Day 4: LIVESTRONG

I wear it everyday but somehow I haven't looked at it in weeks. I mean, really looked at it. It is the yellow LIVESTRONG bracelet wrapped around my wrist. It happens to be my favorite color and it does an incredible job of making me look sportier than I really am but that's not why I wear it. It was a gift.

Bob, a close family friend had just passed away. I remember being in the room with him in his last moments. He was frail. His body had evolved into a life sucking machine that was ripping out pages—chapters— of his autobiography. It didn't make sense. I was fourteen, almost fifteen, and death wasn't something that my teenage mind was equipped to distill.

Bob was business man. He had a smokey office in the back of his billiards hall— McHenry Boulevard Billiards. On the occasional Friday evening, before the rowdy crowd filed in, my brother would take me there to see Bob. My sassy second-grade self would walk back to his office like I owned the place. He would put out his cigarette, I would jump into his lap, and we would start talking business. I would file papers that, hindesight 20/20, I think were on their way to the garbage bin. I'm sure Bob had resurrected them from the trash pile on his desk and let me file them so I could feel like I had helped. It worked. I always felt like I was something else. After my work was done, Bob would reach into the top drawer of his desk and pull out a bag full of quarters. This was good stuff. It was the signal. It was my cue to get my tom-boy tooshie out to the air hockey table. We would play as many rounds as I could beg out of him and he would always bribe me out of another match by striking a deal. He's a business man, remember. If I agreed to relent, I got to sit up at the bar and have a soda with Debbie, his wife. It never took to much convincing.

But he was gone and my these were the memories that my teenage mind clung to in order to cushion myself from the blow of death. It was my first real experience with it and it felt like a whirlwind of bizarre.

A few weeks later, I got a package in the mail. I ripped it open, anxious to see what was inside. Yellow LIVESTRONG bands—one for me and one for my mom—and a letter. It was from my brother. He wrote about the fragility of life and how watching Bob pass was lesson, to him,  in living strong. So, in memorandum, we all wore our LIVESTRONG bands as reminders to do just that.  

Exactly a year of wearing our bracelets had passed when I got the call. "Hi Meggy, 
it's mom. Nick has come down with a really bad flu and I'm headed out to California to take care of him for a few days. I love you," my mom's recorded voice said into my voicemail. I thought nothing of it. I would miss my mom but school, homework, and track workouts would keep me busy. The next message was a little less light-hearted, "Hi Meg, It's mom. Nick's in the hospital. They're doing some blood work but I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. I'll keep you posted. I love you." My heart sank slightly in my chest but my world kept charging forward. Blood work was no big deal. It's standard.

The next school day came and went. Track practice was over, I was exhausted and I was headed home to make some dinner and crawl into bed. The third call came, but this time we finally connected. No voicemail would be necessary. I answered my cell and could hear that someone was on the other end of the line. We were connected but my mom was silent. "Mom? Are you there?" I asked. "I'm here, Meg," she whispered. "What's up, Mom," I hesitated to utter. "Meg," she paused. "Nick has Leukemia." I hit the floor like a ton of bricks. My phone went flying and my world went blurry.  How I got from Utah to California still remains fuzzy in my memory. But I did. Next thing I knew, I was calling Standford Hospital home.

The cancer was progressive and they started chemotherapy immediately. The familiar scene of watching a limp body, sunken into the sheets and sucking life, had returned. But this time it was closer than I could ever imagine. Everyday the nurses would come in dressed like they were transporting nuclear waste and they would inject the chemo—The Death— into my brothers body.  I would sit, like an observer at an execution, as I watched death take my brother by the hand and lead him to bleary horizon where life and cessation meet.  And everyday, like clockwork, death showed up to lead him to that bleary horizon. But everyday, he refused to go. He fought, for what seemed like an eternity, through the chemo, through the radiation, through the bone marrow transplant, and through the myriad of associated illness that followed. But somehow, in the midst of such unrest, my brother had become the epitome of living strong.

Two months ago, marked the five year anniversary of my brother's diagnosis and I'm proud to say that he's still living strong. I got a glimpse of the yellow band around my wrist tonight and thought:

"My brother. My brother still living strong is what's right in the world."