Unjudged submissions are thoughts inspired by this year's prompt from writers who are not eligible to compete for the prize. All are invited to share something.
By Ann Bacon
Music has always been my way to work through emotions. Childhood was “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “Hip to be Square.” High school was a rotation of R.E.M., Tori Amos, and Alanis Morisette. When I left for college, my brother insisted that we listen to happy music on the car ride, because I was finally getting out of our small town. But when I learned that same brother was dying of cancer, there was no off-the-shelf love song to help process the emotions.
C was diagnosed with rectal cancer twice, first when he was twenty-eight, and a few years later when it reoccurred. In between, my mom made it through breast cancer, I met my husband, and C was my right-hand man preparing for my wedding.
Nine months after the wedding, there was a shadow on his scans, and a call that the cancer was back. We thought it was easily treatable like the first time, and C wanted to use a local, South Dakota surgeon. The local surgeon chose a surgical procedure that misted virulent cancer cells all over C’s liver and lungs. A month after this mistake, C was evaluated at the Mayo clinic and we learned that his liver and lungs, which were clear before the surgery, were now pocked with cancer cells. The doctors wouldn't tell us how many months he had left, but the internet gave us an answer—a bell curve with only 5% of patients living at the five-year mark.
Without long-term hope, my grieving process began before his death. I sat on the bus on the way to work every morning and on the airplane during frequent work trips, wearing big sunglasses to hide tears as I alternated between mentally writing the eulogy I knew I’d have to give and listening to music, trying to find the lyrics that would help me express my feelings. I thought that if I found just the right song, I could play it for others and explain why I was so sad, why my relationship with my brother was so important, why I wasn’t okay, and wasn’t going to be okay.
But there’s no love song for a dying brother.
Yes, C was the one thing I'd rather die than lose, especially in the moments when his death seemed so close, but the romantic parts of “Mine Would Be You” didn't work, and it didn't seem fair to my new husband. (Top 40 hits seem incapable of acknowledging that at times, someone other than your romantic partner or child is most important to you). I wanted to sing to C that “I could offer him a warm embrace,” “I'd go hungry I'd go black and blue,” “I'd go to the ends of earth” for him, all to make him feel my love and demonstrate how much I wished it was me with cancer; but the truth was that there was no body part I could donate to him that would cure him. There was no equivalent of “F* You” for the doctors who told me how lucky I was that they were able to find and remove my precancerous lesions before they turned to cancer, because C got cancer first. Modern worship songs, with their teenage-esque obsession with trust in Jesus and the prosperity doctrine, were the opposite of a respite. If Jesus had the wheel, he had steered the car into the lone tree in the middle of the Dakota prairie.
When I explained C's medical situation to others, I mastered the stoic approach: “I will hold my head up high. You will never see me cry. I'll smile and say I'm good. But I would fall apart if I could.” At home, by myself, and behind my sunglasses on the bus, I allowed myself to fall apart. “I drink up all my money, dazed and kind of lonely, you're gone and I gotta stay high all the time to keep you off my mind.” Except instead of Tove Lo’s drugs and clubs, it was red wine, and for a time Guitar Hero. I calculated how long I could descend into the abyss after his death without doing real damage to my friendships and career. I decided the magic number was thirty days and after that I would have to hold that head back up high again.
There were also moments reminiscent of a sweet country song in the months following the cancer reoccurrence. I decided that my vacation time would be spent in South Dakota. Instead of going “2.7 second on a bull named Fu Manchu,” C and I picked wild raspberries with my nephews in the Black Hills on a dry August afternoon. We took my nephew to his first rock concert on my brother’s thirty-fourth birthday—an acoustic Jack White show that only played in five rural cities. I imagined C and I as the two little kids walking to school together in "We're Going to be Friends" as my nephew burrowed into C, tapping out the beat on his arm. We dipped our feet into the Mississippi at a rest stop on a first-time trip to Wisconsin during a diversion on a visit to the Mayo clinic. I asked him to help me put up shelves in my condo so that when he’s gone, I have something physical to remember him.
Three years have now passed. He's beating the bell curve, and hopefully he'll ride out a long tail. But he'll never be cured, and that bell with a long tail is merely hope in graphical form. So on my best days, I try to imagine him as the main character in "When I Get Where I'm Going," riding a drop of rain, speaking with his namesake, and shedding his struggles. And on the worst, I remember that “I'm Alive,” and try to convince myself that today that's going to have to be good enough for me.
Music has always been my way to work through emotions. Childhood was “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “Hip to be Square.” High school was a rotation of R.E.M., Tori Amos, and Alanis Morisette. When I left for college, my brother insisted that we listen to happy music on the car ride, because I was finally getting out of our small town. But when I learned that same brother was dying of cancer, there was no off-the-shelf love song to help process the emotions.
C was diagnosed with rectal cancer twice, first when he was twenty-eight, and a few years later when it reoccurred. In between, my mom made it through breast cancer, I met my husband, and C was my right-hand man preparing for my wedding.
Nine months after the wedding, there was a shadow on his scans, and a call that the cancer was back. We thought it was easily treatable like the first time, and C wanted to use a local, South Dakota surgeon. The local surgeon chose a surgical procedure that misted virulent cancer cells all over C’s liver and lungs. A month after this mistake, C was evaluated at the Mayo clinic and we learned that his liver and lungs, which were clear before the surgery, were now pocked with cancer cells. The doctors wouldn't tell us how many months he had left, but the internet gave us an answer—a bell curve with only 5% of patients living at the five-year mark.
Without long-term hope, my grieving process began before his death. I sat on the bus on the way to work every morning and on the airplane during frequent work trips, wearing big sunglasses to hide tears as I alternated between mentally writing the eulogy I knew I’d have to give and listening to music, trying to find the lyrics that would help me express my feelings. I thought that if I found just the right song, I could play it for others and explain why I was so sad, why my relationship with my brother was so important, why I wasn’t okay, and wasn’t going to be okay.
But there’s no love song for a dying brother.
Yes, C was the one thing I'd rather die than lose, especially in the moments when his death seemed so close, but the romantic parts of “Mine Would Be You” didn't work, and it didn't seem fair to my new husband. (Top 40 hits seem incapable of acknowledging that at times, someone other than your romantic partner or child is most important to you). I wanted to sing to C that “I could offer him a warm embrace,” “I'd go hungry I'd go black and blue,” “I'd go to the ends of earth” for him, all to make him feel my love and demonstrate how much I wished it was me with cancer; but the truth was that there was no body part I could donate to him that would cure him. There was no equivalent of “F* You” for the doctors who told me how lucky I was that they were able to find and remove my precancerous lesions before they turned to cancer, because C got cancer first. Modern worship songs, with their teenage-esque obsession with trust in Jesus and the prosperity doctrine, were the opposite of a respite. If Jesus had the wheel, he had steered the car into the lone tree in the middle of the Dakota prairie.
When I explained C's medical situation to others, I mastered the stoic approach: “I will hold my head up high. You will never see me cry. I'll smile and say I'm good. But I would fall apart if I could.” At home, by myself, and behind my sunglasses on the bus, I allowed myself to fall apart. “I drink up all my money, dazed and kind of lonely, you're gone and I gotta stay high all the time to keep you off my mind.” Except instead of Tove Lo’s drugs and clubs, it was red wine, and for a time Guitar Hero. I calculated how long I could descend into the abyss after his death without doing real damage to my friendships and career. I decided the magic number was thirty days and after that I would have to hold that head back up high again.
There were also moments reminiscent of a sweet country song in the months following the cancer reoccurrence. I decided that my vacation time would be spent in South Dakota. Instead of going “2.7 second on a bull named Fu Manchu,” C and I picked wild raspberries with my nephews in the Black Hills on a dry August afternoon. We took my nephew to his first rock concert on my brother’s thirty-fourth birthday—an acoustic Jack White show that only played in five rural cities. I imagined C and I as the two little kids walking to school together in "We're Going to be Friends" as my nephew burrowed into C, tapping out the beat on his arm. We dipped our feet into the Mississippi at a rest stop on a first-time trip to Wisconsin during a diversion on a visit to the Mayo clinic. I asked him to help me put up shelves in my condo so that when he’s gone, I have something physical to remember him.
Three years have now passed. He's beating the bell curve, and hopefully he'll ride out a long tail. But he'll never be cured, and that bell with a long tail is merely hope in graphical form. So on my best days, I try to imagine him as the main character in "When I Get Where I'm Going," riding a drop of rain, speaking with his namesake, and shedding his struggles. And on the worst, I remember that “I'm Alive,” and try to convince myself that today that's going to have to be good enough for me.
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