My Father's Wake by Kevin Toolis

Author:Kevin Toolis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

GESTATIONS

Sonny’s death took nine months to come into being.

It was in the autumn as Sonny approached his seventieth birthday that he first began to complain of indigestion and a burning pain at the top of this stomach. By Christmas he was in sufficient discomfort to have visited his doctor three times and been sent to the local hospital for tests. The tests came back negative.

I missed his seventieth birthday party that January. My brother and sisters and Sonny’s sisters went for a meal in a restaurant on the island. Everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’. They had a birthday cake with candles, and he blew them out. I did not think being there was important. I was living in London; my first child had just been born and we were worried about her. I thought I could not afford the time, the money or the disruption. I knew my presence would have pleased Sonny in his own quiet way. But I never went, persuading myself I would make it up to him sometime in the future. When my mother was alive, Sonny had made his views known through her, but she was gone and he was never a man to demand things openly. It was easy to ignore him. I still regret my thoughtlessness.

I came home in early March to show him his new grandchild. But Sonny was unusually quiet and inactive. He spent a lot of time sitting around watching television. He was preoccupied, hard to read, fallen into himself, a bit cranky. He was due to go for more tests but he never mentioned his symptoms–or perhaps I never listened. We went out for the day, stopping for tea and cakes at the Sisters of Saint Lucy convent in the little town of Newport, where my mother used to buy meat on those long van journeys. Sonny bought his new grandchild a soft felt purple rabbit in the gift shop. We halted near a harbour for a short walk, but Sonny did not want to get out of the car. I passed it off as old age, grumpiness. I took a few photographs by the side of the car; Sonny smiling holding his granddaughter, Sonny and me, Sonny with my partner. We drove back to Dookinella, and then a few days later we flew to the city to get on with the rest of our lives.

Sonny’s nagging pain did not disappear, and not long after our visit he had those further tests and an exploratory operation. The surgeon opened him up and found an advanced cancerous tumour in his pancreas. Pancreatic cancer is the seventh most common cancer found in Western men, but is particularly fatal. The survival rate five years after initial diagnosis, even with chemotherapy, is just 5 per cent; after ten years, 1 per cent. The pancreas gland, at the back of the abdominal wall near the top of the stomach, acts like a biological junction between the body’s digestive system and bloodstream, controlling digestion through the production of insulin and blood enzymes.

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