On December 11, 2013, Jason came to Dr. Brunvand’s boxy office at the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute for an eighty-minute meeting that seemed slated for joy. Jason had survived more than twenty-two months without a relapse after taking brentuximab during 2012 and experiencing a full year of remission in 2013; at twenty-four months, he’d have hit a state of remission considered significant and predictive of full recovery.
“How are you feeling, Jason?”
“All right. Good days and bad days. Some days are awesome. I get a ton of shit done, and then I’ll just be exhausted.”
Understandable, Dr. Brunvand told him. His body had been through three years of hell. But now Jason was down to taking only acyclovir, a medication to prevent cold sores and worse.
“You’re turning the corner, Jason.”
He just had to make it another six weeks and the ordeal would be over.
A week later, back in Vegas, Jason got a massage. He woke up the next day with swelling under his left armpit, where the armpit meets the shoulder. It’s known as the axilla. It lasted a month. He came back to Denver to get it checked out. Now he was only a few weeks from being in the clear. He got a scan of the inflamed area.
On February 2, Jason was pumped up. He was feeling good and going to make a night of it with his oldest friend (and part of the high school gang), Bob Nesbit, and watch our beloved Denver Broncos play the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. The bad news: The Broncos got destroyed, 43–8. The good news: It was over pretty quickly, practically by the end of the first quarter. Jason had a blast with Bob and was feeling pretty good, despite the outcome of the game.
The next day, he was at the grocery store in Boulder with his mother when his cell phone rang. It was Poppy Beethe, Jason’s nurse from the cancer center.
“Hey, Poppy! What’s the word?”
“Jason, I’ve got some bad news.”
“What? Tell me.”
“The tests have come back. Why don’t you come in and meet with us.”
February 11, 4:30 P.M., Jason went to Dr. Brunvand’s office to learn his fate. “I’ve got it, don’t I?”
“Look, Jason, we’re not out of options.”
They were long past pussyfooting around.
“We have options,” Dr. Brunvand repeated, “but there is no standard therapy at this point.”
“So what does that mean?”
“You made it a year disease-free after taking brentuximab. So we can try that again.”
Jason listened and just felt so beyond defeated. He couldn’t begin to stomach the idea of putting himself through the hell of chemotherapy again when the cancer kept coming back.
Dr. Brunvand explained that there were two other drugs that might help. One of them was aimed at causing the cancer to overexpress a molecule called CD30 so that it could be more easily targeted by the brentuximab.
“They have risks, Jason. They can actually lead to other malignancies. But those risks aren’t any worse than the malignancies that you’ve already got.”
“And if I don’t do it? If I can’t put myself through it again?”
“Median survival is less than six months.”
Dr. Brunvand proposed they start in six days. He had the impression that Jason was on board.
“Rick, I can’t do it.”
He called me and told me he was done. Enough already. The guy I had known as the ultimate competitor was ready to redefine the battle. It wasn’t about fighting anymore, it was about not suffering. It was about peace.
“I won’t spend the last months of my life feeling like shit.”
“I feel you, Greenie. It makes a lot of sense.”
“It’s just so wrong. I was so close. I feel fine. I feel great.”
He said he wanted to talk about it some more.
Two of Jason’s best friends, Noel and Tom, and I started a text conversation. We decided that it was time to get the gang together, the members of the Concerned Fellows League. We set a date. Tom would come from Minnesota and I from San Francisco, and Noel would host in Boulder with just a few of Jason’s oldest and closest. We told Jason that we were having a reunion, without putting so fine a point on it: We’d be coming together to say goodbye to Jason.
Bob Nesbit picked me up at the airport and we got to Noel’s house in Boulder by early evening. Tom was there, and Ariel Solomon, an absolute prince of a human being who was a year behind us in high school but had long since been part of the gang. Ariel had been a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, had a Super Bowl ring to show for it, and had become a triathlete and still looked the part of a fit giant. In fact, everyone looked and seemed great, just older versions of themselves.
There were some differences. The heavy drinking that at times accompanied our adolescence was mostly gone. Two among our group had dealt with drinking problems, and they went heavy on the seltzer water. These were now open secrets and what dawned fairly early in the evening was some good news. We all seemed much more at ease with our more mature selves than the alcohol-fueled versions that we’d passed off in high school and college. We had a good conversation about family and life, and we waited for the guest of honor.
And waited.
At some point, Jason called or texted to say he was getting there. He’d driven since dawn from Vegas.
He got there by nine, a whirl of Jason, flip-flops, jeans and a flannel shirt, stale smell and a wide smile and a high-pitched laugh, and he immediately launched into a story.
“You guys gotta hear this,” he said. “I was at grief counseling last night with Beth, and I was trying to use it to break up with her.”
“C’mon.”
“I’m serious. I keep telling her that she doesn’t need this shit. But she won’t have any of it. I was thinking maybe I could get the counselor on my side.”
“You’re a savant, Greenstein. No one else could use death counseling to try to get out of a relationship.”
“I know. But it’s not working.”
It was beautiful. Not Jason’s tactics—just Jason being Jason—smiling, laughing (squealing), not taking himself too seriously, late to his own party, living on his terms. He looked damn good.
He had another story to tell. He’d gotten himself locked up by the Vegas cops. What had happened is that over the years he’d amassed a bunch of parking tickets that he’d failed to pay because—well, why bother? Then late one night, with insomnia, he’d gone for a walk. It was hot and he was sweating like hell. He’d wound up in a so-so part of town and was walking sort of aimlessly when he realized that a cop had taken notice of him. Jason was dripping sweat. One thing led to another and the cop wound up checking Jason’s info and discovering he was wildly in arrears on parking tickets. The cop took Jason to the clink, where, exhausted and overcome with the cancer sweats, he sat in a holding cell, waiting to be processed and taking in the tight quarters filled with macho twentysomethings on the brink of coming to blows.
“I had to take a shit the whole time, but there was this little silver bowl in the middle of everything!” Jason being Jason, he was howling, appreciating his own self-made misfortune, and we weren’t sure if we were laughing at or with him. But speaking for myself, I thought he looked as alive as anyone in the room—certainly not like a guy who had six months or less.
Bit by bit, the conversation turned serious. Jason brought everyone up to speed and he recounted what he’d told a few of us: He couldn’t do any more chemo.
“I want to enjoy one more Final Four,” he said. “What do you guys think I should do?”
His question was rhetorical in the sense that I’m not sure our counsel mattered, or even that it should. It was Ariel who took the first crack at answering. “If it was me, I’d do everything I could to fight,” he said. “If you’ve got a chance, you’ve got to take it.”
Ariel hadn’t been so much part of the saga the prior few years, and certainly had not heard Jason’s recent misgivings about treatment, so his position was totally understandable. Others said they appreciated Jason’s position. It wasn’t a long conversation. Jason seemed burdened by Ariel’s comments. He didn’t like to think of himself as a quitter.
We stayed up late, playing pool and agreeing to get together for breakfast. We’d rekindled our group, our connection ripened by time, and we weren’t quite ready to say goodbye to our founder.
At a restaurant painfully named Eggscetera, we brunched. Beforehand, Bob and Noel and I had talked about taking a moment to let Jason know that we agreed with him that it made sense to hold off on treatment. It’s not that it actually made sense to us; that was irrelevant. Rather, it made sense to us that it made sense to him.
He nodded and took in our counsel. “Ariel got to me a little,” he said. But he was still leaning away from treatment.
In the parking lot, he wanted a parting gift. He wanted to take a picture next to me, side by side, in profile, to see, as he put it: Which of us has the larger nose?
It looked to me like a tie—for last.
We hugged and I headed to the airport. I doubted I’d ever see Jason again.