* * *
Phin’s class won.
We don’t think Phin told his classmates about his personal history with leukemia. He isn't ashamed of that part of his identity, but this is only Phin’s first year at this school, where his older sisters have attended for years, and it seems like maybe he didn’t want cancer to be the first thing his new friends learned about him.
Everyone who has known Phin remembers that he spent most of 2022 in a hospital fighting for his life. He is currently a poster child for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Georgia. With his school's cancer fundraiser, however, Phin decided not to put his thumb on the scale. Instead, he and his classmates buckled down and quietly defeated all the other classes by collecting the most money for cancer research.
Journal Entry (Dustin’s): January 31, 2024 I’m trying to do self-care a little bit in 2024.
While I can, anyway. Before the next catastrophe arrives.
It’s February 7, 2024. Pizza Party Day.
I carry a stack of steaming pizza boxes into the classroom where these first graders have gathered with the winning class from the middle school. “Here comes the pizza!” a kid yells. The entire place goes crazy. Teaches scramble to restore order. I see Phin in the corner of the room, his face beaming. I set the pizza boxes on a table, give him a high five, and congratulate him again on his win. He hugs me.
“Thanks, Dad!” he says.
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None of them suspect that the very same enemy that they rallied to fight is also at the party.
* * *
Phin missed his class’s Valentine’s Day card exchange, but his teachers encouraged his classmates to design new cards for him that both observed the holiday and acknowledged the occasion for his absence. This mostly resulted in a kind of Happy Valentine’s Day/Get Well Soon mashup–a combination of sentiments that’s tough to find in the greeting card aisle.
One by one, Phin delicately removes each card and sounds out the words his classmates wrote. Many of the cards are cut into heart shapes or have hearts drawn or colored onto them, and some also feature his classmates’ custom drawings of animals, dinosaurs, and ninja turtles. Phin admires them with the rapturous joy of a museum director opening a package to discover a trove of lost masterpieces.
But it doesn’t happen with these first graders. They get it right. Maybe their limited vocabulary and spelling skills turn out to be beneficial by forcing them to keep their messages plain and simple. Or maybe, because they haven’t fully mastered the dark art of cliches yet, or because the act of writing is laborious for them, their sentences are incredibly concise, stripped of everything besides raw purpose. Whichever it is, they hit hard. They feel true. They say exactly the things that I wish I had the courage to write to my son on a construction paper heart:
“I’m really sorry you got cancer again.”
“I hope you get better.”
“I hope you feel better and your cancer goes away.”
“We miss you.”
“Get better please.”
“We love you.”
* * *
I’m standing at the closed doors of the pediatric specialties unit, holding a cup of coffee I’ve just retrieved from the parent nutrition room, waiting for the nurses to buzz me back in. A tall man about the same age as me steps out of the elevator down the hall and walks over. Another dad.
“How’s it going?” I say. It’s more an expression than a question. It’s a safe bet that it’s going pretty poorly overall for any parent trying to buzz into this unit. I wince a little inside that I didn’t catch myself. Force of habit.
“Oh, you know, not real great,” the man says.
“Tell me about it,” I say. Another expression. I wince inside again.
“My son and I were driving the other day. Minding our own business. All of a sudden, everybody just starts shooting. Not at us. At each other. We just happened to be in the way.”
He points to a dark, scarlet scab on his forehead, presumably where he was grazed by a bullet or a shard of flying debris.
“Oh shit,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “My boy got hit, too. He’s stable, though. He’s stable.”
The man tilts his bullet-grazed face upward and purses his lips.
“I’m glad you’re both okay,” I say. I’m really on a roll with blurting things out this morning. There’s a near certainty that neither this man nor I will ever really be okay again. At least not anytime soon.
“What about you?” he says.
“My son’s leukemia came back.”
The man exhales like he’s been punched in the gut.
“I can’t imagine,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
The buzzer sounds. The doors to the unit swing open. We walk in together, just a couple of dads out here, chatting it up in the hallway. We walk to our sons’ hospital rooms. They are next door to one another.
“Hey man,” he says. “Hang in there, okay?”
“You too,” I say.
I see him turn to face the door to his son’s room. I watch as he takes a deep breath and forces a smile onto his sad, wounded face. It’s the same smile I force onto my own face as we each push down the handles of the doors and quietly enter.
For some reason, my mind keeps returning to this moment in August of '22. It was early evening, the golden beams of a late summer sunset blazing through the west-facing windows. Phin had just been released from treatment and returned home. Thin and wan from months of chemotherapy, then-five-year-old Phin was supposed to take it easy for a couple of months, building his strength back slowly, avoiding exertion and infection. I was in the kitchen when I heard the front door open and close. I called Phin’s name. He didn’t answer.
By the time I hit the front porch, Phin was far away, running barefoot at full tilt around the far rim of the lake. I called and called. He heard me and sped up, his distant laughter punctuating the droning symphony of cicadas at dusk.
I watched him, so far away, so vulnerable but full of joy, and for a moment I was awash in an indescribable lightness. The world fell silent. My breath left my body. I remember thinking, yes, yes, because this was the deal I offered over and over, the wish of my heart, that he would get to stay and I would go instead. This was my prayer. Let it happen. Please. Let the curtain fall for me. I am already so tired. Let me take my bow, and let my atoms be recast into other roles. Let him continue to laugh and to run, and let me become part of the wind against his face and the ground beneath his feet and the grass under his toes and dust in his wake.
Then, just as quickly as it began, the moment ended. I recovered my breath and wits and took off around the lake after my runaway son.
So many memories pass like the glints of autumn sunlight on the tips of the waves that day, sparkling brightly for a moment, then vanishing forever.
This one, for me, remains.
* * *
Journal Entry (Dustin’s): February 5, 2024
Disaster.
Phin’s numbers from his lab work at the clinic today are crazy. His counts, I mean. Platelets way down to 2022 levels. White blood cells down. RDW way up. It looks to both Neesha and me that the nightmare we feared is upon us. I read her the report while she was driving and went straight into shock. She had the kids and I had to teach. I fought my way through my 8 p.m. class and came home to Phin asleep in our bed. I prayed and prayed.
My God. Help. Protect him. Please.
It’s the morning of February 8, 2024. Phin is on a class field trip to the UGA Marine Education Center and Aquarium. Parents were invited, so I’m tagging along.
Inside, the students are divided into groups. An aquarium worker guides Phin’s class into a room full of tanks and seats them on the carpeted steps for an interactive overview.
“The fish and sea animals you see here all live in the ocean right here in Georgia,” the aquarium worker says. A girl in front of Phin raises her hand.
“Are there any axolotls in there?” the girl asks, pointing to a nearby tank.
“No,” the aquarium worker explains, “no axolotls in there. Sorry. We do have--”
“Well, what about over there?” the girl asks, pointing to another. This continues for some time.
“Axolotls don’t even live here,” Phin whispers to me conspiratorially, “but she’s not going to stop asking about them.”
The girl snaps her head around and scrunches her smiling face up at him wryly. Phin chuckles and shrugs at her. It occurs to me that at no point in my life have I ever been as cool as he is at age six.
The aquarium worker finishes her presentation. Phin and his classmates complete an aquarium scavenger hunt, populate an ocean biome board with sea creatures cut out of felt, and rotate through touch stations where they pick up shells and pet stingrays.
“Are you Phin’s dad?” a boy asks me at the horseshoe crab station.
“Yep,” I say. “How could you tell?”
“Well, you’ve been taking kind of a lot of pictures of him, so I figured.”
“Good looking out, dude.”
Phin walks over to us and holds a horseshoe crab shell in front of his face like a mask. The other boy crinkles his hands into crab claws. They both turn to face me and pose. For a moment, we are scuttling happily at the bottom of the sea, far away from the storms and the currents, the waves and the rocks. Everything here is still and calm. In this moment, we are safe.
I take a bunch more pictures.
* * *
Journal Entry (Phin’s): February 29, 2024
I have no words. 🥺
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