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There are moments when some word or words silence the universe; nothing exists but what is being spoken.  One of these took place in 1969 when  the CO called me into his office to announce ‘Here are your orders for Vietnam,’ setting off days and weeks of a numb and breathless terror, a wish screaming from the shades of the spirit that this would not be so:  ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, Lord, hear my voice. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.’   I lived through Vietnam.

Most recently word that silences my eternity was spoken in the emergency room:  ‘you have pancreatic cancer.’

I’ve walked as pastor with some folks through their life–and death–by it.  It’s an extremely nasty fucking disease.  Nobody survives it very long.  I can hear eliot’s eternal footman snicker ‘and you always thought it would be your heart taking you out, even relatively painlessly and peacefully.  Well, here’s a surprise.’  Shit like that seems to happen in my life.

As with all things medical, the treatment for pancreatic cancer has improved since I walked that journey with those others–or at least so I am told.  Now my own pilgrimage has begun, first with the ‘Whipple Surgery’ slicing and dicing and reattaching all those digestive organs in a major way.  I like to call it ‘the Benihana’s Procedure’, after the popular Japanese restaurant where they do that fancy knife and stir-fry work right in front of you (today’s special:  Sushi Larry).  I spent a week on the respirator and another week or two zoned out on drugs in ICU (more morphine! I say.  More morphine!)  The most exciting thing then was my determination to go home, I don’t give a shit what anybody says, and the nurse calling for security, a real Dylan Thomas moment, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. . .rage, rage against the dying of the light.’  I got the raging part down, just ask the darling, who so often and so unfairly gets the brunt of it that I expect I’ll be spending much of eternity apologizing to her.  (That heavenly cloud of witnesses witnesses it all, chanting in a four part fugue, ‘what an asshole.’)

I’ve been in the hospital since November 2nd, save for a five-hour trip home related to the security guard incident mentioned above and ending with voracious vomiting and a new hospital room. I’m told I’ll be able to go home tomorrow utilizing ‘home health  care’ after we learn how to use the IV chemical feeding tube (I’ve not had real food since October).  Guess we’ll see what happens then.

And to the taunt, ‘you have pancreatic cancer’ I’ll reply with Leonard Cohen:

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for

If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring

If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

If it be your will.

Sushi Larry