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contemporaries would laugh and say, “Hey, I’m not on chemo and I’m in the same place.”
    On these occasions and others when news came of a contemporary’s health issues, the first reaction was generally, “Aging sucks.” Born in 1940, I am not a boomer, but the tailwinds of that generation swept through my age group as well and we became part of the “always young” cohort. Aging was not in the game plan.
    Suddenly I am shuffling along, cane in hand, trying to process all that the medical experts say is going wrong in my body, losing muscle mass and staring at the pillbox of high-powered pharmaceuticals instead of a single-malt Scotch at day’s end.
    It is unsettling to realize just how much control I’ve lost over my body and, by extension, my normal take-charge attitude. Cancer is running my life, and although I am central to the efforts to first slow it and then drive it away, I feel more like a test tube than the man in the cockpit, hands on the controls.
    The uncertainty of it all is an unwelcome companion, and so I control what I can. I am methodical in my daily regimen of drugs and rest, physical therapy and diet. As a lifelong optimist I am confident this will work out, but it is frustrating not to have a more active role than just as an intake system for drugs morning, noon, and night.

Fall
    Through August, September, and October 2013 I kept up a false front for my friends, who were concerned by my appearance and struggle to walk. Meredith and I worked up a stock answer. “Tom has a bad back, two broken bones from falls while fishing”—mostly true—“but he’s making progress and he’s bored by the subject” (true).
    For a time I used a cane and, in the privacy of our apartment, a walker. My weight dropped precipitously, from close to two hundred to one seventy-five in a month, despite Meredith’s calorie-rich morning shakes, pizza lunches, and protein-rich dinners, and at least one glass of wine nightly. However, I rarely finished a full serving.
    My usually robust appetite faded quickly, mentally and physically. Not much sounded good and it all tasted flat.
    Until this set in, a martini, chilled and straight up, was irresistible. No more.
    That only added to the concern of friends, who know me as an enthusiastic New York foodie. Still, we kept up the cover story. Bad back. Complicated. Going to take a while.
    It was about this time, in early November, that I completed what I thought of as a journey to reality. All my other medical problems in life had a sell-by date. I knew when the broken ankle would heal, the time it would take to knock out a parasite picked up in the Middle East, when a bout with flu would end. Cancer has its own calendar and insidious rhythm. The very word—cancer—has no redeeming qualities. It is a dangerous and mysterious condition. Paul A. Marks, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is one of the world’s leading authorities on cancer, and he’s weary of the attempts to soft-pedal dealing with it. It is not a “mind over matter” disease, nor is it a disease that has succumbed to the declaration of war against it.
    As Marks puts it in a useful, plain-language book entitled
On the Cancer Frontier
, “The truth, uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, is that medical science has never faced a more inscrutable, more mutable, or more ruthless adversary. It is a unique disease. Cancer is, in a way, the body’s war on itself.”
    Having spent his adult life on the cutting edge of cancer research and treatment, Marks knows whereof he speaks when he says cancers use all of the blood cells’ capabilities to defeat the treatments we throw at them. We can understand the unsettling power of cancer intellectually, but unless it is eating away at our bodies it is something that happens to someone else.
    It was my constant companion, out of sight but never out of mind. Accustomed as I was to having control, I did not welcome the new reality.