After Charlie told me of his diagnosis, my first reaction was to head to the woods. I wanted comfort, I wanted perspective, and I wanted solitude--I'm not inherently a loner, but I didn't want to deal with other people's emotions just then, especially not their emotions about my emotions. I wanted everything simple while I sorted out the inside of my head.
I had my uniform, my camping hammock, and my water bottle in my car, so I changed my clothes, borrowed an extra cloak for added warmth, called my wife's voicemail, and headed uphill to my spot in the woods.
Somebody followed me.
I was aware of my tail because I could hear birds reacting to a second person and because the leaves, just starting to fall, made the trail noisy. I could not see anybody, and when I stepped off the trail behind a tree and waited nobody caught up. I therefore concluded that somebody was trying to tail me in secret, and that the person could not possibly be Charlie because he would have known I'd notice the birds and the leaf-noise. Yet who else would have reason to follow me without my knowledge, except someone worried about my mental state and respectful of my solitude?
"Tell Charlie I'm going to my spot for the night. I'll be down in the morning. I'm OK," I called out.
"OK," replied a distant voice I couldn't recognize, and the birds reported someone's passage back down the mountain.
Really, I felt touched.
I didn't sleep much that night, nor did I really do much of what could be called thinking. My mind wandered in dark, unhelpful, and seemingly random directions, and by morning the edge of my shock had worn off and I could pull myself together.
I think it must have been around nine in the morning--breakfast was over, people were heading to class--when I came back into the main part of campus and found Charlie under the avenue of maple trees that lead past the Dining Hall. He was raking leaves.
Nobody ever raked leaves on campus, the idea being to leave fallen leaves in place to shelter over-wintering insects and to enrich the soil under the trees. I had almost forgotten we had any leaf rakes, though the landscaping crew did pick up leaves from some neighboring properties to make mulch. And yet here was Charlie, raking.
I stopped to watch him. He glanced up at me a moment, without stopping in his work.
"If this is going to be my final autumn," he explained, "I might as well enjoy it." And he dropped the rake and jumped into the pile, then covered himself up to his chin in dry, fragrant leaved.
I jumped in after him.
"Who invited you?" he protested, but I could tell he didn't mean it.
"I did," I retorted. "I wear the Green Ring, too, now, I don't need you to tell me what to do."
"You're a cocky upstart."
"You're a grumpy old man," I replied. And just for a moment, I saw his eyes twinkle.
"Oh yeah?" he said, and threw a handful of leaves at me.
"Yeah!" I threw leaves at him.
"Get out! Go!" more leaves.
"Make me!" And with that we were wrestling, tussling semi-seriously like puppies or like little boys, each trying to pin or push out the other.
I had never wrestled Charlie before, but I had a fairly good idea of what it should have been like. I remembered his hunting bow, which I could barely draw, and his beautiful physical prowess with a chainsaw. I remembered how he had unobtrusively dropped into a martial arts "ready" posture that time he thought I might hit him, and I knew he'd had at least some training. I had seven inches on him and I was over four decades younger, but he should have been able to beat me. Had we wrestled six months earlier, I'm sure he would have. Now, I was clearly stronger than he.
If I pressed my advantage and beat him, he'd be humiliated, I was sure. But if I let him beat me, he would know and would likewise be humiliated. I disengaged and switched weapons.
"You ass-clown, fighting over a leaf pile?" I half-shouted.
"You self-important tyro, fighting back!" He followed my lead.
"Idiot!"
"Fool!"
"Nincompoop!"
"Twat-waffle!"
"Egg-head!"
"Shit-for-brains!"
"Ass-munch!"
And so we dueled. The rules were simple and intuitive, each of us trying to top the other in poetry and invention of insult. We used only insults that might occur to children--nothing political and nothing sexual. In retrospect, "ass-munch" could be taken as a reference to oral-anal sex, and "dick-breath," which also got a mention, could be taken in a similar spirit, but that didn't occur to me at the time, and I don't think it occurred to Charlie, either. We were innocent.
I was then in my early 30's, and not even with my brother could I be a boy among boys anymore, yet with Charlie, a man old enough to be my grandfather, I could. He sometimes took leave of his age and responsibilities and took me with him.
We quickly ran through our remembered repertoire of standards and started making things up. My favorite of my own inventions, and the only one I now remember, was "you poor excuse for a cheese sandwich!" It made him laugh. But the ring that made us peers did not make us equals, and he was far better at language than I. I started to reach, to have trouble keeping up.
Finally he came out with "You tiny Tater Tot of snot!" and I folded.
"I got nothin," I admitted.
"Damn right," he agreed, and tossed another little handful of leaves.
I let myself fall back into the pile and stretched out, looking at the yellow and orange trees above us, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.
"I'm going to miss you," I exclaimed, as though he were merely planning to move permanently to Paris or something.
"Me, too, Daniel, me too," he replied in a similar tone.
It was only later that I realized how truly strange that reply was. Did he mean, as I initially assumed, that he would miss me? A reciprocal statement of personal fondness? But Charlie, as far as I know, did not believe in an afterlife, so how did he expect to miss me after he died? And it would be unlike him not to notice that what he'd actually said was that he'd miss himself, so maybe that's what he meant, but that's an even more metaphysically bizarre statement.
Later, I went home, called my wife at work, called Allen, spoke to his voicemail, and got online. I typed "pancreatic cancer" in to a search engine.
Turned out most of what I'd thought I knew about cancer, and that cancer in particular, was wrong.
When Charlie had spoken of fighting and yet described himself as dying, I had assumed he meant he would try for a cure but expected to fail. I had thought of cancer treatment as a very either/or thing; either you try to cure cancer, or you accept hospice care. Turns out, there is a third option.
With terminal diagnoses, which is what stage 4 pancreatic cancer is, they try to extend your life and keep its quality high. With pancreatic cancer, the standard was, at the time, anyway, to use small doses of chemotherapy to make the patient more comfortable without producing debilitating side-effects. Charlie never talked about his treatment with me, but everything I saw over the following months--the rest of his life--was consistent with that course of treatment. He never lost his hair, but his energy and apatite waned and then waxed again over the course of every week...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Whether he also ever fought for a cure, I don't know.
What I found online also explained something else--how had Charlie not gotten to stage 4 without a diagnosis? I'd have figured him to be very proactive about his health. I'd even thought that maybe he'd been sick for months or years without telling me. I mean, he didn't tell me much about himself anyway. But it turns out that pancreatic cancer usually has no symptoms until it metastasizes, at which point it's incurable....
I read for a couple of hours and totally depressed myself until June came home. Then Allen called me back. I'd called him in order to find out more about how the school was handling things and maybe to talk over my own reaction, but for the first time Allen couldn't help me with anything. He just fell apart on me.
I remember thinking that this wasn't how this part of my life--a newly-minted master--was supposed to go.
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