Good Friday
The church calendar is a throwback to when time wasn't really on our side.
We invented time, for the most part. We started with seasons and moved to seconds, but there were centuries in between and I guess we just muddled through without hours for a while.
I do this still. Sometimes.
Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, or something like that. It's a reminder of our roots, when we looked not to our wrists (or computers, or phones, or microwaves) for the time but to the sky. "What time is it?" must have been an interesting question 2000 years ago.
An interesting time, too.
Holy Week is busy here for us, has been for years and years. We're heading off for Good Friday services soon. I am apparently reading some things, but my wife has yet to put it in my hands. No problem.
I could look on my Microsoft Calendar and see when Good Friday was last year, but I think not. I remember it enough.
It was an interesting week. I talked to my mom a lot that week. We'd slung emails back and forth. She was concerned about my dad. He'd suddenly quit smoking in January, after fifty-plus years, because he was feeling bad, and then he felt worse. He bitched about this all the time, threatened to go back to the cigs. We took it as simple withdrawal.
I think he knew better.
So he went in for a physical, and they found his sodium level was low. So the doctor put him on water restriction, which he examined and scoffed at and forgot almost immediately. Half of that one liter he poured into his nightly scotch, after all, and there was yard work and just life to do. Forget this. Quitting smoking was enough.
But Holy Week last year was hard. He felt bad, real bad, nauseated and weak, and then he started to fall a lot and Mom said he got lost in a Wal-Mart parking lot for an hour or so. This was not like my dad. At 66, he was as vibrant and alert and ornery as ever, just like he always was. He didn't get lost.
His physical turned up a spot on his chest x-ray, so Good Friday he was scheduled for a PET scan, a Star Trek trick where they inject glucose and bombard your body with positrons, looking for a hit. So Mom arranged a viist with the doctor after the test and fooled Dad into thinking it was a follow-up.
I pondered these things in my heart all week. I couldn't make it click. I've spent 25 years wandering around the periphery of the medical profession. I know stuff. I know how to spell stuff. I know what questions to ask.
So, somehow, for some reason, on that Friday I googled it. I typed in "hyponatremia" (low sodium) and "encephalopathy" (acting weird), and I got an answer. A big-time answer.
SMALL CELL LUNG CANCER.
My father is dead. He was diagnosed with cancer on Good Friday of last year, and he died eight months later, supported and loved and, I think, sort of surprised. You can stare at a calendar all day but it won't always have the answers. Sometimes you have to look at the stars.
So this is an interesting day for me. I'm matching it with the last not by a date or a time, none of that made-up stuff; I match it with a moment. A moment when I learned about mortality firsthand, saw my own and hers and his, and I knew what was going to happen. A hard lesson for a lifelong optimist. Sort of a cross to bear now.
Two weeks after the chemotherapy finished, when he was done and getting on, spreading rock in the yard and moving forward, he started having headaches. This was October, and they found tumors in his brain. Lots of them.
I rushed out to visit him, flying on Halloween and making the drive north from Phoenix, not knowing. He was still bald from the chemo, still sarcastic and still fun, and we had lunch together, the five of us, three kids and two parents who got married in 1955 and didn't know how it would end, had no idea.
His eyes were wide a lot. Oh yes, he was surprised.
I snuck out into the back to smoke a cigarette, ashamed that I'd returned to the habit and feeling guilty about the whole thing. Your father has metastatic lung cancer and you're smoking? What kind of person is this?
And the door opened then, and I crushed the butt and wondered if he saw (he must have, though; he must have known) and he opened the door to the workshop.
I will never have a workshop.
He shuffled. He had become old and weak. He wanted to show me something, then, I guessed, and I saw. A lathe. A band saw. A drill press. Order, and industry, and a life.
Oh, I wished I'd said something then, but then. Never enough time. I'd written about him, yakked to him on the phone and told him things I wouldn't tell anyone else because he knew, he knew, and now I can't and then I couldn't. He was sick and weak. I was there for moral support.
A lot of support, dude. Can't even talk to your dad.
I drove to the store today, to get a Dr. Pepper and some more Kraft mac&cheese for my son, and I swung into traffic and thought about how effortlessly I do this. Dad taught me, and Mom taught me, and Bill taught me. Now I drive without thinking.
And I remembered being 4, and sitting in his lap and him letting me pretend to steer as we came into the garage.
I will wear my black suit tonight, last worn at my dad's funeral. It's a somber night, after all. What a difference a year makes, I will think, but right now I think a year is a human invention, a made-up thing, and I am still sitting on his lap and he is still watching me steer, understanding that I haven't got a clue but maybe hoping, as a young man, that someday I will.
4:53:38 PM 
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