Bookends

Our dear friend Vic, a lovely, very funny, and delightfully vulgar Londoner (who has let us live in her flat this semester), is the youngest of five children.  She and her oldest sister call each other “bookends.”  I realized this past weekend that I have significant bookends for my prostate cancer surgery here in Atlanta.

Two weeks before surgery, I went to Canary Wharf Station to board the Jubilee Line for Westminster.  Our daughter Ginna and her friend Jessica were visiting us in London.  One of Ginna’s co-workers had arranged a tour of Parliament with a friend of hers working there.  October 2019 was perhaps the height of Brexit chaos, although time will tell if that really was the nadir or not.  Brexit aside, we were all looking forward to the tour.  I was to meet them and Anne at a pub close to the Houses of Parliament.

We go to Canary Wharf often for the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), less frequently for the Jubilee Line.  It’s a new, quite stunning station, and the line is very deep indeed.   As I went down the second, very long escalator, I heard an announcement.  “The Staff at Canary Wharf Station are collecting donations for Prostate Cancer.  Please give to a member of staff.”  And sure enough, as was about to go through the entry gate with my cell phone ready for Google Pay, I saw two women staff with buckets collecting for the cause.  I walked over and gave them all the change in my pocket, about two or three pounds, and told them my prostate surgery was two weeks away exactly.  They wished me all the best and gave me this pin.

You are not supposed to take pictures inside the Houses of Parliament once you have gone beyond the public areas.  Of course, I did.

 

 

I was very conscious of the two week mark that Thursday.  I knew what was going to happen but I had no idea.  The real fear really started a week later, a few days before I flew back to Atlanta.  Real fear.  There’s nothing like facing cancer surgery.  Surgery is bad and this wasn’t my first.  But this was cancer.

I wore the pin almost every day I could, in my vest or shirt.  I wore it until three weeks after the surgery or so, when I lost the back.  But I’ve saved it.

Five weeks later, and three weeks after surgery, I got up early to drive Anne to the airport in Atlanta.  She was travelling to Ann Arbor to join our daughter and several cousins for an early celebration of her father’s 90th birthday.  We left about 7:00 am, which isn’t early for me these days.  After drop-off, I went to a nearby hotel for a nice breakfast and a few trips to the toilet–I knew I couldn’t get back to my mother’s house without some breaks.  An hour or two later, as I was pulling in to her neighborhood, I heard Scott Simon of  Weekend Edition say, “About a year ago, Joe Henry was told he had prostate cancer. And out of what he calls the black earth of that experience came a flowering of music.”

I sat in the driveway, in a little discomfort because I needed the bathroom again, and listened to the entire interview.  It was the mythical NPR “driveway moment.”  And it blew me away.  There were tears in my eyes by the end, in part because his journey to remission sounded much more difficult compared to mine.  Prostate cancer and surgeries can be very different for different men.  I am one of the lucky ones.

These are my prostate surgery bookends, the staff collecting funds in Canary Wharf Station and Joe Henry on Weekend Edition.  They frame a strange period in my life, just one day now before I fly back to London and pick up the pieces of my sabbatical.

But the bookends are really markers, not the end of anything.  Yes, an end of our time in Atlanta, the surgery, and four weeks of recovery.  But cancer doesn’t end.  I am cancer free and plan to stay that way, but this is with me the rest of my life.