In late December 2013, a dear friend was taken to the emergency room with seizure like symptoms and diagnosed within a short time with a tumor of the brain. Not long after my first visit with him, I was given a prompt in a writer’s workshop to start some kind of piece with “I just wanted to help.” I wrote this, shared it with my friend’s wife (and my writing group), and then set it aside. Now, awaiting word of his final passing, in this insanely helpless period for all involved, I looked for it to post it here, as the only way to share this story right now, at a time I feel like sharing. The bottom line takes a while to get to, but has to do with the kind of help that’s needed in situations like these, when we’re unlucky enough to find it needing, and lucky or something enough to be able to offer it. With much love and sadness in my heart, this:

I just wanted to help.

It’s true.

But truer still: I wanted to stop feeling helpless. Immediately.

I desperately needed that feeling to go away.

We learned on Facebook, from his wife—first that our friend was in the ER with what looked like a stroke. Then that it was a brain tumor. Then that it was a glioblastoma, the one with tentacles that spread, and different cell types that cleverly escape treatment. The one that really can’t be stopped. Maybe slowed, but not stopped. The one that killed Teddy Kennedy (after only 15 months; I looked it up).

This particular tumor was lodged in a center of language in our friend’s brain, already causing problems. He is not a physically vigorous man, this friend. He might even be called frail, and is often at the mercy of physical ailments. But he is brilliant, and nothing if not verbal.

It was an entirely online revelation many of us experienced—following intermittent updates on Facebook; noting the irony of this friend’s verbal center being under attack, not his under-performing body, but his over-performing brain; and googling—googling madly—until realizing, each in our own time, that this was, really, a death sentence. Continue reading →