My father is dying slowly of cancer. Or maybe he is living with it; almost a year after they diagnosed it and tried to take it out, he is still himself – stubborn, head-strong, intelligent and lucid.
But for a son, the knowledge that one day soon, that which slowly gnaws in his groin will slowly destroy him is unsettling. But then I might go before he does, as my brother and his wife have done, and in-laws and neighbours and peers nowhere near his 70 years have fallen along the way. He has outlived young men and women and mourned for, and buried, many.
Prostate cancer is, to paraphrase a cousin who is an accomplished physician, the “good cancer, and if one had to have a choice of cancers, then choose it”. It is slow growing in old age and can be further slowed by treatments. But the nature of the treatments is radical and psychologically debilitating to a man. Because the is fed by the male hormone, testosterone, which leads to all the things we recognize as manly and associate with manliness and masculinity – the deep voice, balding, facial and body hair and a myriad other things that literally separate men from boys including sexual potency – to slow down its growth, castration is performed. This may be chemical via drugs which suppress the secretion of the male hormone or a snip of the testicles which produce it. The result in both instances is to change the man, the most profound and most psychologically difficult blow in this treatment is to a man’s virility.
In this day and age, thank God for viagra because that little blue pill can still allow the man to perform sexually despite the engine room being cut-off.
But this is not what concerns me about my father. It is the opaqueness of his feelings and his deepest thoughts on his living and his dying. In this culture we are not touchy-feely and that is the one thing that is good about it. We are busy trying to get on with the business of living, spending energy revealing our haunted thoughts is not important.
We enjoy a close relationship. As close as a man can have with his youngest of six children, whom he knew little in his formative years because he was away working and trying to put food on the table. In latter years, the past eight years perhaps, we have become closer – I have been an amenable son; the one who takes his advice and tries to play son.
And yet it is not easy to say things. But then again, if I had the werewithal, what would I say to him? That I am afraid; afraid to be alone in the world without his coolheadness and his loyalty, his energetic and adventurous manner and appearance. That I am also worried that because the nature of his disease is genetic, I too am in in line to get it as surely as I have inherited his baldness and his stubbornness? That when I turn forty, I will have to be subjected to annual scans of my manhood when I will be stripped by men and women whose sole purpose in life is to look at penises and balls and rectums? That in his way of dying, I see myself too and I am afraid...
Maybe I would say this. But what I would say more is that at seventy, my father has been incredibly lucky. First, that he is now more than double the life expectancy of the average Zimbabwean. That he has sent six children to school and now they try to look after him in his time of need as good children should do. And that he married right, even if he may, like any man, have his doubts from time to time: His wife, my mother, has sacrificed much of what she is and could have been for him. That she has shown loyalty through years of absence, endured torturous months when he was held in captivity during the war in the late 1970’s, through lean years of unemployment when she had to take up a job as a domestic in order to put us through school. And now with this recent illness, she has not wavered even when you could see her strength begin to flounder as she saw pints and pints of bloody urine drain from him.
So in the twilight of his years, my father should know, as all fathers who have held families together in the most difficult of times, that he is loved. But also that this disease, slow in it’s progress, is a blessing. It allows one to watch the time and plan. That one can spend the best years of the last years – (two? five? ten? – who knows how many our God has decreed) – as if each one is the last, with those people that matter. That one can return the love and loyalty of one’s wife with tender conversation and laughter in this sunset zone. That one can create memories and more, deliberately, knowing that it is these memories in the hearts of those that will remain which makes those that depart immortal and eternal.
This too is what I wish for myself and those that will survive me.
Written October 2005.
Mr Simon Katerere lived to be 75 years old and died a painful but dignified death end December 2010.
