Tag Archives: cancer

The Long Goodbye

By Robin Bates | Published: April 5, 2011

My friend Alan Paskow is in his final days. Although not in a coma, he appears in perpetual sleep, and each day his breathing is more labored. Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death Bed” captures some of the experience of waiting and watching.

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Responding to Intruder Death

By Robin Bates | Published: October 13, 2010

As we do every week, Julia and I visited our friends Alan and Jackie this past Sunday evening, Julia to administer Reiki massage and I to talk. Alan was tired from his chemotherapy treatments and in pain from a cracked rib (he doesn’t know how that happened). Nevertheless we talked about literature, including Sir Gawain […]

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Becoming the Hero of Our Own Life

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2010

David Copperfield  (1935)         “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” writes narrator David Copperfield at the beginning of the great Charles Dickens novel.  But why the uncertainty?  Can’t we just decide to be the hero of […]

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A Battle with Cancer: The Epic Version

By Robin Bates | Published: June 7, 2010

From time to time I have written about my friend Alan, who has been assaulted by a series of cancerous tumors that the doctors keep on removing, either through surgery or through radiation/cyberknifing.  He has had tumors removed from his eyelid, his neck, both lungs (six in all from the lungs) and now, most recently, […]

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Befriending, Not Fighting, Grendel’s Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2010

I am still vibrating from the powerful student essays I received last week. I talked about one yesterday and will share another today. This is one from a student whose mother is dying of brain cancer. Erica Rutkai (she is letting me use her name) decided to move from California to the east coast when […]

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Satirizing Doctors, the Best Medicine

By Robin Bates | Published: April 19, 2010

Doctors debate while patient dies in Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress,” plate V I’ve talked several times about my friend Alan, who has been battling cancer for a while now.  At present he is still alive, still working out at the gym, and still in the dark about what kind of cancer he has.   He longs for […]

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The Kafkaesque World of Cancer

By Robin Bates | Published: February 12, 2010

Tony Perkins in Welles’ The Trial               I ran into my friend Alan in the gym on Monday.  As I have reported in a number of past posts, Alan has been battling tumors in both lungs that continue to baffle doctors.  At least one doctor predicted that he would be dead a […]

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Arguing over Life, Death, and a Semicolon

By Robin Bates | Published: January 7, 2010

John Donne          Cancer has gone from being a word to being a reality for me as two close friends have been struck.  Alan Paskow, whose progress I’ve been reporting on, had an operation before Christmas that removed three tumors from his right lung (one the size of a grapefruit).  And Beth Reynolds had a tumor […]

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And a woman said, “Tell us of Pain”

By Robin Bates | Published: October 6, 2009

Here’s a poem that deals directly with pain, from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.  I don’t entirely understand it but I’m intrigued by some of its claims: “And a woman spoke, saying, “Tell us of Pain.” And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of […]

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