A kind man with white hair who resembled a doctor in a children’s book came into the room with a folder and sat down across from my parents and me. The scans, he said, showed many tumors, in both lungs and all through the body. The kind of cancer was “squamous cell lung cancer.” The doctor said, “We can’t cure this cancer, but we have treatments.” The doctor said we only had to make one decision that day, “the first decision of a hundred more,” and that was what treatment plan to start with. He said the options were: chemotherapy, immunotherapy, both, or neither.
We all sat there, stunned.
“What’s your reaction when I mention chemotherapy?” the doctor asked.
“I’m a writer,” my father said. “I’m still employed. I want to do whatever will help me keep writing as long as possible. I think chemo might make me too tired.”
The room was quiet. Across from me, my mother’s eyes were filled with tears. She looked scared.
“You’re saying writing is what gets you out of bed in the morning,” said the doctor, clarifying.
“The idea of not being able to write fills me with dread.”
“You aren’t just a writer!” I said. “You’re also a husband and a father and a grandfather and a friend.”
Sounding exasperated, my father said, “What am I supposed to do? Just sit around like a potted plant? I don’t make any sense to myself if I’m not writing.”
My mother hadn’t said a word.
“If I do nothing, how long have I got?” my father asked the doctor.
“Well, with your kind of cancer and how far it’s progressed, we say the median length of time after diagnosis would be six months,” the doctor said. “That means half live longer than that.”
And, he did not say, half live shorter.
Six months. Once those words were spoken it felt like the weather in the room changed.
“I don’t want to do chemo,” my father said at last. He opted for immunotherapy. Probably no side effects. A 35 percent chance of improving his quality of life and possibly extending it. It would just mean an infusion every three weeks starting on Tuesday.
“I can’t Tuesday,” he said. “I have a deadline.”
After the appointment, I bought my parents food at a restaurant where I’d once eaten salads and discussed story ideas with a magazine editor. It felt like a long time ago. As my parents and I half-heartedly ate, I asked my father if he wanted to go on a trip or something. He said, “Maybe a ball game.”
A half hour later, we left the restaurant and found that it had begun raining. I was the only one who’d brought an umbrella. My father said he wanted to walk to Chelsea to look at art. I gave my father my umbrella and called a car for my mother. As I stood alone in the rain, I watched my father walk away. Before he rounded the corner, he lit a cigarette.
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