Two Friezes
I was three, and the diagnosis was Wilms’ tumor, a malignant tumor of the kidney that occurs in young children.
I don’t know how my parents did it. They curtailed their vacation to Colorado and flew back to Milwaukee in full knowledge that their only son was on the verge of death. They were so young – in their mid-twenties – too young to be able to grasp how death could possibly reach a boy so new to the world, a boy who hadn’t really lived yet…
That boy was I. And I, of course, was blissfully unaware of what was going on. My world was very small, and part of it was my Nana and Bupa’s house, where I was staying while my parents were away. The trips to the doctor were an annoyance. I was more than happy to horse around in the woody backyard, playing with a plastic golf club while donning a red, white, yellow, and green (?) Superman t-shirt.
My memories of that time are vague – cloudy colors and images that occasionally emerge like swimmers coming into view as they reach the pool’s surface.
I can see my body, lying supine on my Nana’s living room couch. She had just taken me to the doctor because I had inexplicably thrown up my lunch in their backyard. I was taking a swing that would have made my Dad’s hero – Jack Nicklaus – proud. I’d then I saw an explosion (at least, this is how the picture clarifies before my eyes). Underneath my Superman shirt, underneath the skin that would in a few days be sliced by the surgeon’s blade to remove the cancerous kidney, a vital organ had blown up. It was a fleshy supernova, the fiery debris of which poisoned my body and threatened to destroy my inner space, killing me (and Mia and Gwen) from within.
When I look back, I realize that I’m somehow at fault for the swing that triggered the explosion – that it was my attempt to emulate the great Nicklaus and my golfer Grandfather and golfer Father. I realize that there’s some connection between my diseased life and my longing to aspire to greatness and an identity that my family and friends (that of the golfer) could comprehend. It was a swing for love, and just as I was starting out, I’d failed, missed the ball, and created the pressure that I’ve always put on myself to be loved for who I am.
Pressure – the pressure to be Nicklaus, the pressure to be Superman…it defined me, linking unrealistic expectations, achievement, and the recognition of others as the road to happiness.
I still haven’t accepted that I’m neither Nicklaus nor Superman. Nor am I a great writer or artist. I have to accept what that inevitable swing triggered: I’m just Paul, and maybe that’s enough.
But I don’t really believe that. I believe that I’m something more than the individual who’s typing this as he listens to Heaven Up Here. Even though my body tells me that I’m a very sick man (its scars prove it), I know that I’m still destined for greatness. That is, I lie to myself, despite the evidence of my advanced age, my “reduced life expectancy,” my failing heart and kidney, and the tears of hopelessness that well up out of nowhere on the many nights that I can’t sleep, when I somehow relive the trauma of the endless nights in Austin fifteen years ago: the nights I almost died, the nights I knew my finitude.
The memory of that golf swing allows me to visualize a trigger point for the division of the self that defines my life. It’s a sculpture in time from which my life is chiseled in two friezes, which run side-by-side. The first frieze represents the catastrophe of a boy and young man who achieved (academic accolades, a Ph.D., a published book, etc.). The second frieze captures the scared and lonely boy and young man who achieved so that he could be assured of the love of others and rid himself of the anxiety that resulted from illness, suffering, and the isolating knowledge that death was always there