These Genes Are Dungarees

I started writing this two years ago, thinking I’d have forever to brag about all my unlikely living relatives and my impressively hearty genetics. And then my dad died.

DADDY DNA

It never occurred to my grandpa that cancer should kill him. Since his first diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1993, he has had cancer removed from basically every part of his body. He is missing part of one lung, ⅓ of his colon, and has had skin carved from his forehead to make him a new nose to replace the melanoma ridden one the doctors took from him in 1999. At 92 years old he finally lost his full head of hair, but not to male pattern baldness, nor to chemotherapy, but to a scalpel that removed more skin cancer from the top of his head and required a four-inch section to be shaved clean while the skin of his scalp grew back together. 

It never occurred to my grandma that, even though she has no sense of smell, therefore little motivation to eat, that she shouldn’t live to feed everyone around her. Missing a gallbladder since her 40s and disappearing slowly before our eyes, my grandma limps through the neighborhood while her 13 year-old great grandson circles her on a scooter. Her age has exceeded her weight, she is covered in bruises and bandaids and she wants to know if she can fix me anything.

Once, when I was visiting my biological father, his kidneys failed causing his limbs to swell with fluid and bile. The doctors said if he ever took another drink, he’d die. He’s continued to drink pretty much every day for the more than 30 years since. A dozen years after the kidney failure, he was hit by a car while riding his bike. Drunk. On an expressway. His legs were broken, shattered, and repaired with screws and other metal hardware one might use to hold a house together. He complains about not being able to get through airport security. Since then, he has not traveled anywhere he can’t ride on a bicycle, though I doubt it has anything to do with the TSA. Five years ago he fell down drunk when he got up to pee in the bucket in the corner of his bedroom at the back of my grandparents’ home. His 90-year-old father picked him up and put him in bed. Days later, still experiencing pain my grandma drove him to the “Emergency” and learned both his hips were broken. To prepare for and recover from surgery, he had to be medically detoxed. He was in the hospital for three months getting through the agony, but he was eventually able to return home and resume drinking. It never occurred to him to stay sober. 

MOM GENES

Just three months after her 20th birthday, and three days after her first wedding anniversary. My mom drove herself to the hospital in rush hour traffic in the Silicon Valley because she was in labor with me. It never occurred to her that the task of childbirth was something she couldn’t do on her own.

It never occurred to my grandma that  lung cancer would take her more than 20 years after she quit smoking. Not after she survived numerous falls and that pesky breast cancer. In her last few years, I was lucky to spend a lot of time traveling with my grandma, which was wonderful, but it also meant constantly gasping and grasping at her as she fell or nearly fell on the sidewalks of Spokane, Denver, and DC. In a matter of two days, we learned the diagnosis: cancer, and the prognosis: a hospice nurse--which, to this day, occurs to me as little more than a shoulder shrug on the part of her doctors. Since her hearing was failing, she made her calls on speaker phone held up directly to her ear. We all heard the heartbreaking reactions from her lifelong friends as she called to share the news. Before I left that day, she apologized that I had to see her that way. 

Since his wife of more than 60 years passed away, my grandpa has been writing the same grocery list:

• Kleenex

• Potato chips

• Sangria

For at least a decade he slept, practically folded in half, on the loveseat next to the full-size sofa in front of the television and still crawled around on the floor with his great grandchildren. He’ll even tell you he’s “freakishly healthy” despite smoking for more than 40 years. I don’t think it will ever occur to him to start living again.