IT IS A FOOTBALL SATURDAY and I am up early to get some exercise before turning on Game Day.
With my morning coffee I check the email. Atop my in-basket was one from my friend. It was straightforward and unemotional, as his letters have always been. The words carried all of the impact: The esophageal cancer that he’d battled to a standstill earlier in the year had roared back. The same cancer, but now in his liver and Stage 4, incurable.
MY FRIEND, another former newspaper editor, looks at the facts unblinkingly, and when the cancer was diagnosed, he knew that the odds of beating esophageal cancer are long, and he considered entering hospice care. He decided, though, to undergo the indignities of chemo and radiation, not in hopes of a miracle so much as buying time to tie up loose ends so that his wife would not have to face them.
As it turned out, the treatment did buy some quality time. In the spring, tests did not find cancer cells. He gained strength and felt good. He and his wife had a good summer, entertaining friends, hanging out at their cabin, fishing, gardening.
He’d told me that he was scheduled to undergo more tests in September, and I had been hoping to hear that the cancer was still at bay.
IT WAS NOT to be. There is one more treatment for him and his doctors to consider. Not to cure the cancer but in hopes of adding some more quality time. He would like to take his wife away from the harsh northern winter for one last trip.
I have long admired my friend for his character and for his courage to follow his own compass.
I will watch today’s football games, cheer for my teams, feel sorry if they lose, remember the score for several days. The games are important in their own way.
But there are some things that are much more important.
Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com
