How Cancer Caused Me to Kill

I was assigned this memoir in September. My uncle had just passed away and my life was consumed with a flurry of emotions. Anger. Confusion. Sadness and guilt.My uncle had throat cancer. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t talk. And the lack of nutrients made him wane and frail. My family had split up a few years back and we finally met when my uncle was re-diagnosed with cancer. Even then, we were bitter, too busy trying to resolve our own problems instead of seeing his condition.I hated not being able to do anything to help him or to cure him. Yet, he would always look into my eyes and squeeze my chubby hands with his frail ones as if to say, "It's okay. I understand"I hope that this memoir will keep a piece of my memory alive to honor his bravery, courage, and understanding. It’s still not enough, but I’m trying.  

How Cancer Caused Me to Kill

Swoosh, I’m training; striking at an evil I cannot defeat.

Or hear.

Or see.

The sweat beads on my forehead, slides down onto my eyelashes, then finally plops into my eyes. Somewhere along the trails imprinted on my cheeks, the sweat and tears begin jumbling together. Exactly like the mess of emotions inside my heart.

My uncle cannot die. Just cannot. I punch the bag with a heavy exhale. Ooomph.  

I’ve always been an angry child. Trust me when I say that anger is worse when your world has flipped upside down.

Anger is my kudzu vine, creeping, stalking, and crawling. It is the invasive species of my emotions. When I begin feeling confusion, frustration, fear, or sadness; the kudzu anger pounces, suffocating everything with its immense weight. My emotions become a chaotic muddle and I grow overwhelmed, striking, blindly, at microscopic evils I cannot defeat.

I hate cancer. They call it terminal; a fatal disease without a cure. Ever wonder about tiptoeing quietly with a tiger trailing you, panting hungrily? That is cancer. Recurrent edition. You never know when it’ll pounce.

The worse is the grey matter that pollutes the atmosphere or a life. For when the sun malfunctions, or loved-one contract illnesses, everyone is affected. Life turns dull and grey.

Grey like my uncle’s chemo-treated skin.

Grey as clouds on one sticky, slicky, September morning when my uncle surrendered his breath, and I wept.

I called my uncle Dượng Thành, Vietnamese for uncle. Cancer wasn’t his first battle. He had ducked at the clink and boom of artillery fire during the Vietnam War, given wary scans for land mines, and watched as South Vietnam, his mother-country, fell to Communism. Then, Dượng Thành battled his first cancer diagnosis in 1999, penniless in the United States. Somehow, he found the strength and resources to recover.

Dượng Thành’s battles were my fairytales, the only things I gobbled up faster than warm chocolate-chip cookies. They were the guiding light to my hardest conflicts. That was why it was so hard to see him surrender.

My uncle began having serious fevers during the summer. Due to my insomnia, I would stay awake, scurrying around the house on tip-toe. Sometimes, I helped. Other times, I sat and just watched Dượng Thành. His cancer diagnosis was a never-ending roller coaster that involved even me, a child, running to get cool towels for his forehead, heated stones for his skin, or new pillows and sheets. There was always something to be done.

It was a vicious cycle, not just the running and pecking of chickens, but the stagnancy of my relatives’ pent-up emotions and passions stuck in the confines of a single, blank room. Tension would sit, immobile, like a bad odor.

That’s why cancer is dangerous.

It’s dangerous because it affects everybody, spreading like an airborne disease. The stalemate between life and death forces doubts to arise. Without knowing it, you sometimes kill the person you’re protecting.

I was unaware of what cancer could do to a victim, much less, me.

Cancer makes you take the role of a soldier, a cheerleader, and a caretaker. It demands constantly without giving back, attempting to force you from your protective stance. Only then can it choke its victim. It fights with endurance day to night, which a human cannot compete against.

I watched myself becoming more strained as the months passed. Physically, my skin turned ghostly white from vitamin D deficiency. My smile became tighter, forced. Emotionally, I began to detach and pay less attention. I began with caring as I changed sheets, talked, and ran about, but as I did it daily, caring turned to routine. Then, routine turned into chores, which I tried to avoid and ignore. Changing the sheets was no longer graceful and loving. It became a process of sturdy, aggressive flaps, creases, and pats. Conversations became dull fillers to the unnerving silence.

I was pathetic, not willing to fight cancer for my uncle when he was disabled. Not willing to put on a smile or say a few words.

Dượng Thành knew. He would stare emptily at the beige walls, knowing that his family was detaching. Knowing that the end was coming.

One day, I held his fevered, trembling hand and imagined myself in his place, laying down, motionless. People passed by, and I was hurt by their lack of care. They had already determined my death sentence.

It was all too much. I didn’t want to know, so I pulled back my consciousness and sat there, perfectly still in the dark, surprised and hurt by his revelation. Dượng Thành only stared at me with his round eyes. He knew. He couldn’t speak because of the tumor in his throat, but he knew.

Dượng Thành passed away on the fourteenth of September.

I stood in the heat of his cremation, regrets flashing in my head.

I could have been more. Could have tried harder.

I shut up because right then, in my head, his round eyes found mines. Then I whispered, so hesitantly, one last sorry and released my fist.

The punching bag dropped.