Cancer victimizes more people than those directly affected by it. It finds a way to victimize anybody connected to the men and women whom it directly affects. This is the ripple effect of cancer, and the way by which I came to know about and experience its potentially life-changing effects. Let me explain where I’m coming from with this metaphor. I never had cancer, and nobody in my immediate family has ever had cancer. I came to know its effects from the mother of my half-brother, a valiant woman named Sharon Thomas. Given Sharon’s relationship (or past relationship) with my father, I never got to know her very well. I knew that she was the mother of my half-brother Darryl, I knew that she used to be married to my father, and I knew that she held Secret Santa parties at her house that my family and I used to attend when I was a child. This was why, when I learned that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was more worried than I was devastated. The most reprehensible, disgusting part of my worries was that they weren’t for Sharon, but rather for Darryl. These sentiments, along with my outlook on life, would shift later on due to ripple effect. The ripple effect would not only change my life, but bring me to mourn over a woman whom, although a family member, I barely knew.
Because of the timeline of the events that transpired in and between my father’s two marriages (Darryl’s mother and my mother), my half-brother Darryl is much older than I am and lives very far away from me and my family, in North Carolina to be exact. Consequently, we talk to each other fairly often but rarely get to see each other, so when we do, we spend time together in good spirits and good humor. Therefore, this was the only side of him that I had ever known; the good-natured, funny side, and I liked this side, this person whom I thought was Darryl. So when I heard that his mother had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I had absolutely no idea how he would react. There was no doubt in my mind that he was taking it worse than I was, but I just couldn’t picture him in mourning, in a state where his aura that I liked so much disappeared. The months went by, and Darryl and our father regularly visited Sharon at the hospital. Based on what I heard when our father reported back about her condition, Sharon never gave up the fight or showed any hint of despondence. She battled cancer until there was no will or strength left, and there was plenty to begin with. The effect that this losing battle with cancer had on our father was painfully clear to everybody in my family. Sometimes when he returned home from visiting Sharon at the hospital, he would just sit down, mumble about Sharon’s worsening condition, and then just remain pensive and introverted for the rest of the day. Even though I wanted to know, I just couldn’t gather the courage to call Darryl and ask how he was doing. This was because I didn’t want to see another side of him. I had become so accustomed and attached to his humorous side that I couldn’t and wouldn’t face the reality that he was going through a tough time. I didn’t want to get to know the other side of him, the human side, and the side that felt pain. As the condition reports got shorter, more repetitive, and more depressing, everyone in my family knew that the battle was lost. At this point, I stopped being worried and started being scared, this time for Sharon. The realities of cancer-related deaths were foreign to me at the time; I only knew what I saw and heard in the media. Although I knew that the parallels to real-life cancer-related deaths were minimal, I couldn’t stop resigning myself to that knowledge and that horrible imagery every time I thought of her. I feared the worst and imagined all possible outcomes. Then, on April 20, 2010, Sharon Thomas died from pancreatic cancer.
The effects on my parents, especially my father, were immediate and obvious; they were definitely hurt by Sharon’s death. As I said before, I did not know Sharon that well so the effects that her death had on me were less severe at the time. The life-changing effects came later, through an alternative vessel. This alternative vessel was none other than Darryl, the same Darryl whom I worried about earlier and the same Darryl of whom I only wanted to see the better side. After his mother’s death, I desperately wanted to extend my consolations to him, but for the aforementioned reasons, I couldn’t and wouldn’t do so. All it took was a slight prompt by my mother for me to contact him to offer my consolations. When he responded was when that slow, metaphoric ripple touched me. His exact words were “Thanks, bro, remember to cherish your own mother.” This response set in motion, for me, the closest a 15-year old could come to a midlife crisis. I began to ask myself questions that we human beings don’t like to ask ourselves. Questions like “Am I really cherishing the people that are important to me in life? If I died tomorrow, who would care? What would I be remembered for?” And, most important, “What could it possibly be like to battle with cancer? For death to become a daily reality? To waste away with my loved ones as an audience, and to subject them to such grief as I and everyone around me are feeling now?” The answers to these questions brought me to an epiphany; I was missing an essential part of the human puzzle. I was not loving and cherishing the people in my life with as much fervor as I could. I realized that this was not only cold, but it was not what God had ordained for me, or for anybody, man or beast. We were given the ability to love and cherish, and I was squandering it away on material, temporal things instead of extending it towards people. As was my habit, I deduced these things and suffered in silence, trying to improve myself and, in general, love more. To this day, I still struggle with this, but the death of Sharon Thomas serves as a brutal motivation and reminder of why I need to cherish those in my life, especially my mother, while I still have her.
So that’s how cancer’s devastating ripple passed through my half-brother, through my parents, and reached me. That’s how Sharon Thomas’s cancer changed my life. When one really stops and thinks about the metaphoric ripple effect of cancer, it builds in strength, the metaphor that is. A network of people (friends, relatives, students, teachers, etc.) is like a body of water, held together by bonds of varying strength. Whenever there is a disturbance in this otherwise tranquil body of water, or a tragedy in this otherwise peaceful, friendly network of people (in this case, cancer), there is a ripple. This ripple will spread, first with its greatest, most forceful intensity to the water molecules closest to the source of the disturbance, just as the cancer of a loved one will have the greatest impact on those most closely related to him/her. This ripple will lessen in strength as it spends more time in the body of water, and therefore, it will touch other molecules with less force, or the impact isn’t felt as strongly in distant relatives/friends. So I have been somewhat enlightened, even while mourning, as a result of Sharon Thomas’ cancer and subsequent tragic death. I know, by the metaphor, that this ripple either passes through me with less strength or ends with me. However, through this essay, I hope to share the facts of the devastating effects of cancer on a network of people (community, neighborhood, friends, etc.) and defy this metaphor I’ve expounded. This ripple will go through me with more strength than with which it came, it will reach more people than it meant to, and by all the power that I can put into my words, the victimizations of cancer will be made clearer than ever before. Thank you for hearing my story.