Credit: Pixabay
When I was just myself, not latched onto and not
stalking my own breath, I was not aware of how
much I could unfold and conform the male race
to my recesses… >> Read more
My poems in The Writing Disorder, a literary journal that features award-winning writers, poets, and artists:
Happiness
Stillborn
My Breasts
Meeting
The Surprise
I woke up with a big lump in my neck the Wednesday before Easter in 2018. My wife was on her way back from a business trip. That night I went to the hospital because it was getting worse. She met me at the hospital, I had emergency surgery that Friday because they didn’t know what it was. I got the call from the doctor that Tuesday. He wanted me to come in, I asked him for the news over the phone. Stage Two Hodgkins Lymphoma. It was in my neck and a node behind my heart. Close friends came over that night. I wanted a second opinion for the course of treatment, and my father who’s worked in the health care industry many years got me an appointment at City of Hope for a week later. They confirmed the diagnosis. We didn’t cancel the trip we had planned to DC. The doctor said we could take it. We went on the trip with the boys, thinking it might be our last vacation. We had a great time but my wife got upset with me when I kept stepping away from the family at times. She wanted me to be more present, didn’t know I was having my moments, passing by these monuments, looking at the three of them, feeling like a ghost.
The Journey
August 2018: With Family During Chemotherapy
We came home, I started treatment end of April, which went through Sept 2018. I started eight rounds of chemo. My wife wondered how I was going to handle it ‘cuz I hate needles. Thirty-seven pokes. I documented my journey on Facebook, calling the day we got the diagnosis Day Zero. Highs and lows. I wanted to show people that God had this under control. We were not going to be fearful. We were going to be fearless. I didn’t paint a pretty picture but a realistic one. I told people the days I felt like absolute junk. I wanted my boys, who were nine and seven at the time, to know that whatever happened to me, God had a plan and it really made an impact, I think. Their class, their school, their teachers, our Little League, my CrossFit gym, our church, my dad’s church, the whole community was behind me.
Fear
When you get cancer, it’s what everybody feels right now with COVID-19. Keep social distance. What everybody is concerned with right now is what a cancer patient deals with on a daily basis while they’re going through treatment. We’re told that if we have a common cold, a fever of 99+, we gotta go to the hospital. So I’ve lived this. My family has lived this. So what people are concerned about – welcome to the cancer world. At the same time, everybody’s cancer journey is personal. And you can’t tell a cancer patient how to act and react. But I chose to be proactive, use common sense. I never stopped working and working out. I stopped traveling because I didn’t want to get on a plane. But I still met with customers. I practiced good hygiene, washing my hands. I would still shake people’s hands when I was sick, though I would do a lot more fist-bumping. because I had a great God. I was not going to let the cancer dictate my situation. Was I scared? Yeah, but as a believer in Jesus how can I be so scared that I was gonna stay tucked away in my house? No matter what happened, God had it under control. I used the strength of the community to give me that guide. Text messaging, phone calls, video calls, what people are doing right now I did a lot. But I’d still go out in public, I’d still go to gyms and still work out, but I’d use common sense and listen to my body. I exercised, ate the right foods.
Making a Difference
We started a company called Move through Motivation with the people that actually came to my house the night I found out I had cancer. I’ve known these people for 15 years. We have a Youtube channel, a podcast about my mission and the story behind the story. The podcast shares people who’re going through struggles and what their life is looking like right now. Feel free to go on. I wanted to start a company that got people even just walking, exercising in an encouraging environment to show them how that would keep them healthy. And so Pray and Move is a small group we started in 2017 with some guys from our baseball group and friends from church, and we meet every Sunday morning at 5:15. We’re still meeting every Sunday. Because the parks are closed, we’re practicing safe social distance running on the streets in our neighborhood. This past week there were six people that came. I’m a military man, served in the US army, I deployed in 2003, was in a severe accident, landed in the hospital. I’ve been through many tragic experiences that have set me up for this and to encourage people in this current situation. But further than what’s going on with COVID-19, my goal is to help people with health. So if you’re sitting on your couch all day, I want to be the encouraging voice that says let’s get up and go for a twenty-minute walk. If you need an encouraging group, I can find people you can be accountable to and I will be that motivation, although I can’t be the driver. The drive has to come from you day in, day out. I want my company to inspire people. Before COVID-19 hit, we were about to start a Just Move campaign with our two neighboring cities to help families come out and move, provide fun activities. If I can change the mind of just one person to walk just twenty minutes everyday, to do something more than what they were doing months ago and start them on a track to health and wellness, normal and healthy people will be able to fight a pandemic like this. The cancer didn’t define me. It just motivated me to help others any way I can, whether they’re going through cancer or just struggling to move more.
What happened at the end of your treatment?
The chemo killed the cancer cells. I’m in remission. We get a five-year window. So far after a year and five months, I’m clear. I scan every six months.
What was the greatest lesson you learned?
Spread love and positivity in dark times. When you go through something trying, you have a different perspective on what life’s really about. Spread love.
A big thanks to Matt for this conversation, his strength, love, and service. He roves the church (when we gather) looking for ways to lighten the load for everyone. Be sure to catch the awesome Youtube he filmed the day he got his diagnosis, and plug into his podcast and adaptable daily regimens on his Facebook page.
Please address comments to the blog host.
JK,
I wish I had the words and muscle to help bear your load. You have borne your distresses with such amazing grace. Caring for the elderly becomes much like the labor over young children and you are pressed on all fronts with little margin to tend to your own needs.
Ariel Levy, staff writer at The New Yorker, recounts in her memoir her traumatic miscarriage out in Mongolia at five months. She speaks of grief, loss, growing up, thinking she had been getting somewhere with her career, love, playing house, motherhood, when it all came crashing on her head and she realized she’d just been driving around. She longs for her lost child in the crushed dream of motherhood, and confesses the fear of being without a companion. I thought of you but also of us all.
She quotes a famed writer, a woman in her ritzy apartment late in life who, when asked about her unfulfilled desire for children, answered simply that everybody cannot have everything. Ariel came to see – slowly – that we can have some things. I would add that every gift, every station in life, comes with a dark side we don’t think too much about in eyeing what we don’t have. This side of heaven, as you know, life is a burden, the burden of our humanity. T’s hobble from a judo injury has tapered to a limp. But I am reminded that we all limp. And joy can be found in all things.
Life here has been too full. I don’t have hands enough for all that needs doing, putting one fire out after another. Preoccupied as I had been with T, it took 36 hours for me to look down and understand that my thumb was (very) mad at me and was shouting up through my shoulder. I had forgotten the freak wrench off the joint after that first scream. In the resentment at being stretched like taffy, at being kept from the writing in life’s madness and the home school, it hit me last night that I have one shot at this. No matter how hard I try in the future, I will not be able to do this day over with T, resurrect his childhood and do motherhood more patiently and sweetly. I will not be able to care for him as I would want to. In a blink these years evaporated, leaving me with the freedom I gasp for some days and the house quiet. What lessons in character that he has learned from me (by watching) will he take into the world, into his own life and family? Faced, in the past, with the choice of alter egos for a life I could relive, I would’ve – so satisfied with my person – chosen my present self. Now, I would jump at the chance to be anyone else. Someone better at happiness, someone who knows worrying saves no one. In all that selflessness of yours, be selfish with the joy, JK. I don’t envy you your sorrows but no need to look this way through frosted windows.
Love always,
D.
Dear God, yes, I’ll take Combo #4. The family free of injuries (could we throw in my parents?), obedient child, antiaging powers, and that book deal we’ve talked about. But on the days that a smile is a workout, I’ll take it à la carte, the grace just to get through and to know You’ve got this.
So here you go, folks. Presenting…Mr. Wayfarer.
I can barely open the door before it throws itself in my face, rattling against its frame. I rein in my voice like I’m working a pulley, and talk to the door.
“I said hurry and eat, brush, and go to bed. I’m leaving the house.” I can’t help flipping the pitch at the tail: “You happy?!” Sharon Olds can keep me company over fish tacos. I make a note to grab my beloved copy, as my head makes it into his room on the last try.
He releases his weight on the other side and flops on the bed. “You wanna leave? FINE!”
“I’ve done nothing wrong. I just pointed out that you need to be more responsible when I’m not here. You can’t not eat all evening and then stuff your head in the fridge just before bed. You don’t want indigestion again. But you need something to be able to sleep now.”
The words walk out of his mouth almost staccato, measured. The boy who still feeds and cuddles with his stuffed tiger cub suddenly sounds sixteen. “Mom, I didn’t have an appetite. I don’t need to eat now. It’s no big deal.”
“Do you know why I’m going?” The words are rocks, breaking apart. The tears burn. “I’m leaving because you hate me. I love you and you don’t want to be near me and I don’t want you to go to bed hungry.” Anger, love. One and the same passion. I storm down the stairs and he stands above me, hands on the banister.
“I don’t hate you!” he yells.
“Of course you do. Your actions say you do. You said I make you sick.”
Somebody come collect the boy’s jaw off the floor. His brows furrow, furious with indignation. “I never said that!”
“Yes, you did. And you blame me for everything.” For the backpack that throws up its contents on the floor, for the headphones you can’t find. For being your mother. “I’m going,” I turn, desperate for tissue, and he calls out, “Wait…I have to give you something.” He disappears into his room and as I blow my nose in the kitchen, I feel something hard closing into my free hand. A ruby out of his treasure box, plastic and pretty the way it gleams, his most prized keepsake. It looks like the rock candy I licked down to a mound at his age. Something to remember him by.
He thought I was leaving for the long haul.
He’s gone upstairs. And my stomach is arguing and turning. It won’t survive a wait for tacos, so I scout the fridge when I realize he’s back, pausing behind me a moment like a long comma. He drops a piece of paper to the floor and finally goes to bed.
My eyes are sore and tender as the tears swell. Isn’t this the home we seek of our journey? We roll the dice, kick it up on the boardwalk and go back three spaces – even go bankrupt. We hope we don’t perish in jail. We make our way along the edge of our wins and the losses, biding our autonomy. But at striving’s end, all we want is to lay it down, to say and hear I want you. I need you. Please stay.
I will blog this.
Am I going to get likes?
Yep.
I’m gonna be famous.
His scream punched the room where I was hiding for my life and sucked me cold out of sleep. It had just turned midnight and as the dream evaporated, I did not know I would rest again only after dawn. My son had woken – yet again – to spit thick, cloudy coughs into the waiting mountain of Kleenex. Tennyson cried, holding the ice pack down on his head, wiping at watery eyes. How much can a kid take? How much could I? Unrelenting 16-hour shifts nursing him hand and foot and chasing down every possible remedy, days of aborted sleep. I was now battling the flu.
The Money Tree uk.pinterest.com
This thing that’s mowed him down unflinching in the face of the best practitioners and products turned out to be a seasonal pollen allergy. Which is why it stealthily flared all last month as the pollen count here rose, and let up the two days it fell. Spring comes early in Southern California. On the way home with the diagnosis the other day, I decided some plants would filter the air in Tennyson’s room. We picked out a big, tall palm and a cute little guy that made us smile, a Money Tree. Ten minutes later on our driveway, Tennyson was clutching his throat, hands wet with desperate tears. His throat tightened and hurt. The plants! How sad is that, being allergic to the Money Tree! And a virus came along to kick him while he was down, sending him flying off a cliff, making sure not to neglect his parents. I didn’t remember my boy being so sick. But reserves are not bottomless. It’s incredible what life asks of us sometimes.
Where’ve I been? I’ve been stressed, if that isn’t obvious. We’re behind in school. Testing for Memory Master lies around the corner. The TV network PBS is also doing a feature on our music school and Tennyson was to be at the drums filming next week. The best laid plans of mice and moms, see them wheel away like chaff in the wind. It will be hard to swallow those events passing us by. The little mister has missed every baseball practice and Saturday’s opening game. We’ve been so disappointed, but the email from the coach touched me deeply.
Hi Diana,
No worries. I hope he is feeling better. His health comes before baseball. We are praying for him.
I wish this man knew the gift he gave me. I’m sure he inspires kids to love baseball and teamwork, but his humanity and ministry to me meant everything. He’s played professionally, but didn’t forget it was about people, not the game. It takes so little to help someone up. You persevere in hope but how long? And how, in the teeth of it going from bad to worse? Answers can come from the most unexpected places.
Flowers don’t like me. I can’t seem to coax them to life. I’m sure they sense the Tiger Mom, accordingly suffer performance anxiety. Or maybe they become passive aggressive and decide to just wilt on me. It also doesn’t help that I forget to care for them. And so looking up from the dishes, I was stunned at the sight of the bold blossom on my windowsill. I had given up on the orchid that dropped all its petals some six months ago, even though it was said to be only going dormant. How foregone it’d looked, stripped of promise. But here was a triumphant awakening, the white silk so fragile, so strong. My eyes smarted. How…under my watch? In the midst of this despair? The tenacity not only of life, but of beauty. The insistence of hope.
***************
Goodness, is it only March? I can do this. Nine more months and I get to reset and wish myself another happy, hard year.
Comments closed.
holisticwayfarer@gmail.com
rd.com June 2014
Deeply troubled by the reports of violence against the Jews in Europe, Gil Kraus decided to rescue children from the clutches of Nazi Germany. His posh home and successful law practice in Philadelphia were treasures he could let go. Even with two kids, 13 and 9 – and perhaps because of them – he was willing to confront danger for families suffering terror. His wife Eleanor, won over to his vision, prepared affidavits from people who signed on to help support the kids financially. When she was kept from joining him on the voyage to Europe, Gil convinced their friend and children’s pediatrician Dr. Robert Schless to take her place. The men found themselves in Austria which, swept into the Third Reich, saw Jews by the tens of thousands in a panic to flee. At Gil’s urging, Eleanor caught the next ship out across the Atlantic.
rd.com June 2014
Austrian Jews streamed to give their children up to the couple, fully aware they might never see their precious ones again. Eleanor wrote: “Yet it was as if we had drawn up in a lifeboat in a most turbulent sea. Each parent seemed to say, Here, yes, freely, gladly, take my child to a safer shore.” The most agonizing part was choosing whom to save. Dr. Schless advised caution, as any child who was sick would be refused at the threshold of Immigration and the children needed to be mature enough to endure the separation from their parents. Hoping for 50 visas from the American embassy in Berlin, the Krauses along with Dr. Schless finalized their selection of the kids, ages five to fourteen. Since “Jews were not permitted to give the Nazi salute and any parents who so much as raised an arm could be arrested, their eyes were fixed on the faces of their children, Eleanor remembered later. Their mouths were smiling. But their eyes were red and strained. No one waved. It was the most heartbreaking show of dignity and bravery I had ever witnessed. Almost a third got visas and were reunited with their children. Several more succeeded in coming to America during and after the war, but others perished in the Holocaust.” Reader’s Digest excerpt of Steven Pressman’s 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple’s Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany.
50 Children by Pressman
About half the children are still alive, now elderly. With the support of counselors and medical staff, and some with their parents, the young emigrants seized the lifeline of a new language and culture. Fear gave way to hope, hope answered by achievement. When these teachers, doctors, writers, business executives found love, they became parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Their lives, in other words, meant the lives of many others. This, despite the stringent refugee quota and unconcealed anti-Semitism in the U.S. State Department, thanks to the startling sacrifices of three Americans who wanted their lives to mean more than personal comfort and safety.
Fast-forward 25 years, the law that would determine my own place in the world before I was born:
This measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways. This system [that] violated the basic principle of American democracy — the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man…is abolished…We can now believe that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege…The dedication of America to our traditions as an asylum for the oppressed is going to be upheld.
Lyndon B. Johnson, as he signed the The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that opened America’s doors to Asia, Africa, Latin America.
Fast-forward 50 years. The man who campaigns to build a wall and protect the nation’s borders wins the presidency.
The exuberant response to the election results among some families I know brought with it a revelation. Though they have been plenty polite, some even kind, I had not noticed the white bubble that floats them from activity to activity, a way of life that seems unnatural to me in diverse Southern California. But then again, I thought, aren’t these Caucasian families entitled to keep the company they wish? I was reminded of the way Korean-Americans manage to find their own in every large city. And there are the Chinese and Indian and every other ethnic group. Take a mélange of people, and we don’t disperse like marbles you shake in the jar. Multiculturalism doesn’t work that way. The marbles organize themselves, often by color: NYC’s Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy. Sure, we build cross-cultural friendships. The marbles mix. But cultures will always build their own communities. Among the many reasons, suffice it to say those who have to interface the white mainstream as outsiders maintain their blood identity. So it jarred me to see white people enjoying life in their happy sac. It meant they were content to keep outsiders…outside.
But I get it. If I had grown up on Wisconsin cheese, if my grandparents and great-greats were all white, I wouldn’t be necessarily racist for not flinching at threats against immigrants. After all, these are other people. Not the ones you have Bible Study with, the ones your kids have sleepovers with, not the friends you gather over a latte. They are characters in the margins of your life, the check-out girl at Walmart you don’t look at, the day laborers you drive past in the rain, moving as on a reel. They are center stage only on TV and news media.
Passport Photo, 1977: The Little Wayfarer Sets Out
And when you watch us Asian-Americans kick butt in school, take the stage with our awards.
Except the mentality of Other was the long sleepy response of the masses to word of Hitler’s brutality overseas, wasn’t it? After all, America had problems of her own. And to this day, claiming American citizenship remains a privilege and a problem. Let’s start in our backyard, the detritus we never cleaned up. In all the talk about race, we rarely hear about the Native Indians anymore, and that’s because they are going extinct. War, disease, emigration, loss of culture. The Navajo reservation in Arizona my church has visited remains worse off in crime and poverty statistics than those of our inner cities. The country that built herself on the bleeding backs of slaves grew on the sweet milk of bigotry and contempt for anyone who was not white. This included all “Asiatics” like the Chinese who laid the rails to unite the states of America. The largest mass lynching in U.S. history was not of blacks but the Chinese in the massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles. We remember the Japanese-Americans, uprooted and packed away in camps during the Second War.
Let me put down the textbook and pick up my journal. Both my father and younger brother, separately, were mugged at knifepoint, and my mother spit on at the deli we owned in Queens, New York. On the other coast in 1992, my aunt watched the flames engulf her store in the LA Riots, the work of black arsons. America tried to dust the racial degradations from her knees and rose to her feet, not by skyscrapers but by the brick and mortar of dry cleaners, shops, restaurants, the acquiescence of immigrants who did whatever it took because hard work was not an option. The dirt and concrete just fertile soil for dreams, their Korean sons and daughters came out of the best schools. Harvard Law. Stanford School of Business. Columbia. M.I.T. If Trump had been President in 1965, he would not have welcomed the little girl with pigtails from Seoul, Korea – although as long as he admits to no Native Indian ancestors, he hails from immigrants like the rest of us. In any case, I don’t apologize for having come. Somebody has to watchdog the English grammar in this country. I have taught children of all class and color how to write, and write well, figure numbers with ease, give speeches, write poetry, seek beauty. My Asian-American friends have bettered hospitals, furthered academia, moved Wall Street, planted churches, fed the homeless. The commitment to excellence, our I.Q, the drive with which we emulated our parents served not only our secrets dreams but our country. This work ethic and hope in freedom have forged America, generation after generation, filled and cemented disparate cultures in the fissures of mistrust as we did business together, advanced the economy together, with the currency of respect. This, Mr. President, is how we have helped make America great.
And friends, free market to me doesn’t mean billionaires first, or corporate executives first. It means customer first. I come to the table every time expecting the type of service and dedication my parents and I put in whenever, wherever we were up at bat. And if you don’t come through, I open my purse elsewhere and you will learn to do better. Free market means choice and choice means you had a chance. It’s not always front and center but in this country, the holy grail of opportunity awaits the thirsty and the earnest. There is always room for resourcefulness, a corner you can turn. And if you can’t move the boulder somebody put in your way, you can appeal with that beautiful, powerful voice you claimed at birth. I honestly believe those feeling trapped can look up and find open sky. At least they could, before.
I am not saying we have to answer every country’s knock and plea. A group is only as strong as its weakest members, at least how well the other parts can compensate. And yes, turning the country into an international homeless shelter creates some serious socioeconomic complications. But to lock the pearly gates and do an about-face while humanity perishes behind our back hardly makes for world leadership. Don’t make it a zero-sum game, and don’t spew hateful rhetoric in the name of patriotism. History asks America to keep renewing her vows to liberty and justice, which she now looks about to abdicate.
There they stand, the good, bad, and the ugly, the many faces of the most powerful nation in the world. The heterogeneous richness, opportunity, support, competition, hypocrisy, oppression. This April marks for me and my parents 40 years in this country. English may be my second language, but this land will always be my home. Because it’s simple. I am America.
