My mother’s last trip to her oncologist was a perfect example.  The doctor retired soon after the visit, shortly before my mother died.  He looked sort of dazed most of the time, sometimes lost key details of the patient’s particular cancer during an examination.   He acted like too many patients dying on him might have taken their toll, though he was trim, polite and ran a flourishing practice.  He could have been the sort who retires and dies a week later chasing a tennis ball.  But that day he was as focused and straightforward as I’d ever seen him, and so was my mother in her way.

“What’s the good news?” asked my mother with a cheery, girlish inflection.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any good news today,” said the shifty eyed oncologist.

“Then I don’t want to hear it.  I don’t want any more bad news!” she said.  The oncologist deftly shifted the conversation to other subjects and what was left unsaid was never said, until my mother looked at Sekhnet from her hospice bed and asked “how can I say goodbye to such a sweet face?”

And so it seems to be with this gentle, brilliant man we spent a few days with this weekend.   He looks shockingly bad, much worse than he did two and a half months ago, and he looked horrible then.  It is the darkness around the mouth that is most disturbing to me, but many aspects of his looks are disturbing.   He is weak but determined, in pain but uncomplaining.  Sekhnet kept asking if he wanted help and he kept telling her he didn’t, though things were difficult for him and it was also hard to watch him struggle.   It was important for him to struggle, and we could easily see this.  This struggle is called life.

“His memory is perfect and he’s brilliant and still remarkably mild and kind,” you could say, and you’d be right.  He was telling me about a baseball stadium trip he took with his son-in-law, a man with Asperger’s Syndrome, as far as we can tell.  It’s hard to gauge an expression, looking at the son-in-law.  He is the proverbial two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  He looks vaguely sad all the time, and he speaks very little.  A brilliant guy, from what I hear, and he and the man we visited, who looks like Death walking painfully as an exhausted but resolute man, grew very close.  In 2002 they set off, during inter-league play, to catch baseball games in 8 cities: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis… I’d have to look at the map to give you the eighth.  3,700 miles in ten days, they saw 15 or 16 teams play, there may have been one repeat, he doesn’t recall off-hand a decade later, and, really, what difference does it make?

It was apparently not hard for this pair of shrewd baseball fans to map their journey.  They took the schedule, inputted the games and locations into a spread sheet and tweaked it a few times.  It took under an hour.  And then they were off.  Hard to imagine their conversations during the average 370 miles driving a day, but knowing the man we visited and his almost limitless range of interests, I’m sure they had plenty to talk about.  One bond they had was their love of the man’s oldest daughter.  The future son-in-law lived in their house for a year or more before the wedding.  He was clearly the son the man had never had, growing up with his hard-working wife and three daughters.  The two are very close.

“We may do it again this August during inter-league,” the man said with an almost imperceptible smile playing across his wasted face.  Then he looked off slightly and said “maybe we won’t…I’m not sure yet, ” and his voice trailed off just a little.