COLUMN: Bowing to the sun gods
When you are waiting for the results of a biopsy, your life doesn’t flash before your eyes, but it does sort of languorously scroll by. The script is bad, the flashbacks are sketchy and you’d probably walk out of the movie if you didn’t happen to be the lead character.
Although cancer has become part of our daily lexicon, the difficult part is answering the questions “why,” not in a cosmic sense, but in a very tangible sense of who do you blame? Well, most of the time the answer is as clear as your face in a rearview mirror. Both in reality and metaphorically it’s you and your past.
I knew there was only a small chance that my skin cancer would be life-threatening, but I was also worried about the prospect of looking like the elephant man if they had to remove too much of the offending tissue. I felt guilty getting too upset because this was a lower-case rather than an upper-case cancer. But then again, it is like the reports of there being only a one in three million chance of getting eaten by a shark; if you are that one person, you are 100 percent, not 1/3 millionth, eaten.
I thought about people I could sue, Coppertone for telling us to all go out and get a deep dark tan in the ’70s, my parents for encouraging me to play outside, the whole industrial complex for thinning out the ozone layer or this town for being 4,500 feet closer to the sun than where I grew up.
But like someone wise said, “Life is what you do when you are not waiting.” We have a whole new world of sweating through tests, biopsies, AIDS tests, colonoscopies, cytoscopies and cameras going other places you never thought they would.
And like waiting for my acceptance or rejection into college, I sat around thinking of all the past-tense time, but was unable to decide which part of it was wasted. You play a lot of mental pingpong while your are watching your life scroll by. What would I regret? The part where I wasn’t actively contributing to the betterment of society or the time I passed up a chance to drink margaritas on the shore of Bear Lake as the sun went down in July.
Should I have read more great literature or should I have written that trashy novel that would have embarrassed all my friends and relatives? Should I erase all the incriminating evidence on my hard drive or leave it to some heir just for the shock value? Spend more quiet moments with the people I love or do something really stupid that will get me on all the talk shows before I die?
Or maybe we all ought to have a few more “Brent” days and ride our bikes around smiling and waving at people we’ve never met. Maybe having your life flash by would be better because the condensed version is a little more action-packed and dramatic than the seven-day-mini-series version on a continuous loop that creeps by while you wait. I found it better to not say much because it really puts people on the spot and Hallmark has not really caught up with the times.
Heck, I don’t know what to say and it is happening to me. Like most things in life the anticipation is the hard part, but most of the cards, greetings and sympathetic structure we have built up is designed to deal with aftermath. “This card is to express our sorrow about (your loss/your divorce/your daughter’s marriage to that loser.)
Maybe that could be my big contribution to society. I could write gallows-humor cards:
Borrow some of my sedatives, I hope your test comes back negative.
The CAT scan found nothing in your brain. If they asked us we would have said the same.
That laxative sure packs a wallop. We hope they find no colon polyps.
But just about the time I was poised to call Hallmark, the biopsy results came back. It turned out to be only a pre-cancer which, I guess, is a comfort since I consider myself pre-old. It was benign like most of these columns.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears each Friday in The Statesman. Comments can be sent to flackmaster@burningman.com