It was Stage 4, and the relative five-year survival rate was 27%. But the doctor assured them that treatments were advancing all the time. It was far too early to despair.
         On the ride home she cried. He would have too, but he needed to focus on driving. At the house they laid down on the bed and held each other and let it all out.
         The next morning he felt a little better. Clearer, his mind fresh like blue skies after a thunderstorm. But every time he tried to think about it, a little twinge in his gut warned him to stay away. He found that he couldn’t raise the subject with her, but she didn’t either so he supposed she was grateful for it.
         Eventually they told their friends and family. She started chemo. They shaved her head. They took that trip to Spain. Secretly he was buying experimental drugs from China and Russia on the web and having them shipped to a PO Box rented under a false name. He slipped them in with her prescribed meds. She would never have allowed it otherwise; she had worked for thirty years as a consumer safety inspector and had seen her share of quacks.
         Her moods were erratic. She smoked a lot of pot. The cancer didn’t seem to be spreading further, that was something at least.
         A year passed in this way. She seemed to be improving. He kept giving her the weird pills. He had an affair. Eventually the doctor started using works like encouraging. He broke it off with the girlfriend. Mom found out anyway and threw him out of the house and my sister moved in with her.
         Without the extra pills she seemed to get worse. Six weeks later she died in the hospital. Sister wouldn’t speak to dad anymore. Neither would the girlfriend. He was alone except for me.
         I asked to see one of the pills. It was a capsule, not too big, red on one end and white on the other, with Cyrillic writing on it. I broke it open. Inside was nothing, literally nothing. They’d dried out, dad said, but they’d contained the tears of Russian saints and Chinese sages. He’d ordered a new batch to take himself, he said. In his mind they had given her an extra year of life, such as it was. If he took them regularly himself, who knows how many extra years he could get.
         Since then he’s lived a lot longer than the actuarial tables would suggest, but I doubt it’s a very happy life. Then again, he doesn’t ask for much: not love, not friendship, not happiness, success or recognition. All desires eliminated, a bodhisattva of boredom. I visit my father in the nursing home where he has been living for the last thirty years and bring him his share of the pills. We watch the others play bingo and we barely talk and he never once casts a single look at any of the pretty nurses.
💀