There Should Be a Crescendo
How one family deals with news that the patriarch is dying
The day we learned our father had terminal cancer was the best day our family ever had. This is true mostly because of my father himself.
Dad had been feeling poorly for over a year and had endured all kinds of tests which had resulted in few answers. He had been in the hospital a couple of times. The last hospital visit before diagnosis was just days before my niece’s wedding. The doctor came in and said, “We need to run more tests, so I need to keep you in the hospital a while longer.” To which my father replied,
“My oldest granddaughter is getting married. You can release me with all the paperwork or I’m walking out of here on my own. I won’t be missing her wedding.”
One of my favorite pictures of my parents is of them dancing at that wedding.
It is an unusual story, but by the time he was officially diagnosed with terminal cancer, my siblings, mother, and I all knew that would be the diagnosis. It was a mixture of my oldest sister taking charge — as she is known to do — and her having been a hospital chaplain understanding the language along with the fact that Dad just knew what was happening in his body.
At the time my parents lived in a small town. The day Dad was scheduled to go to his “country doctor” to hear the results from the latest test, both my sisters, my brother, and I gathered at my parents’ house. We knew what was coming.
Dad was in so much pain that Mom called the doctor and said,
“I’m not making him get in a car and come to your office. He can’t even sit up. You will either have to talk to me in the office or make a house call.”
To his credit, the doctor and his nurse drove out to their house, the only “house call” I’ve seen in my lifetime. We all gathered around Dad’s bed while the doctor delivered the news,
“Sir, I’m sorry to have to tell you that you have colon cancer. It is Stage 4 and there isn’t anything we can do about it.”
Dad responded,
“Well, how in the hell did I get that?”
And, my entire family burst out into laughter.
The nurse was standing behind the doctor in tears.
I am serious. She was crying the whole time. The doctor was shocked by our reaction — understandably so. Dad was a long-time smoker. He knew he had lung cancer. We knew he had lung cancer. The doctor misdiagnosed it as colon cancer because by the time he finally paid attention to what was going on the cancer had spread to most every part of Dad’s body.
The local minister lay in his California King sized bed with all his children and their spouses standing around him, with his wife holding his hand and when the doctor said it was something other than lung cancer that was killing him, his response was “How the hell did I get that?” and our response was to laugh.
That poor doctor and nurse probably still tell stories about us just like we tell stories about them. We must have seemed like a crazy family. But, like I said, we knew what was coming and my father kept us laughing all the way to his last breath.
A little while after the doctor and nurse left the house, we were doing what we do best as a family. We were sitting around the dinner table, talking, laughing, and eating. Dad didn’t want to miss it, so he got up for a bit and came to sit in his chair at the head of the table. We talked about lots of different things, not the least of which was that poor doctor’s reaction to our reaction. And, we started planning Daddy’s funeral. Dad said,
“I’ve put some money aside so y’all can hire some mourners. I want there to be people crying for me at my funeral.”
We laughed.
The middle sister, who has my father’s sense of humor, said,
“Now, Daddy, you know we will cry for you. But, how do you want us to do that? Do you want us to weep softly to ourselves or would you prefer we wail out loud?”
Before we could laugh at her question, without missing a beat, Dad replied,
“Well,” except when he said “well” with his southern accent it was always drawn out,
“Weeellllll, there SHOULD be a crescendo.”
So much laughter around that dinner table that night. The older sister, who worked as a chaplain to children with cancer at the time looked at her husband while laughing and said, “I don’t think normal families do this.”
Well, I thank God we are not a normal family. This story will not do that day justice. It doesn’t matter how many times we retell it or details that we remember about it, there is no way to adequately communicate how wonderful that day was. I think my siblings feel the same way. I hope they do. It was horrible and if we could live without hearing that our father was dying, we would prefer that. At the same time, we clung to each other and laughed, I mean really laughed together. We always laugh together. That day was different. There was sorrow mixed in with the laughter, but we knew it was sacred time.
There was a crescendo.
A week later, Dad was dead. Today marks the 14th anniversary.
