by Taylor Black
Maybe she had the brain tumor from Day One and she was fated for a short life, maybe that’s why she said when she was four and five years old that she wasn’t going to be here long, and that at seven she said she saw heaven. Maybe we can truly blame it on the brain tumor after all.
Taylor’s Diary
June 26, 2001
Well, I went up to Duke and had an MRI done. Also talked to 60 Minutes. The results were pretty much the same as last time. There is something there which leaves us on the same path as before. So, not much news there. I’m just going to continue w/the Temodar and see how that works. 60 Minutes was an experience. I was excited that I got to speak with Ed Bradley. He’s so easygoing; he made me feel very comfortable spilling my life story on national television. Remind me to vacate the country when it airs.
In other news, not a whole heck of a lot. I am writing to you from the Raleigh/Durham Airport, patiently awaiting our flight home. I’m getting used to living on my own. I just desperately need my own bedroom because I feel like a guest. But, Gia and Karly are in their own little world and I think they like it just fine and dandy w/only the 2 of them there. You know what they say, “three’s a crowd.”
Chapter Thirty-Four: J. D. Salinger and A Land Remembered
I was reading on the internet that the reclusive author J. D. Salinger was suing another author for using his character Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye for some rip-off rendition called something like Shortstop in the Wheat Germ and Taylor came into my head once again:
I read all of his stuff, Pops, remember?
Yes.
I mean what book better captures adolescence than Catcher?
None that I can think of.
I don’t know how many times I read that and Franny and Zooey.
Taylor discovered J. D. Salinger at roughly the time that she discovered boys, at say thirteen or fourteen. Like many teenagers who discovered a new author, she thought he had written especially for her, for if there was anything certain in the teenage universe it was that the teenager herself was the center of it. Kind of like Ptolemy’s idea of the cosmos, with the earth as the center.
But I think the book that she and I most discussed was a saga of Florida history written by Patrick Smith: A Land Remembered, a novel set in Florida from before the Civil War through the 1960s, and the only book that the red neck kids at South Fork High School had ever read cover to cover. It was a captivating family saga with racial undertones as it didn’t spare the language of the Florida “Cracker.” It was in A Land Remembered that Taylor learned the origin of the moniker “cracker” for the cowboys who cracked their whips while herding cattle. She also learned a good deal more about Florida history than she had in her fourth grade class.
As a divorced dad with no money to spare, my girls and I spent endless evenings in the local library, and Taylor became a library addict. Books gave her the opportunity to escape to another time or place or to visit another person and, of course, nurtured her desire for poetry.
She was unusual among her peers, as was Courtney, for being such an avid reader. While Courtney was a full-fledged nerd, Taylor always had one foot in nerd-land and one foot in party-ville.
I gave you fits, didn’t I, Pops?
Yes, you did, Taylor.
You don’t know the half of it, she laughed. I was like you were when you were in college, Pops.
Yes, my undergraduate days at Gettysburg College at the Phi Delta Theta house. Not quite as bad as Belushi’s Animal House, but bad nonetheless. I skirted by with grades which were just good enough to keep me from being drafted and joining Bill Chandler on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to put my Gettysburg past behind, so a few years after I graduated, I sent a phony letter to the class secretary, who had always been naïve in college, saying that I had died in a hang-gliding accident off the coast of California. I signed a buddy’s name, of course, and after the next issue in which my death was reported I no longer received solicitations from the alumni clubs for cash. Of course, my mother was rather upset with me, but it was a small price to pay for a lifetime without solicitations from alma mater.
Our generation just did it a few years earlier than you did, Pops, Taylor used to say about her generation’s misbehavior. What my generation did in college, hers did in high school and today’s are doing even earlier.
Today, students begin experimenting with alcohol and drugs as early as middle school, some even in elementary school. On any given weekend more high school students are finishing a six-pack than are finishing a book, but I suppose Taylor did both.
Like many parents, I have learned things about my children after the fact. In Taylor’s case, I learned a great deal after she died. I learned she was as flawed as any other human being. Normally, I think, we find out things about our children’s adolescence when they are safely in their mid-twenties. I think I was 25 or 26 when I finally told my mother that Bill Chandler and I, playing with matches, had burned down a field when we were 13. Got away with it too.
So when I think that my children are not the objects of perfection that I had once envisioned, I try to remember myself as the incorrigible little miscreant I often was. Holden Caulfield would understand that about all of us.
Taylor’s Diary
July 1, 2001
Well, I write to you from Orlando. I am sitting in my apartment watching “Goonies.” Although it doesn’t really feel like my apartment. I don’t even have a bedroom. Supposedly, we are getting a 3 bedroom in August, but Gia and Karly each have a bedroom and they don’t seem anxious to move. Jeff just left today. He came up for the weekend and we had a really nice time. I really didn’t want him to leave. He moves to N.C. on the 6th. We’re gonna try the long distance thing and see how it works. I’m going to try so hard because I think we were meant to be. I mean he came into my life right before the shit hit the fan. I would have never thought that he of all people would have been able to be as understanding and caring as he has. He really has been my saving grace. Without a doubt. And if we have made it through the last year and he hasn’t bailed on me he is definitely a long term keeper. I keep thinking about Justin. It doesn’t seem real that he’s dead!!! It can’t be. I don’t know how to deal w/that. I can face my own mortality but not his!
Chapter Thirty-Five: Dido and the Grandfathers
When I think of those horror movies like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street I recall that they all had sequels, in some cases, several sequels. So perhaps Taylor should have been prepared for Brain Surgery II, the Sequel!
You weren’t ready for that setback, were you, Pops? She whispered to me the other day.
No, I certainly wasn’t ready for that. A few days after her 18th birthday Taylor was at Pam’s and throwing up, not from the chemotherapy but from something else. It is truly amazing when you hope your daughter merely has food poisoning, for in your mind you are thinking the dreaded tumor has returned, that ugly friggin’ tumor, and that the damn chemo hasn’t worked, that maybe she should have had radiation first. But there is no Monday morning quarterbacking in brain tumor treatment as far as I’m concerned. It really doesn’t matter if you should have called a different play if the patient was dead. The end zone is literal. But this was still early in the “game.”
So Taylor had an MRI at St. Mary’s which indicated that the tumor had indeed returned. I was with Taylor, mulling over a decision as Pam had gone off to try to see Dr. Paul. Taylor and I couldn’t reach Pam by phone. Taylor needed surgery. A kind-hearted nurse tried to help Taylor and me with the decision.
“What do you think, Dad?” Taylor asked me.
I turned to the nurse for advice.
“Our neurosurgeon is incompetent,” the nurse said. “I wouldn’t let him work on my dog.”
I remember Taylor’s eyes growing larger at the comment. Well, that was pretty damn honest, her face seemed to say. The problem was that it was the weekend and the pediatric oncology team wasn’t around to discuss the needed surgery.
>
The nurse was gung-ho about Duke.
Then, as if clairvoyant, Henry Friedman from Duke called Taylor in the hospital. Duke’s neurosurgeon, Alan Friedman, was “the Michael Jordan of brain surgery; he was the best in the world,” Henry said. “Come to Duke, we’ll take care of it.” The phone call clinched Taylor’s decision although we would have to wait until the following day for release from St. Mary’s. Pam would make the trip with her.
“I trust Henry,” was what Taylor said. I hadn’t met Henry Friedman at that point, but I had researched his career and it was stellar. He was recognized as one of the best neuroncologists in the nation.
I was rereading Taylor’s journal entry from January 18, 2001.
Well it’s amazing what can happen in one week. I am up at Duke but not for the stem cell harvest. Instead, I have come back for a second brain surgery. It all started two days after my birthday. I started to have severe headaches and vomiting. So I went down to St. Mary’s to do an MRI, and they found out the tumor is back and bigger. So here I am, lying in a hospital bed at Duke and having arguably one of the worst evenings in my life thus far. It has taken them about five hours and four people and one thousand sticks later. Finally, I have it in and I’m extremely frustrated. I can’t even decipher the array of emotions.
The following day she had surgery and at 4 p.m. I received a collect call from Taylor in ICU.
“It was really neat, Dad,” she said about the surgery.
“Neat”—that’s what she said, it was neat and in a way it was. I know it was “neat” she had come through surgery successfully. What a difference from the first brain surgery when Taylor had spent so much time sedated. I recorded Taylor on tape when she talked about her second brain tumor operation.
“It was surreal, Dad. First, they put me under and then they woke me up and there was a special doctor, Dr. Robbins, I don’t know who he was. He was in charge of making sure I kept all my motor skills and brain functioning while Dr. Friedman—Alan, not Henry—was working on my head. So he had me doing simple motor skills with my left side and even with my right side—about an hour of lifting my leg and tapping my hand and saying the date and the year and things like that. That was probably about an hour. I could hear them debulking the tumor the whole entire time. It was kind of like the drill sound of a dentist that you hear. You could feel the sensation but it wasn’t like pain or anything. Actually, it was like nothing I’ve ever felt before, but it was a sensation that you could feel inside your head, like a little twinge kind of thing. So then they put me back down and I woke up on my way to intensive care and that was pretty much all I can tell you about the brain surgery except that I heard a Dido song playing over and over again in my head and the doctors assured me they hadn’t played any music in the surgery room, and I felt a comforting presence like a light, but also like a warmth or something like that. It was calming and soothing so I didn’t freak out during the situation.”
So Taylor was to be out of the hospital the next day, in a hotel room with Pam at the University Inn across the street, but still under care at Duke. The next day she called me again.
“We got the pathology back and Friedman is working out an aggressive game plan. They didn’t get the whole tumor.”
I remember asking her why not.
“To get it all would have damaged vital tissue. Mom mentioned something about doing my treatment up here. If anything, that would be detrimental to my mental health, Dad, to be out of my element and away from my support systems. Since it is mind over matter anyway, every little bit counts. I know I can beat this, Dad. I know I can.”
Taylor was a social butterfly, but in a very serious way it was her peer group and her boyfriend that kept her going. To be among them was to be alive, to be with a future; that’s what she meant. To be away from them would be to be away from life and she wasn’t ready to be away from life.
I thought about the story of the train engine I had read to Taylor often when she was little. “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” Taylor was the little brain tumor patient that could. But it was a pretty damn high hill to climb, I realized.
“It’s going to be a bitch though,” she said and then added. “Sorry for the language, Dad.”
There was something else that went on during brain surgery, something that we discussed later, something Taylor couldn’t explain: the comforting presence. She went into more detail about it.
“Dad, I felt there were two men in the room with me during the operation, and I had a feeling that I was going to make it.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure, but I think grandpa was there.”
“Grandpa Joe?”
“I think so.”
My former father-in-law, Joseph Coddington, had been dead a number of years.
I remember saying, “That’s interesting,”
“There was someone else, I didn’t know him.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, he wasn’t familiar to me,” she said.
“You have no idea?”
“Not really, Dad.”
“Nothing?”
“He might have had light hair.”
I remember the cold shiver I felt when she told me this: could it have been my father? Taylor’s paternal grandfather whom she had never met, Newton Black, died in 1974, nine years before Taylor was born. Were both of her grandfathers there in the room somehow to give her comfort? I believe strongly in God, but were her grandfathers her angels during that operation? Out of place and out of time, but I guess time is more for mortals, not for spirits. To this day, I can’t explain it. Perhaps it was a hallucination, but if so, why would Taylor hallucinate about a man she never met?
I would fly up the next day, but I wouldn’t meet Dr. Friedman. As fate had it, Taylor was released and we dashed to the airport to catch a flight back to Florida from Raleigh-Durham to avoid the hordes coming to Florida for the Super Bowl. But Taylor and I would return to Duke for the stem cell harvest a few weeks after that.
Still, to this day, I wonder, was my deceased father with my daughter during her second brain surgery? And if so, how was that possible?
Someday I will ask Taylor.
Taylor’s Diary
July 5, 2001
Clouded thought fogs my mind.
I attempt to navigate the mist,
Unsure of my destination and the path that will lead me there.
Is my endpoint not of this world?
What should I think of the journey?
I have turned on auto pilot and now it’s stuck.
I struggle to regain control, not knowing where to begin.
Everything falls apart at once, I am speeding to the ground in flames.
Frantically searching for a parachute I find none.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Diminishing Dreams
So, you are still trying to get my story published?
Yes, Taylor.
After all these years?
Uh huh.
You always were persistent, Pops, that’s for sure.
I’m a mule, Taylor, and I want to get it right before I go.
Are you going somewhere?
You know.
Everyone’s going where I’ve gone, Pops, but you don’t know when that’s going to be. No one does. How’s that old song you sang to me once, “Oh Sweet Mystery of Life.” Or something like that.
I sang that to you?
You sang a lot of songs to me when I was little. Remember Mom said she thought I’d marry a cowboy.
Yes, I remember that. I sang you a lot of country and western songs, that’s for sure. You smiled a lot when I sang those.
I might have had gas, Pops.
No, I think it was the cowboy songs.
You like to think so, don’t you? Well, I did fall in love with a boy who was going to be a NASCAR driver. Kind of a cowboy I think. NASCAR. Cowboys with cars instead of horses.
Yes, I would say so. Lot of horsepower there.
Yeah, it was.
So what’s the problem, Pops? You’re down.
I’m not dreaming about you as much as I did.
I’ve been gone a long time, Pops. That’s natural.
I feel guilty about it.
You shouldn’t. Our memories fade like the ending of a movie when they roll the credits. They all fade to black
I still wonder if there was something else we might have done, something else we might have tried.
There wasn’t. You did what you could. So did Mom. So did the Friedman boys at Duke. So did everyone. It’s not your fault. I thought you were going to go with the alternating journals, Pops, your diary entry followed by my diary entry. I liked that concept. I thought that was really us.
It was, but the literary powers that be, said no one buys memoirs in the journal format anymore.
So something like The Diary of Anne Frank is passé?
It seems so.
I guess people don’t have the patience for that form anymore. I suppose you have to do what you have to do.
Yes.
The “waves” are gone, aren’t they, Pops? Those rushes of grief that would come over you when you drove to school in the morning and you would sob all the way to the parking lot?
Yes.
And you feel guilty about that too?
Yes.
Guilt is overrated, Pops. No one can keep up grief forever. Only Charlie Brown, I guess, with his “Good Grief,” but he’s a cartoon character. It was wise of you to seek counseling at Hospice with that counselor one-on-one. Too bad others in the family didn’t do that. You’ve finally let go. You know, that was the best advice you ever gave me, Pops.
What was that?
To let go and let God.
When did I say that?
At Martin Memorial a few days before I left, and we all knew I was going to leave, and you suggested I put myself in God’s care. You surprised me.