Old Friends Second Beginnings

Relationship accounting and reconnecting in the face of illness

Today is my friend Sean’s birthday. Unlike most of my friends, we met from different schools via our high school’s feeder basketball team. It was the seventh grade and we both made the cut. He was a guard and I was a forward, delineated by his ability to dribble and my ability to jump. His dad Rory was the assistant coach, a friend-legend we loved to aggrandize into our own weird, teenage lore who was rightfully never satisfied with my ugly shooting form.

Graduating into a singular high school, Sean and I became a package deal for the later half of it. Our mutual devotion to playing bad basketball (that we thought was really good) was wrapped in a bow of mutual pranksmanship that solidified our friendship.

But college soon arrived and we scattered to the winds, me with dreams of winding my way to Hollywood and, selfishly, largely uncaring where my friends wound up. I had previously spent every summer lassoing a core of friends, and later Sean, into summers making home movies around town. Now I would depart to try and make it in the big leagues, sure to one day return and show everyone that everything went exactly to plan.

Sean and I fell out of touch quickly. Occasional texts over the course of hazy college nights and diverging ambitions meant that any real tracking of the other’s life was reserved for Christmas Break. The slow gravity of time and distance filled the gaps in conversation. Years of past history could now fit tidily into a long night trudging back through the snow from the hometown bars. We saw each other maybe two or three times over four years.

A few years later, after moving to Los Angeles, I got sick. I remember calling a number of close friends to deliver the news over the phone but I don’t remember calling Sean. Then, seven weeks after diagnosis, I returned to my hometown of Libertyville, Illinois, a far northern Chicago suburb that looks a lot like a John Hughes movie—and Sean was the only person on my call list.

I knew he still came up to Libertyville to see his family and his girlfriend Lauren—who had graciously allowed me to be a third wheel through much of their high school romance.

It wasn’t a strange call, but it was a strange request. “Hey man, I have cancer but we should catch up.”

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Cancer sets in motion an unwanted but oftentimes illuminating game of relationship accounting. For both friends and family, there are those you tell and those who learn through the grapevine. There are those who reach out and those who wait for you. Some people are there and then gone and others reappear or remain when you never expect them to.

Much of it depends on how public of a person you are. I was (and am, despite this thing) not that public of a person, though I eventually dropped the news on Facebook and sat back to watch the shockwaves of likes and heart emojis roll in, a small consolation prize for the new tubes that were running out of my arms.

But cancer is a proximity mine and no one wants to be the person who blows it up. And yet there is a strange desire to tell everyone. The news feels like too much to hold in. It is a burning pit of gossip, a wtf life reckoning first digested as what surely had to be a mistake. It’s a dramatic recasting of a character destined for contentious debate by whoever is still watching. I was the movie guy. Now I’m the… Cancer guy? 

The whiplash of externally existing as two different people at the same time leads to strange encounters. Past and present became oil and water, me doing my best to be a crowd-pleasing balsamic. Everyone wanted to know how I was feeling, but I couldn’t shake the subtext of the question that I was also asking myself— did it feel like I was dying?

Or maybe it wasn’t that serious. Maybe people were just trying to be nice. Who knows? From the person holding the bad news, I found it both easy to judge and easy to forgive. I didn’t know what to do with it, so why should they— but also, why did they act like that?

Most people want to be helpful, they just don’t know how. That is probably because there isn’t much anyone can do (a personal feeling). Lists of hats and socks and books and ginger candy are bandied about the internet. Cards and care packages arrive, phone numbers and emails are given with zest, updates are shared and blogs are begun (some ten years too late). Maybe I was just missing the point.

But information is the only real, tangible currency with cancer. An audience of unknown size stares up at the betting boards to see, in as close to real time, whether by social media, word of mouth, and/or the rumor mill— how the odds are changing on Elliott.

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Sean last saw Elliott as a starry-eyed kid who left home, returning in fits to murmur career achievements over now-legal beers, each tiny step casually reframed as momentous leaps towards accomplishing a dream. Elliott asked fewer questions to Sean but knew that he now had a dog.

Elliott later returned to Sean as a sickly twenty-six year old guest of indeterminate length in his parents’ ground floor guest room. The same home they had ransacked as teens. Upon reunification, in the primal way that men communicate, very little was spoken about cancer. Sean gave a broad thesis of “I don’t want to talk about that shit if you don’t want to”, to which Elliott replied “Yeah, that’s cool.”

If only the world knew that cancer could be defeated by the all-inclusive emotional guardrails of two dudes talking about nothing.

But just like that… I was no longer alone. I had someone to hang out with on the weekends. Not just Sean, but Lauren too. The tricycle was reunited, this time with a rusted third wheel.

In a period between chemo and before my bone marrow transplant, we began again. We ate breakfast sandwiches at the bagel place we once thought undefeatable until we stepped foot outside of our suburb. And we discovered a nearby mysterious wildlife refuge that had a bobcat in an enclosure that we liked to hang out with. It would eye us on approach, an all-knowing seer discovered by two grown up teens still trying to kill time.

When I was locked away in the hospital for my transplant, Sean and Lauren came by to visit after work (along with others, but they’ll have to wait until their birthday). Lauren even got towed picking up a pizza for us to share as we watched a Bulls game. Penniless and helpless I could offer nothing but a few additional curse words.

Everything had changed and yet nothing had changed at all.

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Relationships have a shelf life. Despite our best intentions, family and friends are elastic. Ritual gatherings are fractured and spread as cousins become distant and friends fall into blindspots only rendered visible depending on their commitment to social media. Life’s strict adherence to the passage of time demands that we actively involve ourselves in someone’s life in order for them to wholly exist.

But cancer brings the sound of passing time up to a dull roar. Like some kind of temporal tinnitus, scenes of my life pass by without me understanding what happened. Without the ability to rewind or add subtitles, I rely on regularly scheduled reminders to “be present”. It often falls on deaf ears.

As much as cancer is a dramatic intervention in the sprawling web of family, friends, and those known as acquaintances— my disappearance from this life could have happened any time at all. Bad news travels fast but so does everything these days.

People disappear from my life all the time. Names and stories are brought up that have been inadvertently purged from my memory, triggering my knee-jerk Midwestern need to apologize to the outline of someone— I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to forget you.

“Hey, did you hear about Elliott?”

But good news is just as welcome. Good news can breathe new life into shuttered windows. It can resurrect the smallest of connections, costing nothing to drop a comment in the comment section.

In cancer, and in life, a celebration of any amount of continued existence or small accomplishment can jump start a network of still-beating hearts, sending an unseen stress test through the dormant fibers of your life. At barest, best minimum— someone somewhere might remember you again.

I don’t think that’s the ego talking. I think it’s just nice to know someone is doing well.

“Hey, did you hear about Elliott?”

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Many weeks after I had successfully made it out of my stem cell transplant and had been given a longer leash, I was given the all clear by my doctor to have exactly one beer. I texted Sean giddy with excitement as we planned where we would purchase my solitary lager.

We settled on a pizza place, some new but nondescript “fancy” restaurant that rocked the suburbs by putting arugula and honey on their pies. We sat at the bar and the waitress gave us menus. As we weighed my options, I made small talk with the uncaring bartender (honestly, fair). Sean and I went on and on about how “this was my first beer in a loooong time.” Having been friends before we could have a beer, it held a certain silly resonance to us.

The waitress gave me a strange look when she set my beer down, offering a second of hesitation that both of us insinuated as an “Are you sure?” moment. I thanked her, promised I would be fine, and drank the beer. Sean and I puzzled over her reaction, trying to suss out her distaste with us until we broke into wide-eyed chuckles, realizing that the way we had been talking about the beer made me sound like I had been some sort of alcoholic.

For weeks we pulled apart the scene— of the waitress who thought she was helping someone fall off the wagon. We laughed as we retold the story to Lauren (perfectly unimpressed), as both of us found too much humor in our perceived miscommunication.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized how obviously wrong we were. We had misread the scene all along. The truth was much simpler. The bartender had seen a healthy jokester and his sickly, bald cancer patient friend asking for a beer, both playing up the trepidation of it. She didn’t think I was an alcoholic, she thought I looked sick as shit and probably shouldn’t be drinking a beer.

It makes me smile to this day. Because on some level, it meant that Sean didn’t see me as a sickly, thin, bald cancer patient. I mean, he probably did, how could he not. But despite the circumstances that had made our paths cross once again, there was something that cancer hadn’t changed.

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There are difficult stories of cancer’s strain on relationships. On marriages. On families. Everyone needs and expects something different. Being the one with cancer is a filter unto itself, the world often appearing closed or hostile or endlessly unfair. I have been bitter to those closest to me. I have asked for more than could be given. And I have been rewarded with attendance and grace that I did not deserve.

I circle back to my friendship with Sean because I don’t know what our relationship would be like if I hadn’t gotten sick. I certainly never intended to move back home. There is a non-zero chance that our friendship might not really exist. And it is in that rumination that I have to admit, begrudgingly, that I suppose some good did come out of cancer.

These relationships forged or strengthened from illness seem very much the point of relationships and cancer. So much is lost to the disease, so much anger is swallowed or shuffled around, that to linger on those who contribute nothing or depart for safer pastures matter little in the end.

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Sometimes when I needed an excuse to get out of the house, I would drive to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription refill. From there I would make the extra trip to go see the mysterious bobcat that we had discovered. In the dead of winter, I would trek out to its cage, past rows of withered prairie grass, never once seeing a park ranger or any other soul at the snow-covered refuge.

Leaning against a cold wooden fence post, the bobcat and I would look at each other. I liked to think that we were both wondering how we got there. My imperfect blood ran slow, it having become weak after only a few years of Southern California living. But I had come back in the coldest season to the flatlands of my youth, the sound of old haunts dampened by the greying white.

The bobcat always sat perfectly poised, as if it had been waiting for me, as if we had known each other in a life not long ago. And now I had returned, and there we were, left out for the long winter, waiting for life to return with the thaw.

Anyways, happy birthday Sean.

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Sensory Activation: What I Watched/Read/Listened To This Week

In the spirit of a small detox from illness-talk, I’m going to add a recommendation section at the end of each newsletter. I’m an avid movie watcher, middling indie music connoisseur, and always-catching-up reader, but here I’ll try and relay something I found noteworthy for the week.

The Iron Claw (A24)

If you thought you were going to get a break from the melancholy… Not yet.

This is a happy accident because Sean is a very big wrestling fan (I’m not) and we both happened to go see this last week. Here’s what he had to say:

I won’t be talking shit about Efron anymore

I’m a fan of director Sean Durkin (Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene; The Nest) and it’s nice to see him get a bigger budget for what feels like a personal interest for him. The film is based on the true story of the Von Erich wrestling family and the “curse” that hangs over them, bringing incredible tragedy to the already punishing profession of professional wrestling. It’s a touching and haunting film that I’m surprised Zac Efron isn’t getting more awards season buzz for— his physical transformation (expansion) works well to bury his nuance beneath so much muscle mass. Across the board, there is so much genuine joy to the beefy Texas brothers that the four-some of actors never feels saccharine.

Between the brotherly love (I have two) and the nagging wariness of a “curse” floating over your head that returns to punish you… The movie resonated. But be warned, it’s a sad movie. Also, the needle drops are great, with a particular “Tom Sawyer” placement that the Internet is already hailing as a great “dudes rock” moment— and while cautionary, they’re right.

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Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed what you read, feel free to Like, Comment, or Share— it helps boost visibility of the newsletter and is a nice acknowledgement from the void. I would love to hear from whoever is reading.