told me he didn’t have Crohn’s disease. Now the doctors thought it was diverticulitis, a colon inflammation treatable with the same medicine he had been taking. He sounded ill at ease, and I could tell that the continuing uncertainty was bothering him. Penny had been trying to obtain information from Dad in order to help him, but he wasn’t always forthright. Finally he admitted to her that there was a “CAT scan problem,” something that had turned up, and so he had to undergo more tests, involving needle biopsies.
On the twenty-second of November, 1985, Dad called in the morning while I was writing, and told Jan that Group Health had discovered two “small spots of cancer” in his liver, each approximately half an inch wide. He said they were recommending chemotherapy, and added that they still had not figured the intestinal problem out. Jan said she would bring me to the phone, but he did not want to disturb me.
Ten inches of snow had fallen the night before, and when I called my father back a short while later he answered with surprising cheer, saying, “And a snowy good morning to you!”
He possessed, among other attributes, tremendous courage, not unlike that of my mother. “I’ve been leading an interesting life,” he said, in reference to an ancient Chinese curse that no longer seemed funny to me. (“May you lead an interesting life.”)
The following Monday afternoon Dad reported that his liver problem was adenocarcinoma, which alarmed me. “I’ll have to undergo chemotherapy,” he said, “which means nausea and hair loss. After Bev went through the suffering of her initial treatments, she told me, ‘The mind has a marvelous capacity to forget.’ I’m going to keep that in mind.” He paused, and added, “It’s funny, Brian, but I don’t feel too bad about this. They caught it early.”
I recommended that he obtain a second opinion before undergoing chemotherapy, because of side effects, but he didn’t feel that was necessary.
Dr. Bill Scheyer, his friend from Port Townsend, called that evening. Jan got on the line with us and the doctor said, “Don’t listen to what he’s saying about catching it early. Once it’s in the liver, a person’s in big trouble. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. He’s in tough, and I thought you should know what’s going on.” He said chemotherapy had not been successful in the past in t
reating adenocarcinoma of the liver, so he had convinced Dad to obtain a second opinion from an oncologist at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, which had an excellent department for the treatment of cancer. They had computer hookups to other facilities around the world, permitting them to determine state-of-the-art treatments for each disease type. He said the emphasis in diagnosis now would be in determining the primary source of the cancer, which at this point was unknown. If the primary source was in the liver, that would be very bad, so he hoped it was in a more treatable place, such as the colon.
In a dismal mood, I responded that each time we got news on Dad it seemed to grow worse and worse. We thanked Dr. Scheyer for his concern and honesty, and especially for the invaluable counseling he was giving my father.
On Tuesday, November 26, Jan and I were snowbound, since Dad had borrowed our tire chains several months before without telling us. Now he wanted me to drive him back and forth to the clinics for tests, but I couldn’t get out to do it. I telephoned every dealer in the Seattle area looking for chains, thinking I could have a taxi deliver them. But all the chains were sold out. Penny and Ron came to his aid all the way from Port Townsend with their four-wheel-drive truck and chains.
By the first of December, after the snowiest November on record in the region, the weather was beginning to warm. The roads were clearing, and we were able to get over to Dad’s place, where Jan and I lunched with him and Theresa. We had soup and sandwiches. In a surprisingly good mood, Dad said Penny called from Port Townsend to say she was having trouble with a skunk that got into the greenhouse through the cat’s pet door. The whole house was acquiring an aroma. Desperate, she asked Dad if he had an old-fashioned skunk remedy. To this he quipped, “I think you can still find some old-fashioned clothespins for sale in Port Townsend.”
He told me his intestinal disorder was dramatically improved, and that he was eating regular food again. Doctors were still performing tests, however, trying to locate the source of the cancer spots in his liver.
We discussed traction devices for the snow, and I mentioned a bucket of kitty litter I was keeping in the car, to get in and out of difficult parking areas. He mentioned a trick of his own father’s from the 1930s: pour Clorox on the tire treads, thus softening the rubber and providing improved traction.
On Wednesday, December 4, temperatures were warmer, into the mid-forties, and most of the snow had thawed. I struggled in the morning to build up a head of steam on Prisoners of Arionn, and finally pulled seven typewritten pages out of the air—1,750 words. That was pretty good for me, as my usual day of first-draft typing produced around four pages, one thousand words. Often when I felt the worst in the morning I had a good day of writing—starting out slowly and then getting on a roll. As if I was able to tap a deep reservoir of strength in the struggle to produce.
I went to visit Dad at 1:30 that afternoon. When I entered his study at the rear of the house, he smiled at me and closed a paperback copy of Chapterhouse: Dune that he had been highlighting in yellow. He wore a red plaid Pendleton shirt and said he was feeling pretty good, that his weight was up to 152 pounds. Doctors had completed their tests, he said, and had pinpointed the pancreas as the primary source of his cancer.
At the time I had no idea what I was hearing, how serious it was. But I didn’t like the sound of it.
He described a new hyperthermic cancer treatment at the University of Wisconsin Medical Center in Madison, Wisconsin, learned about through the computer network at Swedish Hospital. He said it involved using radiant heat and water vapor to induce fevers of up to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, heating the blood. Dad and Theresa would be leaving the following Sunday.
The doctors wanted him to be physically strong before undergoing treatment, so in Madison they would give him treadmill and other tests before proceeding. He expected to remain there for ten days or so if they accepted him for treatment and added that he would have to go back once a month for the next six months.
This treatment would be administered in conjunction with a type of chemotherapy that didn’t result in hair loss or other undesirable side effects. “I’d rather not get sick to get well,” he said.
The out-of-state procedure was extremely expensive, and he said his Group Health medical insurance would not cover it, due to its experimental nature. He was investigating his Medicare coverage, since he had just turned sixty-five, but didn’t think that would apply either. He said the hyperthermic treatment was “frontier medicine,” but that results for his type of cancer in other people had been encouraging. He emphasized that his cancer had been discovered early, and his tone was upbeat. “When we come into this world we’re given a death sentence anyway,” he added, with an impish wink.
Considering his suffering in recent months I was concerned that the disease had not been discovered all that early, but I said nothing. At least he seemed optimistic, and I thought this would carry him through the difficult times ahead. He had a strong will to fight, to survive.
He also had a sweetness about him in this difficult time, and a quieter, more pensive way. Most of the time he wasn’t his old blustery, exuberant self, but occasional flashes of it gave us hope.
The day after Dad arrived in Wisconsin, he told me by telephone that doctors in Seattle had only given him a 25 percent chance of survival, but his doctor at the University of Wisconsin said, “Oh, you have a much better chance than that.”
The University of Wisconsin had only treated twenty-five or thirty patients under the experimental program, and only one with similar pancreatic and liver conditions. That particular patient responded well and survived the treatment, but did suffer a side effect—a nervous system problem. They felt they could avoid such side effects with Dad through a once-weekly treatment for four successive weeks and other modifications. Indications from the medical team were that Dad appeared to be strong enough for the rigors of the program, but he would be in the hospital for a couple of days undergoing a battery of tests.
On Friday, December 13, 1985, an editorial assistant telephoned from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, saying she was mailing the Man of Two Worlds galleys out for authors’ corrections and that she needed them back by the first week of January. She said she would mail Dad’s copy to him in Wisconsin, and that publication was scheduled for April 1986.
When I spoke with Dad the next day, he said he was starting hyperthermia on Monday, with chemotherapy beginning two days after that. There would be four weeks of treatment through January 4, 1986 (four hyperthermias and four chemotherapies). Then, from January 19 through February 2, they had three more of each scheduled.
My father went into his first hyperthermia session on December 16, and did extremely well, with his heart rate only accelerating to one hundred and twenty beats per minute—better than a thirty-one-year-old jogger who underwent the same procedure. Frank Herbert surprised the doctors with a number of quips, causing them to laugh. One, while his head was sticking out of a heating chamber, was, “What you see is what you get!”
I often sent him humorous messages, including cartoons, jokes, and funny or cute things the children said, items that simultaneously went up on our bulletin board. As with my mother, I hoped humor would be therapeutic, knowing that Norman Cousins credited laughter with curing him from cancer. We also sent Christmas poinsettias.
In subsequent telephone conversations, Dad said Theresa was very supportive and always at his side. She’d only known my father a short while, and already their life together had taken an unfortunate turn with the onset of his illness.
He sounded tired, wrung out from the treatments. The processes were draining his strength, and he had difficulty sleeping well, even with medication. And I heard more than fatigue in his voice. No matter how he tried to get around it, depression was weighing him down. It tugged at my heart to hear this terrible, debilitating emotion in his voice, and I knew it was from more than the physical rigors of hyperthermia and chemotherapy. For some time he had not been able to write, and this was a man whos
e psychological well-being depended upon his ability to create.
But I heard something else in his voice as well, and this gave me pause for hope. No matter how tired my father sounded, no matter how slowly his words came, he was always struggling to be upbeat, fighting to sound cheerful. A constant air of excitement surrounded him. There were new directions Frank Herbert wanted to explore, new worlds to conquer and write about. I sensed that he was reaching for something deep inside, this man who was no stranger to working long hours—reaching for something to keep alive the book that was his own remarkable life.
Chapter 45
How Bare the Pathway Down This Mountain
As I look back on it, I think there may have been some prescience in my father, too….
—Frank Herbert, in Dune
I SPOKE with my father in the morning and again in the afternoon on December 28, 1985. He said he was under 140 pounds and feeling weak. After reading the galleys on Man of Two Worlds, I wanted to insert more material into a war scene on Venus, and we discussed what I would include.
He returned to Seattle from Wisconsin on January 5, 1986, having completed four hyperthermia treatments and the same number of chemotherapy treatments. On the flight back, he and his young wife happened to be on the same plane with science fiction author and editor Frederik Pohl. I met Mr. Pohl at the airport for a brief time, before he hurried off in one direction and I went with my father and Theresa in another.
The doctors reported that he was doing well, but he looked very thin, down to 132 pounds. He had his coat off for a while, and I noticed around the short sleeves of his navy blue pullover shirt that his arms were still muscular, though much less bulky than before. Able to carry heavy luggage without difficulty, he stood erectly and walked briskly, with astonishing energy. His eyes were the familiar eyes, but older and sadder. His smile, like my mother’s when she was so sick, was wan and distant.
Dreamer of Dune Page 54