By the time you read this, the email says, I will have started my journey to the next Great Adventure. It’s 3 p.m. in a crowded airport terminal, halfway around the world in Amsterdam, when the message from my brother pings my phone as I take it out of airplane mode. The subject line–So You Know–has given me no clue about the gut punch to follow.
As a twin, I’ve never been alone. Brian kicked me in the womb, I’m sure of it. For almost sixty years we fought over the craziest things, but nothing that ever mattered. Not really. It was the two of us against the world. How unfair, then, that the world should be against only him.
#
“Stage four,” Brian had said with a shrug. “Didn’t know anything was going on down there until yesterday.” He had scratched his stomach with fingernails bitten to the quick as usual.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked, blindsided too.
“Enjoy every minute. And fight the cancer like hell.” He was older, bigger, stronger… and I believed him. I always had.
And so it began. I sat in his corner, cheering him on, round after round. I carried him when he was weak. I cried for both of us when he would not. I scoured the internet for options. I read positive imaging books and pictured him bathed in cleansing white light. We were a tag team wrestling an invisible beast, and I grew to love him in a profound way that made me long to relive forty years I’d wasted chasing a career that would mean little without him.
Over the months, in some perverse, inverse relationship, I grew strong while he grew frail. I juggled frequent business trips to the Netherlands with ever more frequent visits to his doctors for chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants, immunotherapy, and a host of other procedures recommended by a long chain of specialists who seemed to be figuring things out along the way.
“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” my friends said.
“Cancer is a marathon,” others encouraged. “You can’t look at the finish line.” I listened and hoped and believed. I refused to look at the finish line, no matter how much it loomed over our shoulders, no matter how close the other white light grew.
#
“If the Mayo Clinic can’t help, we’ll go somewhere else,” I said after more disappointing news, trying to project a strength I didn’t feel. Brian was my big brother by six minutes, but he’d become so terribly small in only nine months. My voice broke with unchecked emotion as I added, “Someplace that won’t give up.”
He detached an empty plastic bag from the G-tube that disappeared into his belly and fed liquid food and medication directly to his stomach. He pulled down his shirt to cover the loathsome attachment and tried in vain to find a comfortable position.
“Remember how we used to trade places at school to mess with the teachers?” he asked. “Nobody’s gonna get us mixed up now, huh?” As he held up a toothpick arm and laughed, shame washed over me for showing fear to this man who knew none.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Death with dignity, I guess. Glad we live in Washington where I can go out on my own terms.” The words hit like hammer blows.
“What about fighting like hell?” I asked.
“The Mayo Clinic was the final round, Stu.” He smiled despite everything, refusing to give in to anger, no matter how much I wanted him to. “You didn’t hear the boxing bell, but it was pretty clear to me. Let’s hope the Judge is kind when He scores the fight.”
“I’ll cancel my trip to Rotterdam,” I said, my decision made.
“Putting your life on hold won’t help,” he said, “but there is one thing you can do.”
“Name it.”
“Have a stroopwaffle for me. God knows I can’t eat it myself.”
#
I fight back the tears and read the short email again. By the time you read this, I will have started my journey to the next Great Adventure. Thanks for sharing your life with me. Live long and prosper.
Brian was only half right. He may have started his journey, but I’ve started my own journey too, one without a map or my lifelong co-pilot. The terminal around me buzzes with world travelers, yet it is emptier than I have ever known as I make my way over to a small deli near an escalator that leads down to the trains.
“Two stroopwaffles, please.”
Author’s Note: For years I traveled regularly back and forth between the Netherlands and America for a technology firm. It was during a layover at 4 a.m. in Reykjavík, Iceland, that I learned one of my best high school friends had passed away. After years of battling cancer, he had finally been allowed to make his own graceful exit thanks to the Washington Death with Dignity Act. In a barely lit airport terminal, I turned on my phone and read an email from him which began, “By the time you read this…” RIP, Brian McCarry!
