Some Images and thoughts on Mike's cancer

llnesses like cancer are called “silent killers” because they can progress without physically recognizable symptoms until late stages. Now that cancer care is happening in my own home I can’t think of the disease as silent at all. Cancer is a poltergeist, a noisy-ghost, a ghost capable of moving objects and inflicting pain. Poltergeists tend to center their focus on a single individual but their manifestations take over entire households. Bangs and scrapings in the night as Mike, whose sleep schedule is disrupted by taking meds and who must use a walker for fear of shattering a cancer eaten femur, moves about upstairs. Moans of pain. Whimpers, crying from distant places in the house. Even when the house is quiet the ghost is not silent. Listening for the manifestations to come is a haunting in itself, a haunting from the immediate future, the long term future, the uncertain end. There are endless paranormal theories that define the cause of poltergeists but they remain the most physical and irrational of ghosts - very much like disease. Still there is a bit of hope in this conflation of biology and folklore. Often Poltergeists appear, torment, then are gone quickly and never return.

Flowers and trees are blossoming now though a week ago we had a snow storm. The weather matches the rhythms of the house. Mike’s treatments are progressing well but the hair falls silently on his pillow and his emotions shift with the chemicals in his body - sorrow, hope, mortal fear, regret, restorative joy. He can walk freely now and music comes from the studio again but he tells me he still wakes and weeps often. Sometimes, he says, from weariness at pain and treatment, sometimes from fear for the future - his own, the future of our work, this home, and sometimes from watching the Country fall apart while being too weak and ill to engage in any kind of struggle.

Today Mike’s the sound of Mike’s guitar quietly pervades the house - old Americana hymns, songs of inevitable death but assured afterlife. Outside the sunlight clouds over. The wind says rain is coming but carries the delicate scents of newly opened blossoms.