Was I A Good Man

It has been 21 years…Twenty one years and it’s Christmas. I used to get really drunk at Christmas…sort of dulled the pain. But then my best friend, my second wife, gave me an ultimatum that I could not ignore…stop or out I went.

And I finally realized, about seven years ago, that I really did nothing for the pain, for the agony by getting drunk…all it did was bring the pain up again.

The awful hideous pain.

I could bore you with the statistics but the truth is if a woman is pre-menopausal she had less than a 50/50 chance of surviving the breast cancer that killed my wife pictured above.

Today maybe those statistics are better; I certainly hope so.

All I know is a nuclear bomb went off in my family, with two teenaged girls half raised when breast cancer was diagnosed in my beautiful wife.

And we prayed, and we hoped, and we got a bone marrow transplant; which was experimental and didn’t work; and we lost.

We lost my wonderful wife.

My children are all grown now with families of their own. I kid my youngest because her daughter has the same willful stubborness that my daughter inherited from her mother.

I told my daughter she got her stubbornness and independence she now sees in her daughters from her mom.

You see I do not have a problem with an independent woman. I may grouse about it some, but I can take it.. Many of my friends can’t, and one divorce after another….

I remember an exchange with my second wife (by the way who is as wonderful as my first) when she said, “You act like you are afraid of me”….and I replied in an instant, “Aren’t I supposed to be”……

THAT was the respect I had for Lorena….when the chips were down she was the toughest one in the room and I knew it.

So once again we toil through Christmas, the hardest season of the year.

You see, Lorena’s parents were both alcoholics and Christmas was usually ruined by her Dad or Mom fighting and drunk.

She absorbed that abuse for years. I always have wondered if it what killed her.

So Christmas was huge….she was quite an artist and we had a “Country Art” business that she ran and contributed art to….and the art was always about Christmas.

She told me more than once that she intended to make Christmas the most special every year for her family, because her parents had always spoiled her’s with their drinking.

So I dreaded Christmas, because I worked my ass off putting up displays, prepared for our open house that sold her art and made Christmas into a mega Holiday!

When we thought she had beaten the cancer we went to San Francisco with the kids on a pre-Christmas holiday. It was when walking in Chinatown that she first complained about the pain in her hip.

She gallantly struggled through Christmas then a 911 call got us to the hospital. Shortly thereafter we got the diagnosis, Stage 4 Breast Cancer.

In those days there wasn’t the medicine now that can forestall the progression of the disease in some cases) so it was Chemo, then a Bone Marrow Transplant.

Problem was this effectively elimated Chemo for pain, since her bone marrow was so compromised; so the hell of five years of pain ensued; with all the agony you can imagine.

And I got a lot of help from her mother (who was now sober) my mother and other friends and family.

And five more Christmas’ came and went until the fateful day in May when she was gone.

I just finished weeping over a Christmas song, “Christmas Without You”…I can’t get through that song even after twenty one years….

I sometimes wonder as I hear the heroic stories of those who beat the disease, of the pink ribbons, of the October campaign against breast cancer, why we can’t beat that disease.

And I wonder about the Iron Mountain Mine, that was a toxic waste dump upriver from Redding, our home town, that had one of the highest beast cancer rates in the United States.

You see we were the unlucky ones…we are the ones who never got on T.V. to talk about our bravey, the victory.

We are the losers, the cancer won.

But we are survivors who everyday try to do what Private Ryan asked toward the end of his life: “Was I a good man”?

The stakes are a little higher with that answer when you had your heart ripped out……but we understand the importance of it more than most.

Was I a good man?