I hadn’t seen T in a very long time. More than twenty years. I heard that he had cancer, and more than that, that it was pancreatic cancer. One of the bad ones. So I reached out to him, and my wife and I met him at a watering hole that had once been a firehall in the town we’d grown up in and gone to high school together.
It took a moment to recognize him when he came in. He was thin, much thinner than the last time I’d seen him twenty years ago. He was thinner than he’d been in high school, when he’d been a pretty fit, strong teenager. His hair, which was always unruly, as the cliche goes, was short. I believe primarily because much of it had fallen out.
He’d been on chemotherapy for some months at that point.
We talked idly and ate, and the awkwardness began to disappear. We returned to high school patterns, he the talkative animated one, me the taciturn one who responds occasionally to keep the words flowing.
T was (and at the time of this writing, still is) living in reduced circumstance. He’d never found a vocation, a calling, but had worked at whatever was convenient at the time. The closest he’d come was a lengthy stint at a retail chain, but when the relationship with a woman ended, so had the job. He attended a coastal university, studying creative writing, but as far as I know has not published anything that earned him any money. He was on chemotherapy, and landscaping, which as most of us know is a euphemism for mowing lawns, for a living.
He was (and is) living in a facility for people in reduced circumstances – assisted housing, they sometimes call it. An old folks home for poor people, if you want to call it what it really is. But on that day he was house-sitting in his older sister’s house, and after the pub, we all went back there where we had more beer and conversation, and then ordered dinner. We sat on the deck in the shade and it was almost like old times.
I saw T again several times in the intervening year. The last time before the most recent visit, we stopped in for an afternoon at the end of July on our way back from delivering one of our daughters to university. He was starting to run out of options, then – several courses of chemo had seemingly slowed the advance, but had stopped working, and he was down to older, more debilitating medications. We had beer at the pub I had tried (with occasional success) to get in to when I was a teenager. One of his ex-girlfriends joined us, and we all went for Indian before my wife and I departed for a late drive back to our place, four hours away.
Since then, he has gone off the last of the chemo. His days are now numbered, though nobody knows quite yet what that number will be. It will be a low number, though.
I went to see him last Friday. My wife was working, so I left around eight and got to the pub near his house about noon. He was late, which was unsurprising. He’s always been late for everything. When he walked in I knew, for certain, that the final days were near. The skin around his mouth had dropped, and his temples were sunken hollows. We had some beers, me only one, and then went back to his place for a little while. I left around four.
We’re going back again this weekend, my wife and I. We’ll get a room in town and stay the night. Hopefully he won’t be too tired.