Throughout January, February, and March, Dr. Stephan Pearson was little more than a walking shade. He seemed overwhelmed and powerless, like a man slowly dying. And he looked like one too. His cheeks were gaunt, his face was pallid, his stomach hollowed out. Most of his friends saw this as a reaction to his losses, but Mary Thorsheim suspected there was more to it than that.
His overall lethargy is doubtless to blame for the fact that his final illness crept up on him unnoticed. It blended in so well with his perennial disposition that neither he nor anyone else, apart from Mary, detected it. His spiritual nausea merged with his physical nausea and camouflaged it. The constant pain seen in his eyes could just as easily have had its source in a broken heart as in a broken body.
A number of humiliating but essential steps were under consideration by the college authorities. What could they do about their useless old wreck, too venerable to release and too irresponsible to retain? On the one hand, his reputation still attracted students to the college. But on the other hand, several were now threatening to leave on his account. His lectures were dull and disorganized. He always seemed a little lost. He never set foot in the laboratories anymore. The mathematics class he had scheduled himself to teach was in the hands of a member of that department. He ignored his duties as head of the Division of Science and Mathematics. In short, he was now a totally different man.
The administration’s final decision, made in exasperation, was to raise his salary for the following year and strip him of responsibility for everything except the Physics Department. Everyone hoped he would snap out of it soon.
With speechless perplexity, Rolph Eriksen watched the man he revered shrivel up before his eyes.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he pleaded one day after class.
“I wish there were,” was the answer he got. “Thank you for asking.”
He shrugged off the suggestions of Mary Thorsheim, who continued to visit him twice a week, that he consult a physician. Toward the end of March, she was considering taking steps independently to bring him under medical surveillance. She had prepared a fine dinner of easily digestible foods for him, some of which he had eaten with effort and regurgitated.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Seems like nothing agrees with me these days.”
He himself did not suspect that something was physically wrong with him until a few days into April. The winter of 1959–1960 did not bring the customary drifts of snow and bitter cold to the St. Mark area, and the ground was fairly workable early in the spring. Now and then something like a fresh breath of air or the early morning song of a bird would stir something in Steve and inspire him to get outside. Accordingly one morning he got up early and went out to the garage. He took the spade down from its hook and went to the tiny plot he had tilled the summer before in the corner of the garden.
It took just one strong thrust of his right foot against the spade to double him over in pain. Grasping his abdomen with both arms, he gasped for air. The pain gradually subsided. He concluded that moping around all winter must have left him out of shape. He picked up the spade again and set to work. This time the pain hit him so hard it sent him reeling backwards. He collapsed on the ground clutching his stomach. And the pain hung on. Wheezing and panting and gripping his stomach, he staggered back into the house and fell into the nearest chair.
When he finally caught his wind, he cautiously sat up straight and admitted, “There is something to this.”
As the days passed, the pain recurred at narrower intervals and with less provocation. Fortunately, he thought, it was very sporadic. He learned to avoid certain activities that strained the viscera. After he had experienced a stabbing pain two mornings in succession while walking to work, he drove his car from then on. It was with extreme care that he climbed the stairs to his office.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of April fifteenth, he noticed that he was passing blood. This may have been going on for some time already since he was slow to pick up on such things. Some level of pain was constant now, rising and falling. He pretty well knew what was wrong with him, but he just didn’t care.
On April twenty-third as he was lecturing his Physics 25 class, Section D, he reached up with his right arm to pull down a chart. Before his fingers touched the string, his arm flew to his stomach. Clutching it fiercely, he groped for his desk chair with his left hand. Staggering forward, he slumped down into it. Instantly Rolph Eriksen was at his side. Several students ran to get help. Most remained riveted to their seats.
It took four or five minutes for Dr. Pearson to recover his wind enough to say anything.
“It will pass in a moment. I’m all right.”
He requested that everyone still in the room kindly remain seated while he slowly rose and finished the lecture. The period was almost over. As soon as the dismissal bell rang, he sat down. Bedlam broke loose. Rolph and a handful of other students rushed forward again. Most of the rest of the students funneled out the door, bucking a torrent of Steve’s colleagues who were jostling to get in. When they gathered around him, Rolph anxiously blurted out exactly what had happened.
The little physicist’s condition was no longer a personal matter. In the company of an insistent Professor Amundsen of the Biology Department, he appeared in Dr. Pederson’s clinic that very afternoon. The doctor admitted him to the County Hospital without further discussion. By suppertime half of the faculty had heard that Dr. Stephan Pearson was in the terminal stages of metastatic cancer.