'Zine (Pagan Kennedy Project) by Pagan Kennedy

Author:Pagan Kennedy [Kennedy, Pagan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2014-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

ONE NIGHT in April 1991, my mother called. Dad had lung cancer. He would die within six months. The news was so horrible, so sudden, and yet it hit with the dull thud of an expected tragedy. Ever since I was a kid, he’d worked like a maniac, getting up at 5 A.M. and coming home late. And then a few months ago, he’d admitted he couldn’t take the pace anymore. “I’m so tired I forget people’s names,” he’d said to us—my mother, my sister, and me. His first admission of frailty opened a crack in our lives, a slit through which we glimpsed what would follow.

Even living under a death sentence, Dad remained capable and sensible. He planned to travel, enjoy himself, and when the end came he would resort only to painkillers. Instead of checking into a hospital, he would stay at home, his death supervised only by us and by a hospice organization. (Hospices are private companies that provide nurses, medical supplies, painkillers, and counseling to patients who have chosen to die without medical intervention.) There would be no life-support systems or last-ditch operations, no useless tests, no denial.

But the doctors—with their promises of a few more weeks of life, a little less pain—eventually talked him into several harrowing lung operations and a round of chemo. Not only did those procedures fail to stop the advance of his cancer, they sometimes amounted to torture.

I visited him often, and his decline shocked me. For a while, he remained the hearty man I knew. Then, after the chemo, he became bald and frail. After the lung operations, his hair grew back steel gray instead of brown, his cheeks sank in, and his eyes seemed pathetically large. Only when he spoke did I remember the powerful man he used to be, the one who started his own company and sat on city planning boards. “The way this hospital is run is very interesting,” he’d say, listing the hierarchies he’d noticed among the doctors, the habits of the nurses. A part of him could float out of his wasted body and watch the world with as much intelligence as ever.

I stopped Working on Pagan’s Head when I heard the news about Dad. I also stopped working on my novel, which—weirdly—was about two sisters whose father had just died of lung cancer; I felt haunted and guilty by the way my book had predicted my father’s illness, and didn’t touch it for a long time. I did keep on writing for magazines and newspapers; in fact, I asked for, and was allowed to have, a column in the Voice Literary Supplement about ’zines.

I thought that I didn’t want to publish another Pagan’s Head because it seemed too silly, too out-of-key with the hell I was going through. But then, I don’t know, after a few months I got so tired of being sad all the time. So I started working on the ’zine again. It seemed like a happy refuge from the stomach-churning Tilt-A-Whirl of my life, those wrenching phone calls and visits.

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