It was eight-thirty in the morning and both of my parents were still asleep. The light in their bedroom was dim morning light, tinted a dusty orange from the sun shining through the sheer burgundy curtains. My dad slept shirtless lying on his side. His broad back freckled with moles faced me. The bend in his knees cradled my mom, who slept next to him on her back. His head was covered with white fabric patches. They looked like bandages. A white wire came out of each patch, twisting together into a cord. The cord snaked around the nape of his wrestler’s neck, disappearing under the rumpled sheets to reemerge and attach to his battery. The battery was plugged into the outlet closest to the bed. Charles, my dad’s name, means strong man. When my dad is awake he refers to his brain tumor as the biggest wrestling match of his life. In sleep my dad is fragile. Fragile like the brain matter the doctor describes as tofu. Soft enough for a finger to leave an imprint.

Nine months earlier I gathered with my sisters on our back porch around my dad, we his small tribe of daughters. It was a cold day in late November and the gray of the air matched the gray of the concrete porch. The hair on the top of my dad’s head was beginning to flop over the widening bald spot on the right side of his head like a creepy comb over. We followed my mom’s rule that haircuts must take place outside. Trimming half an inch of hair leaves months of stray strands sticking to the tiles on the bathroom floor. My sister Lauren wrapped an old towel around my dad’s neck, fastening it with a wooden clothespin. She took up the electric razor and began to shave pathways across my dad’s head. The job of a haircut on the porch typically falls to me, but that day I didn’t volunteer. Lauren’s first pass over his head left a layer of prickly velvet. The last layer she cut with an old fashioned razor, cutting close enough to reveal the skin stretched tightly over his skull. After she was finished, we all ran our hands over his head and told him he looked good.

The cells of my dad’s tumor descend from a lineage of cells shaped like stars. In Norse mythology, the world was created from the body of the giant, Ymir, the first living thing. Ymir was birthed from melting ice, and was betrayed by his offspring. They saw no other way to create an earth but to kill him. When they did, his blood became the sea. His flesh soil. His teeth and bones that were crushed became our rocks, pebbles, and sand. We look up into the sky to see the inside of Ymir’s skull. At night, the pinpricks of light that are stars and planets are the sparks of fire that birthed him from melting ice. The clouds drifting through the day are his brains, untethered to meander their way across the sky. 

When cells are cancerous it means that they replicate with enthusiastic disregard for the body’s normal safety checks. The mutated organelles divide rapidly and uncontrollably with a blind zeal. They are also necrotizing, which my sister explains means that they kill neighboring healthy tissue. The type of cancerous cell in my dad’s brain is called Glioblastoma.

My mom braids the wires of my dad’s cords every three days when the patches are due to be changed. Usually she stands behind him as he sits in a chair at the kitchen table. A friend visiting our house once told me that our kitchen chairs are strangely invasive. When you sit in them the support of the back wraps around you in a lengthy curve, extending past each side of your shoulders in a sheltering arch. My mom peels the paper so the sticky side is exposed, then presses the patches onto his head in the pattern prescribed on the directions of the package. Dad sits still and looks out the window.

When I was seven I stayed home from school sick. My dad stayed home with me and told me he would fix my hair. I could pick a hair-style out of the book my mom had purchased from Michaels with her weekly 40% off coupon. Excited, I chose a braided ponytail. My dad slowly and meticulously followed the illustrated instructions. His thick fingers twisted and layered my hair into a passable braid. My mom braids the cords with the same awkward tenderness. She carefully gathers the cords and twists them together. When she reaches the ends she wraps them in white tape and plugs them into his battery pack. 

The device that has turned my dad into a cyborg is called the Optune. An electric current constantly pulses through the adhesive bandages that attach to the skin of the patient’s head. The carefully mapped patches are placed to target the area of the tumor. The electric current surges through brain tissue to form an electromagnetic field that fights to slow down and stop the rapidly replicating cells.

When a cell divides, DNA gathers and aligns in the center of the cell, forming rank to allow fingerlike fibers to pull them apart to opposite sides of the cell. The cell thins in the middle in an hour-glass shape and eventually pinches apart, creating a clone of itself. It is at this moment of alignment, as the cells ready themselves to be separated and the fingers are about to descend that the electric field wages war. I imagine it like a team of cowboys reining in a herd of cattle. Or a line of children playing Red Rover, doing everything in their power not to let anyone break through their line of clenched fists. The fields hold their ground like soldiers in battle. I find it hard to talk about cancer without battle metaphors. 

A few months ago my mom sat across from me at the kitchen table. I lost interest in what my sister was saying as I noticed a spot of blood on my mom’s nose. It was a brighter red than the rest of the pink splotches on her face. The dermatologist had prescribed a cream for potentially cancerous cells on her nose, brought on by too many summer days as a teen on Lake Michigan. The cream burned through the outward layers of skin, exposing an under skin that was perpetually raw and red. When she went out she would coat it in a layer of foundation, caked thick enough to look like a powdered donut. When she was at home she left her nose alone. I watched the dot of blood on my mom’s nose pool a bit, to the size of a tiny pinhead, and stop. I didn’t tell her it was there. As I looked at the spot of blood I thought about how skin is a pathetic boundary for holding something together so dear as a life. And a brain is too vulnerable a container to hold something so precious as my dad. I find it difficult to comprehend that the quarter sized white spot on my dad’s brain is a cluster of cells that could kill him. When I visit home and awake in the morning to find my parents still asleep, I am startled, because they always wake up before me. 

Addendum I: Mid-March

When I look at my father I see my grandfather. Not his father, who I only knew as a toddler, but my mother’s father, Grandpa Earl. I see Grandpa Earl in the careful, vulnerable way my dad walks and the concentrated effort it takes to stand up from a chair and find balance. I used to feel uncomfortable watching my grandfather eat, watching his hands shake as he wiped his lips and juices dribbled down his papery, stubbled chin. Somehow it embarrassed me, seeing him so frail. My dad’s hands shake now too, as he holds a fork, spoon, or knife, as he tries to reach chips from a bag or carefully pick up the sandwich my mom made him for lunch. I looked away when my grandpa ate. I don’t look away with my dad.

Addendum II: Peanut Butter

I sat with my dad in his usual spot, his puffy red chair in the living room.

I lightly held his hand.

His fingers were coated with a chalky layer of dried peanut butter.

I didn’t care. 

Addendum III: Early September

Dad has four small wounds spaced evenly around the crown of his head. They are the residues of screws tightened into the padded outer layer of his skull to fit a device that directed gamma rays into his brain, targeting the three new areas of tumor growth that appeared on his last MRI. One is in his cerebellum, one near his brain stem, and another in a place I can’t remember.

The day of the procedure he was at the hospital with my mom and older sister from six-thirty in the morning until nine-thirty that night, mostly just waiting. A saying told to my family as our visits to the hospital became more frequent was just hurry up and wait. It's a sense of urgency paired with the pace of molasses, a matter that is life threatening caught and lassoed into slow motion. Those of us not present with my dad during his appointments, procedures, and surgeries waited near our phones with anticipation, wondering with dread what news a phone call or text would bring, fearful of inevitable, sickening realities becoming salient.

Gamma knife is a type of radiation therapy. Contrary to its sharpened name there is actually no incision into skin. My dad’s first surgery, performed only a week or so after the Stage IV Glioblastoma tumor was found, left a jagged fault line staggering up the right side of his head. The Gamma knife procedure uses specialized equipment to focus about 200 tiny beams of radiation on a tumor, shooting within the accuracy of a millimeter. This exactitude is why the day stretched so long. Doctors worked and measured as precisely as possible, fitting the device to direct the rays to the correct spots, striking a tenuous balance that harnessed the ray’s strength but wouldn’t cause dangerous swelling to my dad’s brain.

The device functions like the viewfinder of a rifle, sighting and setting up a target. It bears a similar look to night gear from the orthodontist. From the wounds on my father’s head, I inferred that the device was something akin to a Christmas tree stand, a metal rim punctuated at each quarter length with a screw that when twisted, fastens into the bark of a pine or fir. Little by little the doctors twist, carving away, finding purchase in his skin, my dad’s head serving as the trunk. The Gamma knife leaves no mark, no evidence that it cut through skin, just the dimpled indentations of screws. 

At the dinner table my mom asked my dad to hold still for a moment. She grabbed a Kleenex from the counter and dabbed at the small puncture on the right side of his forehead. They’re seeping a bit, she said as she pressed the tissue to his skin. 

When we lived in Minnesota my family used to go to a restaurant called The Green Mill for special occasions, for a birthday or around holidays. One year near Christmas time we went with the Fridays, our closest family friends who had four kids stair stepping our ages. That night there was a Santa magician performing tricks in the lobby. Kids could go watch while their parents chatted at the table and waited for dinner. This Santa had a special quarter. It had a prong in its center that looked like the point of a pushpin. He performed a trick where he held his hand palm up, the quarter resting in the middle with the spike pointing up. He smacked his hand into his forehead. I gasped, horrified at the gesture of minor brutality. He removed his hand slowly and dramatically, and the quarter was stuck to his forehead. With a pained grimace he peeled off the quarter but there was no puncture mark left on his skin.

The skin of my dad’s head is now a rocky terrain. Like a layer of batting wrapping around and padding his skull, it is now a quilted landscape of cuts, scars, moles, and shiny patches. There is a scar slashed across the right side of his head. It is indented and puckered, a thin ravine. His head has moles that were always there but we didn’t always see.  For the first time in two years he has hair, but it is a depressing reminder that radiation has failed. His new hair, grown back in post-radiation has changed. Now it is fuzzy, gray, and grows in patches, nothing like the thick black hair he sported for fifty-eight years. His head has been parceled up, radiated, sewn back together. A frenzied repetition of punishing and mending.

I spend a lot of time looking down at my father’s head. Nowadays, a bird’s eye view is most common because his posture is most often sitting. I stand next to him as he sits in his chair at the kitchen table, his wheelchair, his bed, the toilet. Often I lean into his back gently, rub his back and shoulders, hug his neck, or lean down to kiss his cheek. 

All weekend his tiny wounds, four dimpled indented eyes, were seeping with a clear liquid. My mom kept dabbing the weeping wounds with gauze. 

Excerpt from “Love Hours”, 2018