Tiberius Anar
Mar 18th, 2016, 02:39:57 PM
My friend died three days ago.
He had been sick for a long time. Years. Almost the entire time we had known each other. We were the same age and we met at university so that means it was most of our adult lives.
We did not know at first what was wrong with him. Why his foot hurt was a mystery. Why there was a hole (that is the only way to describe it: a hole) in it was inexplicable. The doctors took an age to realise it was cancer. Osteosarcoma: a rare kind that usually manifests in teenage boys when it manifests at all. I suppose they were not expecting to find it in someone like him.
He was twenty when it started. He died when he was thirty.
In the time between he was poked and prodded, hooked to pumps, cut-up repeatedly by surgeons, had grafts, transfusions, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. They took his leg and a big chunk of his guts but even that did not stop it. It had crept into his lungs, his muscle, his flesh. It ate away at him. Every time he seemed to have beaten it back, it rallied and came back at him. Every time it did, he fought back. He kept fighting it. He kept fighting it right to the end. He was fighting the day he died. To the final breath.
But it got him in the end.
Now I sit in his house while his son sleeps upstairs. His wife is at work: her last shift on her “pocket money job”. He and I used to sit here together on these nights, talking (always quietly because the boy upstairs has hearing like a bat), arguing, teasing each other, practising for when we would be old men by shouting (sotto voce of course) at the TV news.
I really did think we would be old men together despite the evidence that was not going to happen.
Sometimes, especially lately when he was in the hospice, I was here alone to watch over his son. But I never felt I was alone then. Now I do. Then I could call him if I needed his advice. Now I cannot.
His mobile phone is on the sofa: in his spot. It was never away from him. It was how he stayed involved with the world wherever he was and whatever was happening to him. He used to send me stories he found on Buzzfeed and gossip about the other patients. He liked to make sure we knew he was having a good time getting blood pumped into him while he sipped a gin and tonic like a guest at some spa resort for vampires.
I rather liked that joke. So did he.
I miss him very much.
He had been sick for a long time. Years. Almost the entire time we had known each other. We were the same age and we met at university so that means it was most of our adult lives.
We did not know at first what was wrong with him. Why his foot hurt was a mystery. Why there was a hole (that is the only way to describe it: a hole) in it was inexplicable. The doctors took an age to realise it was cancer. Osteosarcoma: a rare kind that usually manifests in teenage boys when it manifests at all. I suppose they were not expecting to find it in someone like him.
He was twenty when it started. He died when he was thirty.
In the time between he was poked and prodded, hooked to pumps, cut-up repeatedly by surgeons, had grafts, transfusions, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. They took his leg and a big chunk of his guts but even that did not stop it. It had crept into his lungs, his muscle, his flesh. It ate away at him. Every time he seemed to have beaten it back, it rallied and came back at him. Every time it did, he fought back. He kept fighting it. He kept fighting it right to the end. He was fighting the day he died. To the final breath.
But it got him in the end.
Now I sit in his house while his son sleeps upstairs. His wife is at work: her last shift on her “pocket money job”. He and I used to sit here together on these nights, talking (always quietly because the boy upstairs has hearing like a bat), arguing, teasing each other, practising for when we would be old men by shouting (sotto voce of course) at the TV news.
I really did think we would be old men together despite the evidence that was not going to happen.
Sometimes, especially lately when he was in the hospice, I was here alone to watch over his son. But I never felt I was alone then. Now I do. Then I could call him if I needed his advice. Now I cannot.
His mobile phone is on the sofa: in his spot. It was never away from him. It was how he stayed involved with the world wherever he was and whatever was happening to him. He used to send me stories he found on Buzzfeed and gossip about the other patients. He liked to make sure we knew he was having a good time getting blood pumped into him while he sipped a gin and tonic like a guest at some spa resort for vampires.
I rather liked that joke. So did he.
I miss him very much.