Fathers and Sons

Back in 1986, I heard that a guy I’d gone to college with was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We’d been friendly for a year or two in school but hadn’t been in touch since. His news found its way to me because I was then just in my second year of remission from lymphoma, and somebody for some reason thought maybe I could be of some use to him.

I saw him a bit, as his health allowed. I was in publishing in midtown Manhattan, and he was clerking for a superior court judge, who to her lasting credit kept him on the payroll until the end.

He wasn’t interested in talking about cancer, and neither was I. We both wanted to be brilliant writers, and we talked about that instead. We wanted to figure out how to make our dreams come true as if all we had to do was crack some secret code to make it happen. We laughed so hard at ourselves.

We started a book club with each other before that was a thing. We didn’t call it that, but agreed to read the same book and talk about it. We talked way too much about what we’d already read, trying to figure out what we could read in the time left, though that went unspoken. We’d heard something about Ernest Hemingway hating Ivan Turgenev, and since we thought Hemingway was great, we decided to read Turgenev and learn to hate him too.

We picked up “Fathers and Sons” because it was short, as far as Russian novels go.

What a crazy choice. One of the main characters is a brilliant young man who dies of a wasting disease in his 20s. But because denial had us in its grip, I guess, we didn’t acknowledge that it was a map of loss and instead focused on how love drove the plot despite what the characters thought, wanted, or did.

His dad asked me if I could get him marijuana to ease the strain of chemotherapy. His doctor had only subtly suggested it since at the time it was absolutely illegal. I didn’t smoke pot, but working in publishing in 1980s New York City exposed me to a range of personalities, including some who wanted to be writers. Bottom line, no one charged anything for delivering to his father whatever I asked for, and what I think now he needed to use as well.

The pot seemed to make a difference to my friend, but after a few weeks, he abruptly stopped. “It does make me hungry,” he said. “But hungry for other things.”

I thought, naively, he meant food.

He died a month later. We were both 25 with good jobs and promising lives, but we were living like kids, always wanting to do something else. He died like a kid, meaning still full of dreams.

Ten years later, I was hacking away as a freelance writer on the shores of Puget Sound when my son was born. My wife was a busy professional, which meant I stayed home with our boy. We developed a deep connection to mac and cheese and the Teletubbies and spent years riding our bikes up and down the roads around our rural home, stopping to pick blackberries or swim in a secret saltwater cove. We went to his baseball games, and he accompanied us to the weddings and funerals of our friends. There was his first time in a tuxedo for prom or homecoming, I can’t remember which, but I do remember dropping him off at his date’s house and her father’s hesitation when he opened the front door before saying, “Good evening, Mr. Bond.” Then came the pandemic and the social isolation teenagers handle so well, punctuated by the illness and deaths it brought to our family, including a death by suicide, an 11-year-old girl. And then college — ending now — and his designs on the unwritten future.

That included cancer, which returned for me this year. Back on chemo, back in the grind, back waiting for a chance at surgery. Now it is me who is hungry for other things.

My son and I talk about books as he drives me to appointments when my wife can’t. We sometimes stop at bookstores we like. Once I found a lengthy volume of something I’d been meaning to read for years, but I hesitated before buying it.

I think about my son at those funerals years ago. It’s hard not to. He’s standing expressionless, saying nothing. It was like me at my friend’s funeral decades before. I shook hands with his dad. We didn’t say anything. But I knew what he was thinking: Why did you live and my son die? Because I was thinking the same thing.

Why did you live?

I couldn’t put it this way then, but it was so simple.

It didn’t matter that you could never change anything — your friend, your parent, your child, your fate.

You loved. That is what mattered.

Ted Olinger lives in Vaughn.