Michael Finley
A THEOLOGY OF BRAIN TUMORS
Page 85
collars closer against the chill. The tumor inside my brain somehow threatens them. They can't help it -- it's just too scary to acknowledge. A number of people want me to say something to make it all right for them. If I tell them I'm ill, they know how to respond. But there is a gray zone between "ill" and "fine," that I live in, that they have trouble dealing with. The answer they want is the answer we are supposed to give even when our hearts are breaking, and our bodies are opened wide and bleeding: "fine." By not providing that answer, I am being difficult. A few people turn away, but with a good excuse. My friend Jane in Saint Paul asks me to take her off my brain tumor email update list. "I just can’t take it," she says. "Can you understand?" It isn't just squeamishness, which is what she claimed. I can tell she genuinely fears for me, and it unnerves her. Her fear is a sign of her caring. I get a note from Alice, an old friend, also in Saint Paul. "Thanks for being so 'out there,' about your problem" she says. "I am trying to be less ashamed of my weakness, a tremor in my hand that I can't control. I haven’t wanted people to know. I feel like I'm letting them down." She discloses that she is "coming out" with her problem. She has joined an online tremor group with the name wemove.com. People can have very unusual reactions. When I tell a neighbor lady at our door about my tumor, she bursts into tears -- and I mean rolling, sputtering, cascading raindrops -- and hugs me like it is the last time she would see me. I try telling her it's all right, but she is unconsolable on my behalf. But the strangest and most pathological response is my musician buddy Erv's. Erv is a jazz clarinetist in Chicago. We are at a club listening to a piano trio. I sip my beer and fill him in on what is going on with me. "I have headaches sometimes, but they’re not too bad. The weirdest thing is probably the seizures. Rachel counted over 400 one night when I was asleep. The thing that bothers me the most is that I can’t have sex. The blood vessels in my head are unable to cope with the volume when I get excited, so they shut me down with head pain when I get close to an orgasm. It really hurts." Erv looks at me through this without blinking. I forget the conversation took place. A month later, over coffee, he tells me he has a confession. "I have been in pain since I saw you last." "What kind of pain?" "In my testicles," he says. "I got it into my head that you were in agony there, and then I started feeling it, too." "But -- I don’t have any pain there." "Yeah, I screwed that part up -- but once I started feeling it, I couldn’t make it stop." It is Erv's misfortune in life, he explains to me, that he is unable to hear a medical story without reproducing the same symptoms in himself. He's like that empath in The Green Mile who takes away people's pain, and takes it upon himself. This is