Unction

Unction [uhngk-shuhn] – noun
1. an act of anointing, esp. as a medical treatment or religious rite.
2. an unguent or ointment; salve.
3. something soothing or comforting.
4. an excessive, affected, sometimes cloying earnestness or fervor in manner, esp. in speaking.
5. Religion.
a. the oil used in religious rites, as in anointing the sick or dying.
b. the shedding of a divine or spiritual influence upon a person.
c. the influence shed.

-As defined on Dictionary.com


There are nightmare scenarios that are worse in hindsight or in planning than when you actually have to face them. The horror isn't diminished exactly, but is played out with an immediacy that spurs you into some kind of action, rather than introspection. Instead of thinking "What should I do," you find yourself acting around the nightmare, either drifting over it or sinking into whatever complications it brings.

7 years ago, the second wave of cancer hit my family. My father had already lost his kidney two years before, and any further metastases were undetectable. This second wave was my mother, hit by shooting pains causing her to crumple over in her garden. She was rushed to hospital with what they thought was a rupturing appendix, and during surgery it was discovered that her appendix was fine but that a cyst attached to one of her ovaries had burst.

My mother is alive and well, after platinum chemotherapy and through the faith of a high Anglican. My father had a different cancer, before and after my mother's condition, with different chemo and no less faith as a born and bred Baptist. The end results, for reasons both physiological and oncological, obviously differ. No one story is any less painful to remember or to have witnessed at the time. But there are particular issues and minutes to each story that have been etched into the memory of the whole. It's hard to reason what renders something indelible - one cannot remember every second of any event, even when experiencing a horror. There's no way to determine why some instances remain and others fade, or why you will step outside of yourself in spite of events and know I will remember this.

It's October 1999, dry and cold. My father's cancer (the first instance) has passed, his later condition (unanticipated) is not yet an issue, not even considered in the wake of my mother's sudden illness. My wife and I are visiting the hospital, I am watching the clockwork tics of my mother coping with nausea, shakes from the inital blast of chemo, aches from the stitches as her muscles and tissues knit. Abby and I took long bus trips to the hospital, a cab would be faster and would not have bankrupted anybody but it was not necessary, and if there are more visits in the future then cabfare would add up. Taking the bus feels like taking a step, it is something to do that is not cancer or chemo or being scared. My father is at her side, doing what he can.

The situation isn't good. It could also be far worse. There are medications and nurses and a blanket of family and friends to support.But none of this is illuminating or soothing at the time. There's too much awareness of what the cancer entails, the fear of a blunt harm that bruises everyone in anticipation of nausea and biopsies. That said, nobody in my family is squeamish. The crisis-management gene has kicked in and everything is orderly, for want of a better word. We realize that there's nothing to be done outside of the care she's receiving, our role is to be at the hospital for my mother, making sure she's got visitors (or silence - during one chemo session she sharply but not unkindly told me 'I don't need to be entertained' - I took her at her word and read a novel as the IV dripped), making sure that if there's something to do it gets done.

This won't become a diatribe against the Ontario health system, the hospital was clean and the care was outstanding. But with stitches and painkillers and chemo and realization of the problem, the patient needs an advocate and my father, retired, methodical and no less scared than any of the rest of us is her advocate. Abby and I arrive and we have our visit - not too long, allowing for rest, bringing magazines and bottled iced tea, fetching chips of ice from down the hallway, watching the visitors hours and wrangling visitors. There are things to be done, attention must be paid. There is less fear in an order to things.

My father arranges to drive Abby and I to the subway after our visit, which doesn't have to be in a plan - my plan was a bus ride or a cab extravagence. My father, exhausted but smiling (tightly) has his own agenda, his own order of things to be done. And I feel it. He has put the night into an order - time alloted for visiting, for dealing with family matters, feeding the dog, attending to groceries, preparing the house for my mother's return. Driving Abby and I to the subway is in the order and I won't deny our place.

But there is a ticking, quiet inflexibility to the order that risks cracking the surface. I was no less scared than my father but knew that I lacked his responsibilities. I had been married less than a month and didn't want to imagine my wife in hospital, could only picture my father's upset in the vaguest terms, foggy and unformed. He was running fast, driving himself though what needed to be done, I act the same way under pressure (no less so when he was in treatment), trying (hoping working forcing) to be normal, even in the context of something unexpected and horrible.

The instance mentioned previously - the first of two - was my father's quiet, well behaved but stubborn insistance that his car had been stolen. On the way to the underlit garage, he looked into the corner where he was sure it should have been, finding nothing. To hear him say it in as many words ("Great. I'm going to have to go inside and report this to the police, my car has been stolen,") was horrible, a instant etched memory on a night that could have been set-directed for such an event - cold, flurries of snow, a bitter wind and machine-noises from the rear of the hospital. I knew the car was in the open garage somewhere (Abby wisely stepped behind our backs, eyes darting for the license plate and shape in the darkness) and knew that he was about at his limit.

I watched him process the information and make the only decision that he could handle at the time, which was that the car was beyond rescue and he had far more important and scarier things on his mind. I didn't want to tell him to sit down and have a coffee as Abby and I found the car (or ran interference with the police if his suspicions were correct) because I knew it wouldn't help. It might break him, and thus far neither he nor my mother nor sister nor myself had snapped, we had been dealing. This - faulty as it might have been - was dealing. And horrible. I wanted one of us to snap, simply to cry out the awfulness of what it was, and knew that would neither be happening nor productive.

It was a long, dry, cold matter of seconds. I'd let him go inside and make the call. He's coping. I'm coping. By letting this happen as it is playing out I am coping for us.

The moment breaks - Abby yells in a loud controlled voice "It's over here," standing beside the Taurus. I watch my father's mechanism twist for a second, could see One Less Worry pass into and through the gears. And we were in the car, to the subway, and home.

My mother recovered, not easily but well. Another story for another time.

And years later I returned to the same hospital with my father in the last weeks of his life. He was thin, barely able to walk, in need of another X-ray to see if there were masses or bruising or fractures, it's difficult to remember. He was aware, awake, calm, apologizing that I had to miss work that morning to take him to hospital (my mother was home preparing an air mattress and adjustable bed). The trip wasn't difficult, on the surface at least. He was attended to quickly and I was allowed to wait with him in the examination room, standing beside him as he lay, half asleep, undressed on the table. The room was underlit and faintly green from the tiles on the walls.

He's going to look like this when he's dead, I thought, another frozen moment, stretched out. That's horrible to think. I tried to admonish myself and simply didn't have the warm blood for it just then, for one reason - it wasn't true, yet. I held his hand for a moment on the table, he smiled sleepily. He might have said 'My son, my son' quietly, an expression he used to me for decades and I use unconsiously with my own child, wincing briefly seconds after.

If this brings tears now, realize that there none in that hospital that morning. There wasn't time. I was aware of the silence, of the sound of his breathing, the waiting moments stretched. I can remember this, I told myself. He was able to walk, and there would be some - if not much - time between us, my mother and sister, all those caring. This wasn't ending well but it was not over and there was room for faith.

It was the parking lot on a winter night lived again. I was in his place, putting a situation into a slot and heading forward. If my father coped - still hoped - on the table, I would respect it, knowing it would resonate sharp-edged and indelible, impossible to forget. Then - I'm coping. For awhile longer, I am coping for us.

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