McCain after casting his "no" vote, with scar visible over left eyebrow.
While watching John McCain kill Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare by voting against the Senate’s “skinny repeal bill,” I was acutely aware of the scar over his left eyebrow, resulting from surgery to remove a blood clot and an aggressive malignant tumor called a glioblastoma.
In one of the many ways that the political becomes the personal, it brought me back to the time when my father received a diagnosis of the same brain cancer.
Given treatment that can include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, the median survival is 12 to 18 months. But when my father had it 15 years ago at age 87, treatment wasn’t an option. Alfred O’Rently Gordon was gone within five months.
We got the news in October 2001, with the acrid smell of smoke from the World Trade Center attacks still drifting miles uptown to my parents’ apartment. My mother called me at the Massachusetts newspaper where I was a reporter and said that while my father had a brain tumor, she had good news: These things moved slowly in older people. But, tensing up at my paper-strewn desk, I didn’t hear any good news. Further testing confirmed my suspicions.
Signs of trouble first appeared when my father, a successful businessman with a post-retirement mater’s degree in American studies from City University, became confused and forgetful.
He undertook Quixotic missions, riding the Fifth Avenue bus downtown to buy undershirts, lots of white undershirts. In a past life he had gotten off the Number 4 bus at 34th Street to go to his office, eight blocks after the blind man got off at the New York Public Library and 18 before my sister and I got off at 16th Street to walk east to our high school, Friends Seminary. (It was a community on wheels, with some of the passengers who had ridden down from Harlem giving us graduation presents.)
That summer, he had played tennis, a sport that sustained him through two heart valve replacements. Yet now he was losing his balance. He fell on the bathroom floor. My mother, not a big woman, picked all six-feet-four-inches of him up and gently bandaged the blood pooling under his skin. His sight began to fade.
My sister and I were slow to catch on. One day that October, we came down, hopeful, from our respective homes in Massachusetts. The sweet overheated scent of early fall wafting in from nearby Central Park camouflaged the smoky odor. You could see the trees rustling if you craned your head at our window on the side street (101st St.) of 1200 Fifth Ave., where we grew up.
Everything was in place for our traditional brunch: bagels, lox, Nova Scotia salmon, babka from the nearby deli. Everything except for my father, absent from his seat on one end of the table where, every morning when we were growing up, we woke up to find him reading The New York Times.
He was in the so-called den in the black leather chair where he liked to read. After college he would have become a professor if he didn’t have to go to work, so he was furthering his education on his own: literature, history, biography... The den in the two-bedroom apartment was so-called because it used to be our bedroom, and they didn’t have the heart to totally rename it.
My cousin, a doctor, had come for brunch. He went back to say hello.
“Is this the end?” my father asked him.
“I didn’t want to give him false hope, but I didn’t want to say, ‘This is terminal,’” he told me later.
He shrugged his shoulders and wished he could say something encouraging.
He was straight with us. He said this kind of tumor extends its tentacles into the rest of the brain and contains so many different types of cells that it is extremely difficult to treat.
I ran into the galley kitchen where we could barely squeeze three of us, closed the folding door, and cried until I gasped for air.
I was so attached to both of my parents, I thought the earth would open up and swallow me when they died. Attached to my father because he worked through my high school problems with me while we walked down Fifth Avenue along Central Park; because I felt safe when he took me out deep in the ocean; because I could call him crying from the middle of Penn Station to say I was lost and he would know how to rescue me; because during the Northeast Blackout of 1965, when my mother and sister and I and some extras hunkered down in the apartment after finding each other, he walked up 18 flights of stairs to bring a trapped co-worker food; because he seemed just as happy when I hit a good shot in tennis as he did when he hit a winner; and because even if he wasn’t feeling well, he said, “I can’t complain” when asked how he was.
My mother poked her head in. After 55 years of marriage, she knew a thing or two about attachment. She said that for my father’s sake we needed to pull ourselves together.
Thus began months of racing back and forth on the Merritt Parkway to New York. We were devastated that our “Walking Dictionary” was losing his eyesight. I bought him books on tape and set him up in the so-called den. He smiled gamely, but his eyes drifted away.
One day early in February, he got so distressed over something or other that he started screaming and yelling. His heart was as big as his 15 ½ AAA shoes, so my mother knew it wasn’t him. An ambulance took him next door to Mt. Sinai Hospital. He wanted to go home. My mother said they needed to finish doing tests on his eyes.
Early on the morning of Feb. 16, she called my sister and me. He was bleeding internally. They were going to give him blood transfusions until we arrived.
"Al, your beautiful daughters are here," my mother said.
He opened his eyes and waved his big hand at us, the hand that was big enough to hold the small poodle-mix puppy in it back when we got our “brother” Sam.
Then he gestured frantically in the air, moving a hand back and forth to his mouth. My sister and I standing beside the bed, and my aunt sitting in the corner, didn't know what he wanted. But my mother knew: a water bottle, like he would have been holding if he was taking a break in tennis.
“Tempus fugit,” he said.
We watched his large Adam’s apple rise and fall.
“I think he stopped breathing,” I said.
A nurse confirmed time of death. We huddled in the corridor and cried.
My mother said he was as considerate in death as in life. He knew she could no longer handle him at home and knew what it would do to her if he had to go to a nursing home.
Exactly a week after he died, my mother and aunt were having lunch in Three Guys on Madison Avenue when in walked a group of runners wearing Al Gordon T-shirts. My aunt and mother almost fell off their chairs.
My aunt asked about the shirts.
They had earned them on the day of my father’s death, Feb. 16, 2002, while running the “Al Gordon 15K” across the street from where he would draw his last breath.
It was as though they were honoring my father, but it was a different Al Gordon, another lifelong fitness devotee after whom the New York Road Runners Club names many races.
We thought that appearance of the runners was a sign that my father was OK.
As for the T-shirts he bought on those bus rides, they served a purpose after all.
I sleep in them many a night, knowing he is always with me.
A year later when I got leukemia, his example sustained me.