The Headmasters Papers Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hugh.
    J.
    22 September
    Mr. Jake Levin
    R.D. 3
    Petersfield, New Hampshire
    Dear Jake,
    I am finding this a very hard letter to write because I have something I actually need to tell you. Nothing is easier for me than to make glancing observations; to convey something central is paralyzing.
    Meg is ill, very ill. She felt tired, feverish, and achey practically all summer on the Cape, but the symptoms—low grade fever, no appetite, swollen glands, lumps, aches—were somehow so ordinary, except for their duration, that we couldn’t bring ourselves to get serious about them. At the end of the summer she had a series of tests at the Cape and then another series here in Boston at Mass. General, and the diagnosis is cancer. It is apparently widespread and relatively virulent, although there have been no visibly dramatic signs of this yet. There are tumors and other irregular growths on her cervix and in surrounding tissue, also in her breast, and probably elsewhere. The cancer has “metastasized.”
    We have only known something was seriously wrong for a week. The prospect could not be less promising. Neither of us really knows how to respond. It hurts in a new way. It puts you on edge. A weak papery feeling permeates every thought and every activity and fills in the numb spaces in between. The effect is to make everything feel like an anxious present. Nothing in the past seems substantial, the future is unthinkable. In this present I keep telling myself the news: cancer. The setting is the off-white, faintly sickly smelling hospital. In spite of the routines and the gadgetry, there is a strange aura of personal unease generated by the staff of Mass. General. I don’t think I’m imagining it. A sense of too many people with too much to do. Doctors and nurses seem reticent and haggard. They are reasonable and objective in the manner of my students who are not telling the whole story. Not that they necessarily know the whole story—at least in their heads.
    The word for it is cancer, but it is much more than an irregular replication of cells and tissue. At least it’s much more than that in a person, in a personality, in Meg. Describing the course of a cancer in terms of what studies show or in terms of treatments, or even in terms of grizzly symptoms and inevitabilities, is not it. No more than childbirth is a dilation of the cervix, rapid contractions, expulsion of a fetus and placenta. Like childbirth, cancer is experienced in powerful feelings and a theme. There is pain, depression. For Meg, her “rot,” as she calls it, is a summary comment on her adulthood, a consequence in her natural theology she would like to accept, or at least understand. As you know, Meg has always been an expansive, self-effacing kind of thinker. Being sick has made her think about herself and about her body. She will have to consider alternative “therapies”: nauseating radiation vs. nauseating medicines, etc. She will have to decide on terrifying, humiliating surgeries. Such inescapable preoccupation with her physical self is utterly abhorrent to her. The worst thing about the cancer for her is that it trivializes what experience she has left.
    Right now we don’t know how much time she has. Again, we’ve only known for certain for about a week. Neither of us has a feeling for cancer’s rhythm or velocity. Our most hopeful plan is to get her home as soon as possible, or, if that is not possible, to get her to a comfortable hospital as close to school as we can arrange.
    Meg will do fine. Cancer could never diminish her. This morning she said her diagnosis places a damper on some of her plans for a second career. “I had always wanted to start a worldwide mission to save the rich and powerful from themselves.”
    It is I who may not do fine. Without distraction, I think I could do all right by Meg in her illness. The serving and tending are easy when you love someone thoroughly. What