The Perfect Words

That's Leanna in green, crouching between Tim on the left and Ed in his wheelchair.

One morning after I dropped my daughter Leanna at high school, her basketball coach Tim leaned in the car window to ask what came next. I was between a summer of chemo and the fall’s stem-cell transplant.  

Radiation, I said. More chemo, then the transplant, maybe a month altogether in Boston and after that, if all went well, a year at home while my new immune system established itself.  

It was my best path forward, I said, though I could not have looked enthusiastic in describing it.

Tim patted his hand several times on the roof of my car, as if he had his arm around my shoulder, then said the kind of thing coaches say.  “Stay mentally strong, and the rest will take care of itself.”  

I’ve thought a lot about his words from that moment forward, because they’re perfect.  Tim wasn’t promising or predicting anything, though it might have been taken that way: the rest will take care of itself.  

He was being honest: There are no promises when it comes to cancer. You cannot actually will your way to victory, much as we all wish we could. What’s going to happen will happen, it’s beyond your control—that’s what those words really mean.  

Recognizing that truth, accepting it, hard as it is, frees you to focus on the first half of Tim’s sentence, which captures, just as perfectly, what you can do about cancer: Stay mentally strong.  

That’s far easier said than done, and I imagine it means different things for different people. For me, it meant making sure I was dressed and sitting in my chair, not lying in bed, when the doctors came on rounds each morning. It meant asking questions. It meant repeating Tim’s words and others like them over and over at night, in the darkness, as the toxins dripped from the plastic bag above my head down into my arm.

Stay mentally strong, and the rest will take care of itself.

Kill the bad cells, grow the good cells, bless and release.

Long road, bumpy road, stay strong.

If you feel good, it won’t last. If you feel bad, that won’t last either.

Over and over. Again and again.

During my years of recovery, Ed was diagnosed with brain cancer. Tim took a year off from coaching so they could be with each other.  

I last saw them together outside a community center gym where Leanna and the girls on their AAU team had spent hard hours in practice; once, Ed, Tim and I chaperoned a middle school dance held there to finance the team’s big trip to Florida.  

This time, Ed was in a wheelchair. The girls were home from their first year in college. Though no one spoke openly of it, everyone knew this was a final gathering. We ate, talked, laughed and watched a video of their trip, where they had played in a national tournament against girls twice their size.  

Ed knew of my sickness, and once when he and I exchanged a glance, I thought I read in his eyes something along the lines of “How about this shit?”  But only for a moment. At evening’s end, when the team gathered around their coach for pictures, Ed’s smile was as broad as anyone’s. Mentally strong. The rest, it took care of itself.

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