by Erma Bombeck
Married at nineteen, she was a traditional housewife and mother of four children living in Stow, Massachusetts, a suburb thirty miles outside Boston. She worked for the League of Women Voters, sat on the washer to keep it in balance when there were gym shoes in the spin cycle, and dealt with the trauma of the week: "Peter fell down the cellar stairs and had to have stitches in his chin and I thought I was not a good mother for allowing that to happen." Traditional.
On the side, to keep her sanity, Sandra wrote a column for a local newspaper from her home. "One day we had a terrible blizzard and I did this stupid column about how mothers survived the blizzard with the kids home. But mostly it was a society column. I wasn't making much money, but it was fun. I was just a country mouse," she shrugged.
The first volley in the war was fired in 1971.
Her husband, Jimmy, held his frightened six-year-old daughter, Jill, in his arms as the doctor inserted the long needle into her lower hip, removing a portion of the precious bone marrow.
Jill was diagnosed as having acute lymphocytic leukemia. They trudged home with their secret, wondering what lay in their future. But Stow is a small town and its people responded with a bank book containing two thousand dollars and a brochure about Disney World. They wanted the Bakuns to have one last hurrah.
Surrounded by twirling tea cups and dancing bears at Disney World, the Bakuns tried to prepare themselves for what lay ahead. As Sandra wrote, "The children were entranced by the enchanted world and the constant excitement. It was the right thing to do. Not to forget our situation, but to appreciate our brief interludes with life. It was there that my husband and I decided that life was worth a risk, and it was there that our roots for strength for whatever would lie ahead were put down."
But Disney World is a fantasy. When the lights go out and the rides shut down and the costumes no longer have bodies in them to bring them to life, the magic is gone. For the Bakuns, Adventureland became a quest for "normalcy"; Frontierland turned into a new treatment for Jill; Fantasyland was a day without thinking about cancer; and Tomorrowland was iffy at best.
The marriage that had worked so well BECAUSE Jimmy was light and funny and had always complemented Sandra's serious side now sent them into opposing camps. "I figured you just save yourself and go your opposite ways," remembers Sandra.
By her own admission, Sandra "ate, drank, and thought cancer, cancer, cancer" every day of her life. She figured if she armed herself with all the knowledge she could gather she could handle anything. Doctors say this is not uncommon for mothers to share the disease by making it a part of them.
She became active in Candlelighters, a support group of other families facing cancer. She investigated a dump site three blocks from her house that purportedly was under scrutiny for contaminant violations. (None were found.) She had her own well water tested. She frequented the library to find out all she could about the disease and wrote down her questions for later discussions with the doctor.
When her daughter lost her hair and wore a wig, Sandra wore one too. She kept a day-by-day diary of the disease. At one point, she became a school nurse for two days a week because she wanted to be near Jill. She directed a lot of her anger at her husband because she felt he wasn't with her. She felt alone. "Jimmy said his faith was so strong he knew Jill would make it, but it only made me feel that my faith wasn't strong enough and I had to depend on science."
Jimmy handled the problem in his own way.
He didn't mind that Sandra attended a lot of meetings. "He never complained if his supper wasn't ready on time," she said. "He would go off in his direction to his hobbies. He thought this [cancer] was mine. It became my obsession."
A few months after Jill's diagnosis, Jimmy was hospitalized with chest pains that were attributed to stress. The visits to the doctors when he would hold Jill down through her bone marrow treatment plus the loss of his job due to technology took their toll. But in 1977, a new blow struck the already walking-wounded family.
After six years of remission, cancer reappeared. Jill was in relapse and began her treatments from square one.
So did her family.
On the way home from Boston on that day, Sandra went from a woman who "felt like a complete jerk" because she was afraid to ask the doctor a question to a woman who was to testify before the Massachusetts legislature against the legalization of laetrile.
Sandra emerged from a shy woman who had never even driven a car into Boston to a woman who lied to get a job running a dictaphone and when they asked her to take a test, said without blinking, "I've forgotten how to turn it on."
"I was always a serious person," admitted Sandra, "and I keep saying I became unbalanced because it was true. I passed over the center and was consumed with my daughter's illness.
"My older daughter, Jean, has told me that she felt neglected and I really feel bad about that. Sometimes Julie would come up and say, 'I scraped my knee,' and I guess I wasn't very compassionate to her. I passed it off as a piddly little thing. I didn't realize what I was doing because when you're faced with leukemia everything else is just minor. Mononucleosis is minor. But I think I've told Jean, my older daughter, that if it happened all over again, I don't think I would have done anything any differently, that I did my best and I thought I was a good mother, and I'm sorry if I didn't do it all right. She has to forgive me for that. She has to because I did the best I could.
"Today, I'm much more mellow and mature," she smiled. "I appreciate life so much, every little thing. I'm in the Deadline Decade," she laughed.
"You know, in Gail Sheehy's book Passages? I skipped over the twenties and thirties. At forty-six, I'm in the period of life where you don't worry anymore about what people think. I'm me! This is the time if you don't do it now, you're never gonna do it. So I go out and if I like a dress, I buy it. I always felt guilty, like 'Wait, I shouldn't do that. Look at the price.' Always a bargain hunter. I still do bargains but I'll buy it only if I like it. I've changed. My life is not totally kids. When my son comes home from college with all his dirty clothes, I say, 'Now you wash 'em. I'll show you how to run the washer.'"
For the first time in years, Sandra is allowing herself the luxury of a future. She fantasizes about writing the great American novel when she "retires to Cape Cod." She has plans to turn her attention to the survivors of cancer who suffer from job discrimination and insurance inequities.
Sandra once wrote, "When the quantity of life looks safe—quality takes precedence." She is testing that theory.
At present, all the Bakuns are in remission, so to speak, and have gotten on with their lives. Jill is a child life specialist working with children with cancer. She is twenty-three years old.
It's a great temptation to read about the Bakun family and imagine how you would handle it. How you would gather around the kitchen table like Donna Reed and her husband Dr. Stone and conduct a family council to "bond and share feelings." (Maybe Madonna would make a guest appearance as a social worker.) All the devastation that entered your lives would be arranged neatly according to priorities and would be resolved within twenty-four minutes, with six minutes of messages from your sponsors.
But this is not a television sitcom. This is real life. "It's that Damocles syndrome, the sword hanging over your head," observed Sandra, "but you go on."
It was late. Sandra had a long trip back to Stow to make that night. As if to leave on a high note, she paused at the door and flashed a warm smile. "You know, I don't even mind being tall anymore."
8
What Are Fathers For?
"June! I'm home!"
Ward Cleaver, father
"Leave It to Beaver" television series
Can you imagine being so invisible you have to announce your presence when you walk in the door? It has always been the perception of Dads from Jim Anderson of "Father Knows Best" to Jason Seaver on "Growing Pains"... from Ozzie's greeting to Harriet to Jack Arnold walking through "The Wonder Years."
They're fathe
rs who rarely have starring roles in the chronicles of family life. They come home, turn off a few lights, read the paper, eat dinner, scratch the dog behind the ears, and go to bed. If a demolition ball like cancer hits the family while they're gone, it's business as usual.
"I'm a salesman and I'd be driving down the highway and I'd pull over and bawl for forty-five minutes or I'd be talking with a customer and all of a sudden I'd just walk out and get in the car and leave."
Fathers have a reputation for going through life like they have bodies shot full of Novocain. They're cool. They have a certain dignity and distance to maintain—no matter what.
"My Dad won a trip to Orlando, Florida, for me when he entered a Jell-0 Gelatin Jump. For this he had to jump into four hundred gallons of Strawberry Jell-O. I never thought my Dad would do this."
Fathers are also endowed with a strength and detachment that permits them to witness harsh situations and not fall apart.
When Ken decided to share responsibilities with his wife he accompanied his daughter, Mary Beth, to her spinal tap. When Mary Beth groaned, Ken turned white as a sheet and fainted dead away.
So much for Father Teresa and so much for the three popular myths surrounding fathers. The truth is men are just as vulnerable, just as caring, just as devastated as their wives when cancer strikes their children.
But the male species is elusive. The outpouring of feelings I had hoped to assemble in a folder marked "DADS" never materialized. When I opened the white envelope it looked like the one our son had marked "INCOME TAX RECORDS"—there wasn't a scrap of paper in it.
In my inquiries, fathers began to take on a "rare bird" dimension. "Is it true you spotted a three-piece-suited Father last week? Does he talk?" "You had a male-breasted Father at camp and didn't call me?" "I know there are thousands of species of Dad Childwatchers out there, but where do they flock?"
In June 1988, three fathers were sighted in Portland, Oregon. All three had daughters with cancer and had become friends through Candlelighters events. I flew to Portland where we dined over prime rib and a tape recorder. They had all lived with cancer long enough to be comfortable talking about it.
Their perspective was not the same as those of mothers.
Fathers have traditionally been the ones who parked the car in the rain, took the family picture, checked out noises in the basement, or put the dog to sleep. They are charged with keeping things moving. Their roles in cancer are much the same. They have to carry on business as usual—going to work each day and wondering what is happening in their absence.
Bill Warbington, sales representative for Industrial Rubber and Supply Company, whose daughter, Erin, lost her leg to Ewing's sarcoma in 1985 when she was eight years old, said, "Sometimes I thought it would be a lot easier if I could send Jan out and I could stay home. It's harder being gone. You feel such rage. Something is happening to your family and you can do nothing about it. If it's a guy across the street harassing your little girl, you can go rip his throat out, but this you can't do a thing about. Cry in front of your child? No. See, this is the thing. Growing up you can't give away your guts. When you're a little kid in junior high school, college, whatever, and you do something wrong and the coach stands there and screams in your face, what's gonna happen if you start crying because you're upset?
"Or if you're in the military and the sergeant started pounding on your butt or the lieutenant colonel comes down on you. Are you gonna start crying? You can't do that. I mean the male is taught that you get hurt physically and emotionally or someone takes something away from you, something you can't do anything about, but you don't stand there and cry. You just don't."
His friend, Ken Raddle, vice president of national sales for Young American in Portland, is the father of Mary Beth, who was diagnosed in 1984 at age eleven as having acute lymphocytic leukemia.
"Poor mothers get beaten to a pulp and it's just really difficult to be a mother. Much more difficult than being a father because I'm the guy who comes home after work and I listen to the version of Mary Beth not getting her stuff fast enough or getting her blanket when she is too hot/too cold, why aren't you doing it faster and then, 'Oh, here's Dad,' with a big smile."
The third member of the trio is Bob Kreinberg, customer service and district director for Nike. His daughter, Sarah, was diagnosed in 1979 at the age of fifteen months with a brain tumor. "When Penny [his wife] and I went into the Peace Corps, the minister who married us said, 'This experience has the reputation of making or breaking marriages. Because of it—and again it's one of those things where you're totally cut off—you're forced to deal with one another.' Cancer takes that situation and intensifies it about twenty times because you don't have a choice. We've learned a lot about ourselves."
Sitting there listening to their emotions that came spilling out like a dam of water that had been held back, they didn't seem like such enigmas. But I remembered a little girl who said she had a memory that would stay with her forever. "One time," she smiled, "when I was really sick, my Dad brought food to me and when I couldn't eat it, my Dad cried. I had never seen him cry before."
And there was the small boy who said he went sailing down the hallway in his wheelchair in the hospital with his father racing alongside him dragging the IV. He added, "We've never had so much fun."
There was the mother who said bitterly, "My husband denied it all. He just wanted it to go away. It's a male trait where they think everything is going to turn out right because they want it to turn outright. He said he didn't need a support group. How do you think that made me feel?"
And another one observed, "My husband was very inquisitive and intellectual and that was his way of, I'm sure, insulating himself from the pain. The 'I'm in charge. I'll ask the questions. I won't break down.' But I resented that quite a bit of the time."
Fathers may not record diaries of their child's illness. They may not even talk about it. Many won't begin to network with one another. But you have only to listen to them share their helplessness and their pain to know they aren't as isolated from the problem as people think they are.
"I've learned it's arrogant to think we're going to live forever," said Ken. "Everything is valuable. It's been a privilege to have Mary Beth in our family as it is with any of our children. They're not really ours and for us to think they're gonna be with us and live longer than us is arrogant.
"I've learned a lot from Mary Beth. That no matter what's happened in your day, you go ahead and give 'em a hug in bed at night. I was saying to Sharon [his wife], 'My God, Mary Beth's gonna get married someday and I'm gonna be on her honeymoon saying prayers with her.'"
It was late in the evening when we adjourned to Ken's living room to continue the conversation. The "M" word had not been spoken. It was time. "What about money?" I asked.
They looked at one another like "Who wants to tell her?" It was their job in this war and it was a killer. Finding the money to pay for a catastrophic disease was a burden all three of them wore like a bad suit. Bob took the plunge. "The trouble is families affected with cancer have twenty-five percent of their incomes or something like that going to support the illness. I have a pretty good insurance plan. It's covered a lot of things, but there's a lot of incidentals, a lot of things that aren't covered. There's also a lot of things you tend to do to compensate for the illness. You compensate by taking the kids special places. We went to Disneyland. That's kind of an expensive operation for a family of five to try to do, and had expenses of travel, expenses of having to deal with the other kids in situations where they're out of the home... a lot of that kind of thing.
In a lot of cases, where families are ripped apart, I think the pressure becomes one of those, 'What are you gonna do?' "
He paused and held out his hands helplessly as if there were a need to explain. "We were given five percent odds of our daughter making it through. We had no other choice."
"I said, 'To hell with it,' interrupted Bill. "We're gonna start doing what's important to al
l of us while we're all still here.
"Jan was averaging ten hours a week trying to keep the insurance company from screwing us out of the coverage. At least ten hours a week! They paid one hundred percent to amputate, then what came after there was not full coverage. They'll take off your leg, but then their attitude is, 'Leg's gone, don't worry about that. You'll still grow up."
"My attitude was, 'I'm never gonna make enough money to pay this thing off anyhow, so what they gonna do? They can't take the same thing away from me twice. We're gonna start doing what's important to all of us."
Ken was nodding vigorously. "We went through a personal bankruptcy just two years prior to Mary Beth's diagnosis. We had stress in our relationship almost greater than the cancer. Sharon had to balance almost a full-time job, leaving work at any moment, taking lots of days off, and then dealing with the financial stress as well. We used all the money we had set aside for our oldest daughter to go to college. We had used just everything we had."
Under normal circumstances, these three men would probably never have met. Their common ground was three little girls fighting for their lives and needing all the support they could get. They talked about another father who had been invited to attend a Candlelighters social event.
"The one who refused to get out of the car and wanted food sent to him?" asked Bill.
"That's the one," said Bob. "I think he thought we just sat around talking about cancer all night."
"I told 'em to take him the food," said Ken quietly. "He needs time. He'll join us... when he's ready."
On the flight home I thought not only about the mothers and the fathers I had talked with, but the reams of feelings chronicled on yellow tablets, written in longhand... the ink sometimes smeared with tears... little drawings, eulogies, pictures, holy cards, and emotions so real and so private it hurt to read them.
I remembered the mother who said, "Mark didn't receive the Heisman Trophy, but he received a courage trophy for his braveness. He didn't graduate magna cum laude from Harvard, yet he finished and passed first grade. He didn't become a nationally recognized Eagle Scout hero, yet in ten months he was in the Tiger Club and the blue ribbon he received for just participating in the Pinewood Derby Car Race was an accomplishment. Cancer is sad, but it's not the end of the world. I feel I owe Mark."