It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  So I always start getting bored and depressed after about a week of time off at home, and this is no exception. In fact, it’s much worse than usual, because now I am thinking about our situation all the time. Since I have nothing else to define myself by, I become Brendan Halpin, Spouse of a Cancer Patient. And since I don’t have to run anywhere or do anything, I get to contemplate all the stuff I wasn’t thinking about before. When she was in the hospital, I just took it as a given that this treatment would work. But what if it doesn’t? And even under the best of circumstances, we’re not really talking about a cure here. We’re talking about keeping it at bay for a period of time.

  Now that Kirsten is out of the hospital, it makes contemplating the next round that much harder, because we know what it’s going to be like, but also, having just come out of something so difficult, I am now sick to fucking death of this whole thing. I have found this before–you know, the job, or the apartment, or whatever that you have had for years suddenly becomes intolerable after you know you are going to leave. At least that’s the way it’s always been for me–I never got all misty-eyed thinking of the colleagues I’d never see again, or thinking of the street I’d rarely walk down again. My reaction has always been, “I can’t wait to get away from this horrible place and these horrible people,” and while it would seem logical that little annoyances would bug you less in these circumstances, they get magnified, so you’re just like, “I can’t fucking wait to get out of this fucking place!”

  Well, I can’t fucking wait to get out of this fucking place. I am sick of being sad, I’m sick of worrying, I’m sick of having people look meaningfully into my eyes and say, “so how is Kirsten,” I’m sick of having to rely on people’s kindness to keep my house clean, I’m sick of thinking about it, I’m sick to fucking death of living in the shadow of cancer and of having that be what defines me, and Kirsten and Rowen to everybody else, and to ourselves. There they go, that brave family, how do they keep their sense of humor through all this, isn’t it sweet how he shaved his head, my but that kid seems to be doing well, considering, I just don’t know how they do it, I know I would fall apart if it was me, thank God it’s not me. I just want to be a normal person again.

  And the thing is, I can’t. I can’t ever. I realize that I have been fooling myself. I have been thinking that once the second round of treatment is over, that that’s when we get our normal lives back. But the sad fact is that we never ever get our lives back like we had them before. There will always be appointments, and drugs, and possibly surgeries, and maybe new drugs, and encouraging test results and discouraging test results, and unless I fall over dead in three years like my dad, I will probably, in ten years, or fifteen, or twenty, have to put Kirsten in the ground, or else burn her up and try to figure out how to live then. And I don’t even know how to live now.

  I have been feeling like I’m on hold, like I’ve been on hold for three months, (please continue to hold. Your life is important to us) and my thought has been, well, as soon as we get our lives back, I can stop eating like a hog, as soon as things are back to normal I will stay on top of my planning and correcting, as soon as this is over I will take a deep breath and get back to living like a normal person again. But I won’t. This disease has stolen that life from me, and from Kirsten, and worst of all from Rowen, and we can’t wait for later to figure out how to put a life together. We have to do it now. And I don’t know how.

  Fuckin’ Up

  On January 2, Kirsten and I go to the grocery store. We will later be chastised for this by Dr. J and two nurses, who are incredulous that we didn’t understand when they gave us this discharge booklet that said, “Try to avoid crowds,” that that meant was that Kirsten was basically supposed to be under house arrest. I guess they have done this so much that they think it’s obvious, and they forget that this is our first time through this. Bad communication.

  Anyway, speaking of bad communication, we are in the grocery store, and somehow, next to the oranges, Kirsten says, “So how exactly did the plan for this week get changed?”

  “Uhhhh. Yeah…” Shit. I am busted. We had agreed that I would take the whole week after vacation off to take care of her. And then, before vacation, I established that Tuesday was a professional development day which I could blow off with no problem, and Wednesday I got a former colleague to come in and give an introduction to The Odyssey lecture, and if anything at all was going to happen for the rest of the week, I was going to have to spend some serious time planning and writing up sub plans, which I couldn’t really do before vacation because I was running around too much, and then Kirsten came home and it just sort of got away from me, so what I did was just sort of change the default plan from taking all four days off to taking two days off. I will say in my defense that if Kirsten had really been bedridden and everything, I certainly would have stayed home.

  Ok, now for the ugly part. Well, the first part of the ugly part. The really ugly part, the ugliest part of all, is that I can’t stand to take any time off of work. There were the practical considerations of what was planned for the classes to do, but the bottom line is that I love to work and I need to work to keep me sane, and it is my favorite thing right now. And I felt guilty about saying that in our planning conversations. How can you possibly say to your sick spouse that you want to spend as little time as possible at home with her because you love to work so much? I, for one, am way too much of a coward to say that, and also it would have entailed me revealing what an asshole I am, so I just revealed what an asshole I am with my actions instead, by changing the plan without talking to Kirsten about it.

  And now she is calling me on it in the supermarket. And so, up and down the aisles we have the conversation, and I reveal what I just said about how I didn’t know how to assert how important work was to me, and she says, next to the juice boxes, “It just makes me sad that after 12 years we are still having this bad communication.”

  As we round the corner to the cereal aisle, she says, “I mean…I’ve tried to get other people to do stuff whenever I could. My mom came up, your mom came up, Nan came up. It just doesn’t seem like you’ve done that much.”

  I am dumbstruck. She’s wrong. That is so terribly unfair. She’s right. I don’t say anything until we get to canned tomatoes, because I have no idea how to respond to this. “What?” she says. “what are you thinking?”

  “I guess….I guess I really don’t think that’s fair.” I manage. “I’ve done a lot.” She backs off, and we check out, and then we head to the car and she starts to cry. Now, Kirsten is not the kind of person who cries a lot. Whereas I cry all the time, (at the end of the cartoon Grinch, during Rugrats in Paris, etc. etc. etc.), when Kirsten cries it is an event. I can probably remember every time she has cried since I’ve known her.

  So now tears are falling, and I have caused them. “It’s not easy for me to ask for help,” she says, and she cries and cries and I feel like the total shit that I am. I start apologizing profusely, and she accepts, and I continue apologizing until my apologizing becomes incredibly annoying, and she says, “I understand. You can stop apologizing. It’s done now. I’ll be fine. I just need to be sad for a while.” This is just a knife in my heart. It’s worse than the tears. and I offer to take those days off, but the truth is she doesn’t really need me around to help, she just needs me to have wanted to, and I couldn’t do that, and there is nothing I can do to go back and make this right.

  After all I have thought and heard about guys who have affairs during this time, I have become them. Not because I have slept with anyone else, but because I betrayed my wife while she was sick. Yeah, I’ve done a lot of stuff, but when she asked me to give up the thing that means the most to me, when she, the love of my life, my best friend, asked me to pick her over work, I didn’t do it. I have willingly done all kinds of stuff, but she is right in a sense that I haven’t done much, because everything else I have done hasn’t really involved making sacrifices for her.

  I fee
l like a total dick. I guess that’s because I am a total dick. I find myself trying to think and rationalize all day, trying to think of a way I can not be the guy who did something shitty and made his wife–his wife who’s sick with cancer, yet–his wife who never cries, yet–cry, but I can.

  I call Danny, and he listens and says, yeah, I fucked up, but, you know, people fuck up, and I should really make some kind of gesture that says I fucked up and please forgive me, and that even though a flower delivery or something seems cheesy, especially to smart, savvy, women like our wives, it tends to work anyway. “Great,” I say, “Except we’re not allowed to have flowers or chocolate in the house.” True. It’s part of Kirsten’s low-immunity regime. The chocolate part is killing her.

  So I can’t do anything except be contrite, and she is not one of these people who holds a grudge and mopes around for days, so she seems to forgive me pretty quickly. But then, of course, it will be a hell of a long time before I can forgive myself.

  Back to School

  I go back to school one day after the students do, and it is wonderful. I have to get there a little bit later than I’m used to, because Kirsten still needs to sleep a lot and is not really ready to take over the parenting duties at 7:00 a.m., so I take Rowen to preschool an hour and a half earlier than she’s used to going. She is a pretty good sport about it, considering. She hates change, and while it’s true that, yes, she does spend the entire walk on the first day moaning, “I’m tiiiiiired…..I’m tiiiiiiired….” and she does spend most of the second day moaning, “I’m colllllllllld…..I’m collllllllld” (Superdad forgot her hat and mittens when it was like 20 degrees outside), she does not get hysterical or throw tantrums, and it seems to be ok. Also, groaning and all, I just really enjoy any time the two of us have together.

  So I drop her off, hop on the subway and head to school. One of the first things I do is find the girl I was shitty to on the day before vacation and apologize. She has no memory at all of what I am talking about and looks at me like I am vaguely insane for bringing it up. I find this happens the majority of times when I am kicking myself for saying something unkind to a kid–I end up apologizing, and they don’t even remember what I am talking about. I have two theories on this: one is that they are just so used to teachers being assholes to them that they kind of don’t notice, and the other is that I am a little too hard on myself. Probably both things are true.

  Classes go surprisingly well, given the fact that I haven’t had time or energy to plan anything, and I actually find time to start wading through the mountain of papers I have to correct that I didn’t do before vacation, and I can start thinking and worrying about other things besides cancer, like my advisees and their big and small crises, and like how I am living a live-action version of Animal Farm with humans.

  Maybe I should explain. As I said, I teach in a charter school, and our founders, we’ll call them Snowball and Napoleon, were teachers in a large urban public school and were appalled by the stupidity and/or evil of the institution they worked for and were sure that, as teachers, they could do better. So they started their own school.

  Which is a hell of a gutsy move and which I admire them for. I think their instinct that teachers know what they are doing is pretty sound (though I can certainly think of a whole raft of exceptions from places I have worked), and without them the school would not exist, and teaching in this school is pretty much my dream job, so I am grateful to them.

  Except now neither Snowball nor Napoleon is teaching anymore, but they are still on the board, and the board is now telling us that we need to create a position for someone primarily concerned with grants and PR, and that the teachers and principal should report to that person. In other words, they want to give us a superintendent and totally duplicate the fucked up structure of the fucked-up schools that this school was supposed to be a counter-example to. Four legs good, two legs better.

  I get angry about what appears to be a really bad move from any number of perspectives, but, and I know this is not true of my colleagues, for me it is a fun kind of angry. Because the bottom line is that whether we turn into just another fucked up school or not matters a whole hell of a lot less to me than Kirsten living or dying. So this fight to me is like the video games I’ve been playing. Sure I want to kill the guy in the hoopty pickup who attacks my lethal subwoofer-equipped car with a swarm of mutant bees, but when it’s game over I am not really that disturbed. (except, you know, at myself for engaging in this simulated violence that goes against pretty much everything I believe and also for getting so into it. Sometimes Kirsten wanders in while I’m playing and asks what’s going on, and I have to sheepishly explain that I am trying to stop a guy with a specially modified deadly disco ball from destroying Las Vegas by rippling the ground below him with deadly bass.) Fighting about this proposed change in the school feels like the same thing. It’s fun while it lasts, but I am not really losing any sleep over it. I have taught in fucked-up schools before, and as long as I can work with kids I will find a way to be happy.

  Also, I really like my colleagues. One day, sort of out of the blue, this woman that I know only slightly comes into my classroom while I am sitting there shooting the shit with somebody instead of plowing through the scandalous amount of ungraded papers atop my desk, and tells me that she had a girlfriend who had cancer–well, she is circumspect about saying girlfriend–she uses those careful phrases like “I was with someone” and “This person” (which I guess gay people probably get used to saying for protection, which is a damn sad statement about us breeders) had cancer, and she said how all she as the cancer patient’s partner could stand to do was work. And, she said, her co-workers, friends and family didn’t understand, they all thought she should be at home all the time, but she just had to work or she would go insane. And I explain that I feel the same way, and she tells me that she knows exactly how I feel, and that she understands.

  And this is just such a tremendous gift. She doesn’t give me any platitudes or empty reassurances or advice or even offers to talk when I need to that I would have to awkwardly thank her for and then feel vaguely guilty for not following up on. She just says that she understands. I am genuinely touched, and I thank her, but I am not sure it was profuse enough, because she has done something wonderful. She has done God’s work.

  I think this is why the idea of Jesus having been God is so important to so many Christians (though, as I’ve said, not especially to me)–because it implies that God was human and so fully understands what we are going through. And I have to admit that that’s a nice idea, but then if you say, well, if Jesus was human, he must have had uncontrollable boners when he was thirteen, you get people wanting to burn you at the stake, so maybe I understand their belief system a little less than I think I do.

  I don’t know whether Jesus was God, or God was Jesus, or whether either of them had uncontrollable boners when they were thirteen (though every human male I know did), but I do know that for me, today, God’s face is the face of a gray-haired lesbian who tells me she understands me.

  The Heroic Trio

  Friday night I decide to do something wackier and rowdier than I have done in years: I am going to a midnight movie. Now I know that this probably doesn’t sound like much of a bender, but keep in mind that I have been a high school teacher for eight years and have never started work later than 7:30 A.M., and I have been a parent for 4 years, and can’t remember ever sleeping past 7:30 A.M. even on a weekend in all that time, so doing anything that’s going to get me home at 2:00 A.M. is just totally out of character and seems incredibly rowdy, which I guess tells you how deeply deeply lame I am.

  I almost don’t make it. The first week of school after a vacation is always exhausting, and this is the same week in which I pulled my Judas routine (though I like to think of it as a milder betrayal, so let’s say my Saint Peter routine), so I am still kind of emotionally worn out, and at about 9:00 P.M. Kirsten crawls into bed and I go to tuck her in and say I’ll j
ust lie down for a few minutes, and she tells me that I have to stay up or I’ll feel like absolute shit, so I get up and power through the fatigue and grogginess.

  I head over to the theater. I should say that I have come here not to see just any movie. This is The Heroic Trio, which I have rented many times but never seen on a big screen. It is an action movie from Hong Kong about three beautiful superheroes who have to fight first each other and then an androgynous demon who lives below the city and who is kidnapping babies looking for the next Chinese emperor. And who shoots poison needles from his or possibly her fingers. It features some really spectacular fights, an evil guy who gets his finger cut off and then eats it, some cool decapitations, and one scene where a spinning, flying motorcycle is used as a weapon. Did I mention that the heroines are all fantastic babes? Plus it has tragedy, comedy, lots of fighting on wires, and you never have to wait more than five minutes to see some really spectacular asskicking, and also the ending pretty much makes sense, both of which are in marked contrast to a certain other martial arts movie that since I wrote about it has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, which I know are basically pieces of crap, remember Pia Zadora won one, but still, I was right about the awards thing.

  Anyway, this movie looks really cool–a lot of it is shot through blue filters, and it has some pretty good sets, so I decide that seeing it on the big screen will be worth it. But when I get to the theater, I am kind of aghast at the crowd. First of all, I am a solid five years older than the next oldest person here, and ten years older than most of the people here. I feel like I’m about seventy-five . This comes only days after I hit another old man milestone and gave the radio button that for years belonged to the “alternative” station to the classic rock station. Classic rock is not exactly my favorite format, and as a youth I wore my allegiance to “alternative” music as this badge of protest against dinosaur rock hegemony, but I have reached an age where I would much rather hear “Sympathy for the Devil” than, for example, Limp Bizkit or Rage Against the Machine screaming at me or Eminem bitching about how hard it is to be famous. If you’re reading this, Em, they are hiring at the 7-11 up the street if you need to escape the rigors of pop stardom.