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Interchapter PI Ck LES The surgeon appears at the glass door that separates the waiting room from the operating suite, clad in dark blue-green scrubs, a surgical mask untied and hanging below his chin, and a loose puffy paper hat gathered by a thin elastic band that reminds me of my mother’s shower cap clinging absurdly to his mostly bald head. We stand as a group, moving toward him, Dad in the lead. The doctor opens the door and stands half in and half out, one hand holding the door threequarters open and one hand resting on the door jamb, his head and torso in the waiting room with us but his hips and legs holding back, ready to pull the rest of him back into the safety of the operating suite. “We were able to remove the main tumor,” he begins without greeting or preamble, “but Betty’s abdomen was seeded with small tumors.” I lose focus; this was not the news I expected; I hear the words but can’t understand them. “ . . . inoperable . . . without treatment she might live a year . . . but you knew this, didn’t you?” “Yes.” My Dad says yes in response, and I stand there amazed; my linguistics training notes that the surgeon used the tag question “Didn’t you?” to encourage Dad to agree that he knew the news would be bad, and, at first, I assume Dad is just agreeing to be polite; how could Dad have known this when I didn’t? “After she’s recovered from the surgery, we’ll talk about treatment options . . . chemotherapy . . . radiation . . . she’s in recovery now . . . see her in her room in a few hours.” The surgeon is gone, and I look into Dad’s eyes and I know he did know, even though I did not. As a minister, he had sat with too many families in waiting rooms not to know that a recurrence of cancer within two years is never good. The family sits and hopes the man in blue-green scrubs will stride into the room smiling and announce “We got it all,” but that is not what happens and so their pastor needs to be there, to comfort them, to pray with them. Dad moves into minister mode, shepherding us down to the hospital chapel, where we kneel on the carpeted floor, arms and bodies resting against the simple wooden altar rail. Dad prays in his Sunday morning voice, “Our Father . . . thy will . . . thy love . . . we trust ourselves to thee . . . we ask for thy healing hand for Betty” and I weep for the first time in my life, sobs shaking my shoulders, wiping my dripping nose 116 C OM P ELLED TO WRI T E on my sleeve because it had not occurred to me that I would need Kleenex or a handkerchief that day. Mom lived more than five years after that second surgery—through chemotherapy , a third abdominal surgery, and radiation. There was time for me to stand at the kitchen counter with her, our hands coated in flour as she taught me to make her flaky pie crust. There was time for her to see my sister get married and for her to meet the woman my brother would eventually marry. Time to watch her slide away little by little, to get ready for the night when she took her last breath and Dad prayed again, “Dear God, thank you for this life.” But it was the trauma of the second cancer surgery that changed me in some chemical way; the tears I wept that day altered me emotionally, made me susceptible to tear-jerking movie scenes in ways I had never been before, made me face the possibility of real loss for the first time and created an emotional depth that became the basis for writing I was compelled to do. Five years later I sit in a small classroom at Iowa State University with the six new teaching assistants I am guiding through their first semester of teaching. It is September, so the windows are open to catch what breeze can be caught. I open my backpack and plunk down a jar of the pickles I made a few months ago, using the recipe passed on to me by my mother and my grandmother. My stated purpose for the class session is to show my new TAs a little description activity—you bring in a provocative object, have the students examine and write descriptions...

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