The Cancer Diet: A Memoir on Resilience

Chapter 1: Diagnosis and Loss

Chapter 1: Diagnosis and Loss

09/19/2023

I found out I had cancer today.
Years ago, I made a promise to myself that once I inevitably got cancer, I’d start this… whatever the fuck this is going to be. I envision segments about my life, interspersed with thoughts on different media, family photos, half-written creative writing attempts, and other random detritus from the wreckage that is my life.
Why did I think cancer was inevitable?
Because nearly everything we do these days can cause cancer in some form—from the food we eat down to the very thoughts in our minds; chemicals in the water; x-rays in the air; pollution in the sea, and bad vibes thrown at us in every outlet of the so-called lives we live these days.
But I don’t want this whole thing to be a treatise on how fucked up this world is—although a lingering theme in this work is going to be that our world is screwed almost beyond repair, and the only thing we can do to save it is by being as good as we can to each other. What I do want is to entertain and inform you as we analyze this fucked-up creature called Frank.
Yes, I just spoke of myself in third person. You won’t catch me doing that much, but it’s appropriate here because you, the audience, will inevitably get many different versions of me as this whole thing goes down.
What thing am I talking about?
Well, my death, of course.
Morbid? Maybe. But if I’m going to leave anything behind, I want people to know that I was here. I lived. I mattered—and I did it with style.
Not with an elegant, savvy, or even especially smart style, but in one my very own.
If there’s one thing I do know for sure, it’s that I have my own way of expressing myself. For how hard I’ve worked to swiss-cheese my memory, I have access to a million little stories, thoughts, sounds, scribblings, and snippets that I think can clearly give you an idea of just who the fuck I was and why I felt like I had enough to say to make your time reading this worthwhile.
So, back to death—because we will be doing that a lot.
I don’t actually expect to die soon. In typical Frank fashion, I can’t even get one of the cool cancers that will make for some stunning, heart-wrenching accounts of a desperate fight for survival. Nope, instead, I got one of the easiest-to-treat cancers you can get—skin cancer.
A blessing?
You bet your britches.
BUT, not the best scenario for the purposes of this writing.
I made this deal with myself to start writing this and, by god, I’m going to do it. But it would have been nice to have the audience behind me even more from the start because things are going to get ugly here. Meaning, I also promised myself I would be as honest as I possibly can be with myself and my audience while writing this.
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(Sorry, my cat walked across the keyboard, and I don’t know a better transition here. So, I’m going to leave it for now.)
Well… Motherfucker.
Life is crazy.
I got a call as I was typing that last sentence, and it was my mom. She sounded panicked and told me someone was coming to pick me up. She must have thought she hung up because I heard the phone click but could still hear her talking. At first, I was afraid they were freaking out about my cancer diagnosis and were shipping me off to rehab because the fear of winding up in the asylum or rehab is always strong for an addictive, depressive, bipolar fool like myself.
I could only hear the things they said faintly and garbled, like the mom’s voice from the old 80’s show Muppet Babies. I heard my mom and another female, which I thought was my brother’s wife, and realized quickly that it wasn’t her, but her mom, which I figured out because I heard her dad, Jack Key, talking.
I couldn’t imagine what the fuck was going on, but I knew it was something serious, so I got my stuff and walked out the front door of my condo and waited on the steps outside. It was a sunny day, and the world felt oddly quiet. As I waited, a neighbor passed by and offered platitudes which I quickly brushed off as nicely as I could. I didn’t have much in me to “people” on a good day, and this was shaping up to be a bad day.
After a few minutes in the quiet, a van pulled up from the street running beside my red, brick condo. I recognized it as my brother’s wife’s parents’ van as it pulled in closer around the curb leading toward the lines of parking spaces beside my building. I saw my father sitting in the passenger seat, his bald head spotted with red, which happens when he gets upset sometimes. His hand was lifted up, rubbing his eyes.
As the van pulled into an open parking space in front of the stairs upon which I sat, the door to the driver’s passenger side opened. My mom emerged and walked up to me, putting her hand on my arm. She said, “Your brother has died.”
I suppose this is where I should insert all the emotions I felt upon hearing this, but the truth is, I’m so used to shitty things happening and am so used to looking for the worst things to happen, that when something this massively shitty does happen, I kind of snap into trauma response which goes like this:
Shut off all, or at least as many, thought processes as possible.
Respond only to things you know are happening, because my brain will come up with a million potential scenarios and I have to make sure I am following along with reality, not some image of what could or should be happening in my head.
React as little as possible, because committing to any certain path in the early stages of chaos and tragedy can put you on a path you can’t get out of.
Be as supportive as you can of everyone else.
Don’t let any emotion in or out. Shove that shit waaaaayyy down.

Dad got out of the car and walked up to me with a sheepish look I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I didn’t know exactly what to say, so I asked Dad how he was. He shrugged a bit and said, “Not good.”
I guess that was the first moment I actually felt something, seeing Dad like that. My father is a titan of strength, poise, and determination. He has been in declining health over the last year, including his own bout with cancer, back surgeries, and a general decline in cognitive function that can mostly be attributed to his age, but could also be scary signs of more pressing cognitive issues.
I knew that this could break him, and that frightened me. He and my brother shared a special bond, to the point that he and my mother had divided Gregg and me between each other, with him handling my brother most of the time, and me being handled by my mother.
Dad was followed by Mary Leslie’s parents, Jack and Mary Sue Key. I quickly became concerned for Jack, too. He has gone through multiple heart surgeries and has a pacemaker, and I knew the stress of something like this could be bad for him as well.
Of course, it was easier to think about what could happen to them than it was to think about the cold hard fact that I had just learned my brother, who I always expected to outlive me and who was seemingly in much better health than me, was dead.
I shook Jack’s hand and hugged Mary Sue. When they asked me to ride with them, I politely refused and offered to drive myself. Mom replied that it was fine for me to drive myself and that she would ride with me.
We got in my old, black Mercedes 4X4 and rode a quiet drive down the few streets it takes to get to my brother’s house. We all live within a few blocks radius of each other—my parents’ home being only a bit further away than my brother’s.
When we pulled up to the small, brick, obsessively manicured drive, there were cars lining the street—cop cars, ambulances, and a few rubber-necking neighbors.
“He’s still in there,” Mom said. “The police are too, so we need to stay out of their way.” It was an obvious statement, but what does one say in this kind of situation? Cliché is created for times like this. It’s a perfect script you can follow to get from one shitty event to the next.
Mom and I walked in through the white-framed, glass storm door. Jack, Mary Sue, and my father were walking in front of us and entered first, taking turns hugging my brother’s wife, Mary Leslie, who is a truly amazing woman and a saint for putting up with my brother. She is a celebrated middle school principal, who had just learned she won the Principal of the Year award for our school district, which is one of the largest in the country.
Tears poured down her cheeks and she held tight to each of them. When she got to me, she looked me in the eyes and started to cry a bit harder.
Now, I love to sling around cuss words with wild abandon. This world is fucking obscene and if you clutch your pearls at foul language, well, you have probably already quit reading this, but I firmly believe that in the face of the everlasting tragedy of this world, there’s only one valid response—“What. The. Fuck?” I said as I held her close.
She gave a wry laugh, shook her head, and said, “I don’t know…”
Before I was forced to come up with a more appropriate follow-up, a female police officer emerged from the back of their art- and fancy knick-knack-adorned house.
“Is this the family?” she said, more to us all than one individual person.
Mary Leslie nodded, “This is his parents and brother.”
“I want to see him,” my dad said in no uncertain terms.
The officer looked down and pondered for a second. “We have some more things to do in there. No one is allowed anywhere else in the house until we are done, but we will see what we can do.”
“I want to see him,” Dad repeated as if the matter had been decided.
The den of my brother’s house is painted a pleasant, yellowish beige and the walls are covered in original, colorful works of art. Some of my paintings from back when I used to be more creative dot the walls in a few places. It always surprised me how steadfast my brother was in keeping my art. He paid for it to be put in expensive frames and they hung in full sight—a rare sign of affection and even admiration.
Gregg and I were oddly close and very distant. He was five years older than me and this meant that we were always in distinctly different phases of life. When I went into elementary school, he moved up to middle school. Once his high school years were over, he moved on to college; leaving me alone with my parents.
When we were kids, I remember him being a mix of deeply affectionate and totally repulsed by my existence. We were both adopted at birth. My parents had met in the Army and married. They spent a lot of their newly married years in Germany and settled in Greenville because my mom’s family was from here and Dad went to Furman University. Dad grew up in North Augusta, Georgia, which was famous for two things—being the hometown of one James Brown and adjacent to Augusta proper, home of The Masters golf tournament.
We were Southern to the core, but city-folk as well, and lived in Greenville, South Carolina—where “nuthin could be finer” as the ‘famous’ song went.
After one of those endlessly stretched out moments where nothing and everything happened at the same time, my family played out how they had learned about Gregg.
“I knew something was wrong when he didn’t pick up the dogs at the groomer,” Mary Leslie said. “I called Meredith to get them and came home as soon as I could because Gregg wasn’t answering his phone.”
Meredith is Mary Leslie’s sister.
Gregg not answering his phone was actually a pretty regular occurrence. His company, Anderson Restoration, had a rather large client list of some of Greenville’s most influential and wealthy people. “House restoration” is how Gregg described his job, but what this really meant was that he did anything from glorified handyman work to large-scale projects such as completely revamping houses—which he did mostly on his own with a helper or two. But Gregg was fastidious to a fault and had a hard time letting other people do things differently than he wanted done.
His phone would go off at almost any time of day with people needing him for things as far under his skill set as fixing toilets, to as in his wheelhouse as restoring cars or building new construction, and they had no gumption about calling him even if they knew he was busy with something else or even on vacation.
After a bit more bandying about how everyone found out what was going on, the officers and representatives of the morgue came back out and said they were going to let people come in to see Gregg.
Mom and Dad went to look, but I held back. Gregg was very persnickety about how he looked and I wanted to give him the dignity of not being fawned over. Or maybe it was that I just didn’t want to see. I don’t know.
When Mom and Dad came back, I could see the weight on them both. Gregg and my parents always had an interesting relationship. Gregg was fiercely independent and my family is uniquely poor at communicating, so this sometimes led to conflict which was usually followed by Gregg separating himself until things smoothed over. Dad would often ask me how Gregg was doing, like he thought I had a better idea than him of what my brother was up to and how he was.
Truth is, Gregg and I mostly kept up because I would check in with him every few days or even weeks. Other than that, I called if I needed something. Lately, he and I had been talking a bit more often due to Dad’s health, but Gregg was a busy guy who I would say worked himself to death.
Gregg grew up obsessed with cars, nice things, and projects. He enjoyed the finer things in life from an early age. From watching Miami Vice and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, to reading Robb Report, a magazine for wealthy car enthusiasts; Gregg wanted the best life had to offer and believed in working hard to obtain those things.
When he was a tween, he found an oversized, elongated poster that featured a mansion standing in a beautifully-lit sunset and a prominently placed garage filled with multiple luxury cars and the slogan "Justification for a Higher Education" emblazoned across its bottom.
Gregg treasured that poster. He often talked about how many cars he wanted to own once he was old enough to actually drive a car. He would spend hours in my parents’ driveway driving The Thing, an old, burgundy Volkswagen, up and down the driveway, almost like a thoroughbred horse waiting impatiently for the gun to go off to launch itself into a race headfirst. That made it the ultimate shock to see his body carried out of his bedroom and placed on a gurney.
Once he was loaded in, one of the representatives from the city morgue and the police carefully pulled back the flap on the body bag he was in and I saw my brother’s face for the last time.
His head was slightly turned, so I couldn’t see anything but his left cheek. He was unshaven and, to his horror, wearing an old, holey t-shirt. Gregg was always so meticulous about his appearance; he would have hated this.
My brother was a Polo man through and through. Much like fine cars and food, Gregg loved fine clothes.
“Someone fix his hair.”
It took me a moment to realize the words had come from my mouth. Gregg was serious about his hair—he used to spend what felt like hours in the bathroom styling it while talking to girls or friends on the phone. He had started losing his hair over the last few years, a fact I could barely acknowledge without laughing at the irony.
Him losing his hair while I, someone who wouldn’t care at all, kept every strand felt like one of life’s cruel punchlines. Another reason cancer doesn’t scare me as much as it should.
Mary Leslie nodded, stepped forward, and smoothed his hair back, her hands shaking slightly as she leaned in and kissed him. That small, tender act broke something in me. One of the city workers bowed his head and put his hand on my dad’s shoulder, murmuring a quiet prayer. Then they carted Gregg away.