The news hits you hard, out of nowhere. You might have been seeing some changes for a while now, telling yourself that it was just aging, just ennui manifesting itself in a year marked by the turning of pages on a calendar and little else. But there It is, right in front of you, unable to be negotiated with or mitigated or put aside for any other explanation. You never realize the music was playing in your head until you hear the screeching strings and disconcerted vibrato of an orchestra crashing to a halt. Until the music is silenced, and panic and despair and darkness floods in, its easy to forget it was there at all–the good times, the normalcy of every day life that we have the luxury to take for granted. But its over, and a new reality has swept in with the subtlety of a hammer and the heat of an icicle. Your Dad has a brain tumor, and it doesn’t look good.
Days later, he is back from the hospital but isn’t at the same time. The healing process has begun, in a part of us that blurs the line between the Body and the Person. The kidney, the heart, the lungs–all have a vital role to play, yet are not Us. We, like the fabled Ship of Theseus, are replaced constantly with millions of cells dying and new ones being born each day. We are the cradle and graveyard to the organisms which make us, well, Us. Except for the brain. That organ contains every memory we’ve ever made, every face of every loved one, every lyric of that U2 song you remember from 15 years ago. The brutal trauma of the surgery damages not only the organ itself, but all of the processes, decisions, impulses, and thoughts that make him Him.
Still, flashes appear that cast golden lines of hope to those that know him. A witty remark, crass joke, or funny face can appear and push aside the feeling that life will never be the same. There he is! Still here, just resting, tired all the time, with little to say. Time to push aside the questions of “How Long?” and “What Next?” and just appreciate his presence; work to burn his image into your mind, that you will never forget his face or the way he yawns or how he insists on wearing socks that reveal his toes. He’s still Dad, and he hasn’t gone anywhere, and music starts back up again in fits and starts.
There’s so much to say, so much to recount and plan, so many memories to share, and so many emotions to work though. How does one even begin? What is worthy of being said at the opportunity-cost-expense of the other things? Tension between the roles played in the past and present, and looming regrets in the future swing back and forth. Now doesn’t seem the time, its out of place for a moment that demands action, help, practicality. But if not now, when? When?
A hug and a “I Love You, Dad” go a long way, so I start with that.
Adam's Fathoms 
I feel for you deeply, and hope the symphony soon returns to a full bore. In the meantime, I’m glad you’ve found a path forward with hugs and “I love you, Dad”‘s (and club vibes, where helpful 🙂 ). The second half of your third paragraph reminded me strikingly of ideas Doug Hofstadter expresses in “I am a Strange Loop”, and so I’ll close with some passages which I thought you might appreciate:
“What is really going on when you dream or think more than fleetingly about someone you love? In the terminology of Strange Loops, there is no ambiguity about what is going on.
The symbol for that person has been activated inside your skull, lurched out of dormancy, as surely as if it had an icon that someone had double-clicked. And the moment this happens, much as with a game that has opened up on your screen, your mind starts acting differently from how it acts in a “normal” context. You have allowed yourself to be invaded by an “alien universal being”, and to some extent the alien takes charge inside your skull, starts pushing things around in its own fashion, making words, ideas, memories, and associations bubble up inside your brain that ordinarily would not do so. The activation of the symbol for the loved person swivels into action whole sets of coordinated tendencies that represent that person’s cherished style, their idiosyncratic way of being embedded in the world and looking out at it.”
“…and yet, for all the wonderful effects that our most beloved composers, writers, artists, and so forth have exerted on us, we are inevitably even more intimate with those people whom we know in person, have spent years with, and love. These are the people about whom we care so deeply that for them to achieve some particular personal goal becomes an important internal goal for us, and we spend a good deal of time musing over how to realize that goal (and I deliberately chose the neutral phrase “that goal” because it is blurry whether it is their goal or ours).
We live inside such people, and they live inside us. To return to the metaphor of two interacting video feedback systems, someone that close to us is represented on our screen by a second infinite corridor, in addition to our own infinite corridor. We can peer all the way down – their strange loop, their personal gemma, is incorporated inside us.”
You and your family are certainly incorporated inside me, and I wish you the best.
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That is a beautiful passage! I was ruminating on the concept of “we live inside such people, and they live inside us” yesterday. Seems like a form of immortality in a way and reminds me of the paraphrased quote that “we each die two deaths: the first when we cease to be alive, the second when our name is mentioned for the last time.” I learned today that Hofstadter’s wife was diagnosed with glioblastoma and died when their children were 5 and 2 years old. I’m sure these words were written with her in mind, a fact I find incredibly sad yet poignant to me
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Indeed, I think that more commonly heard phrase is very much rooted in the same underlying idea.
Hofstadter speaks extensively of his relationship with his wife, Carol, and the experience of losing her in the book, and actually devotes a chapter to exchanges between himself and Dan Dennett while he was grieving (one of the passages I shared comes from that chapter). For me, reading his words through that lens adds an element of both sadness and depth; the ideas were not put together whimsically. Interestingly, Hofstadter added a P.S. to the chapter to make clear the continuity of his thinking in these areas – as he notes, “Perhaps someday some of what I wrote back then [before Carol’s death] will see the light of day, perhaps never, but at least I myself have the comfort of knowing that when I was in my time of greatest need, I did not merely tumble for some kind of path-of-least-resistance belief system that winked at me, but instead I stayed true to my long-term principles, worked out with great care many years earlier.”
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