Art by Brian Rea
Tim was on the other side of the kitchen counter
looking at a list I had written of what he should check on in the house while
my husband, Din, and I were on vacation.
“What’s that thing on your neck?” I asked.
Tim touched the egg-size swelling below his left
jaw. “I don’t know.”
Din suggested it might be a clogged salivary gland.
He’d had one once, and the doctor had prescribed sucking on lemon drops.
I didn’t know whether Tim sucked any lemon drops
while we were away, only that when we got back a week later, the swelling was
the size of a half-orange.
Tim and I shared a daughter, though we had not been
romantically involved for 20 years. I asked if he had seen a doctor. He said he
had been to the Native American clinic, which had suggested an endoscopy to see
if the growth was cancerous.
I drove Tim to the test. At 6-foot-3, he usually
carried 215 pounds. He was now below 200 and looking dusky. I had known him
since I was 24, the age our daughter was now.
We had met on a movie set in South Carolina when I
jumped off the back of a production van and into the path of Tim and his
father, Will Sampson. I recognized Will from his role as the Chief in “One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but had never in person seen anything like these two
men: hugely tall, dressed in cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans, Tim’s hair black
and lustrous, Will’s silver hair braided with red ribbon.
I said “hey” and was gone. Tim later told me that
as he and his father had watched me run off, Will had drawled, “Not baaaad.”
Tim looked bad today. His hair seemed to have
collapsed. Gone, too, was his enviable posture. He appeared caved in on himself
as he walked from the waiting room to the lab, and I knew.
“There’s a hole on the back of my tongue,” he said
later.
Tim had stage 4 cancer, an HPV-related tumor, the
same type and in the same location that the actor Michael Douglas had. Tim did
not remind me that Mr. Douglas had produced “Cuckoo’s Nest,” the stage version
of which Tim later performed on Broadway, reprising the role his father had
made famous.
Before long, Tim was living in our guest room. I
had insisted he move out of the $250-a-month room he’d been renting in a
rundown house where a childlike bearded woman from upstairs would knock on his
door after midnight wearing a negligee, and a man in the room below smoked
incessantly despite being hooked to an oxygen tank.
It was no place to undergo cancer treatment, which
I had urged Tim to start.
“I’m going to use cannabis oil,” he said. He had a
medical marijuana card to treat pain for ailments incurred over decades as a
professional stuntman and active alcoholic.
I loved Tim deeply when we were a couple, but our
day-to-day lives had been a wreck, especially after our daughter Tava (“feather”
in Creek) was born and Tim and his friends kept brawling in our house after
long nights of boozing, leaving clumps of hair — and once a tooth — on the
floor.
I left Tim before Tava turned 3. He was 36. Later
that week, he took his last drink.
Several months after the diagnosis, Tim was having
trouble swallowing. The growth was the size of a half-cabbage, and no matter
how strenuously Din and I pleaded with him to get traditional medical
treatment, he declined. Where he came from in Oklahoma, he said, Indians went
to the hospital for cancer treatment and died.
I said I appreciated his suspicion of white
hospitals, but we were in Portland, Ore., home of some of the best cancer
centers in the country. But I was not his wife and never had been. I could not
force him to do anything.
Tim was lying on Tava’s childhood bed the day she
was scheduled to fly home for Thanksgiving.
“I don’t care what I have to go through,” he said.
“I only care about what it’s going to do to her.”
I had seen him cry maybe twice in 30 years, and
never like this, helpless to not cause his child pain. I kept my hands on him
until he quieted.
“Wow,” he said. “That felt good.”
We decided I would tell Tava. I made it simple. I
held her hands and said her daddy had cancer, and that whatever happened she
was going to be
fine. I also told her he was being stubborn about
treatment, and that maybe a word from her —“Daddy,” she said. “You gotta bust a
move.”
Earlier in the week, Tim’s doctor had said, “Your
window for treating this is almost closed.” Still, Tim had stalled. Now he
wanted to do everything, and right away.
He set up the guest room so he had what he’d need
within arm’s reach: meds, mouth swabs, TV remote. He would move from bedroom to
bathroom several times a day, wearing scrubs not unlike the ones he wore when
performing the role of the Chief, though they hung more loosely as the weeks
went by.
We did not tell many people about Tim’s condition
or that he was staying with us. Those who knew sometimes said, “It’s good of
you to have your ex living with you.” Or, “That’s really cool of Din.” But Tim
was in serious trouble, and helping him did not strike either of us as anything
but normal.
In February Tim started nine weeks of radiation,
five days a week. Chemo had worked him over — his weight dipped below 170, his
hair was gone, his face spattered with chemo-related hyperpigmentation. But the
toll radiation took was devastating; each day he looked more wasted.
He said he felt full of poison, made from poison.
Even water tasted “like garbage.” I would sit him at the counter and scramble
him an egg. He would look at it. I made him a portion of oatmeal a 5-year-old
could finish in two minutes. It would take Tim 30, with me saying, “Come on,
babe, one more bite.”
His weight dropped to 153; he looked as if he were
made of sticks. He needed to rest during the three steps from bedroom to
bathroom. I told Din I didn’t think Tim was going to make it.
I had been there before with Tim’s father. Nearly
three decades earlier, Will was recuperating from a heart-lung transplant in a
Houston hospital. While the transplant had been successful, he had been too ill
from hard living and undiagnosed scleroderma to rally. Tim and I flew from Los
Angeles to be with Will in the I.C.U. He was unconscious, but you could feel a
spark zipping around the room. The next morning, the spark was gone.
Tim and I watched the blood pressure monitor drop
from 9 to 6 to zero. They revived him, but only for 20 minutes. After they
revived him again, a doctor pulled aside us and asked, “What do you want us to
do?”
Tim looked as if the floor was falling from beneath
him, and I saw that there was no way he could decide. I shook my head at the
doctor: If Will’s heart stopped again, let him go. Within minutes he was gone.
I found a pay phone and sobbed to my mother that I
didn’t understand how some girl from Brooklyn got to make the call for a man
who’d had to break the back of the world to survive.
“Because you could,” she said.
“My dad liked you,” Tim told me then. “He knew
you’d take care of me.”
I thought of this as I tried to get Tim to eat that
egg, that oatmeal. Din was there with the assist. He and Tim had been
basketball stars in high school; they had long watched N.B.A. games together in
our kitchen, hooting and disputing calls and pantomiming overhead jump shots.
Now, no matter his other engagements, my husband
was home with Tim whenever the Trail Blazers were on TV, Din sipping a beer,
Tim struggling to breathe, his eyes above the paper mask showing he was barely
hanging on.
Tim finished his treatments in May. Food still
tasted like trash, but he could eat ice cream. I bought it by the half-gallon.
His weight climbed through the 160s. He said his goal was to get his taste back
by Thanksgiving. It was back by August.
He asked if I would make him my mother’s meat
sauce. When Tava was home that month for a visit, she moved frozen containers
of that sauce, and her father, to a studio apartment.
“You guys saved my life,” Tim sometimes says now,
three years later.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” we say, and go back to
watching the game.
By: Nancy Rommelmann
Source: The New York Times
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