Elephant

When we got back to her place after the hike, she made us a huge plate of nachos, and then asked me to play some music for her. I got out my guitar and sang a few old ones, and then I tried to play her the new song I was working on. She knew right away that it was about her.

Then, right before I asked her to give me a ride back to my place, she asked what I was doing the next day. We didn't have another gig again until Tuesday, and that was in Columbia, so I had a day off on Monday. When I told her I was probably just going to write for a bit, she asked me if I had enough time to go with her to her doctor's appointment. She mentioned that the doctor's office was right by my place.

She didn't seem terribly concerned about it, though she mentioned that she'd had several appointments that month, and that they'd already done some tests, a biopsy, and a series of MRIs during her earlier visits. She said it was all just routine, but clearly something must have been wrong. She asked me if I would go with her to talk to the doctor about the results.

I didn't think much of it. I just thought that she enjoyed my company, and that it was something for us to do together. Besides, I pretty much would have followed her anywhere at that point. Stupid mistake. Maybe I should have thought a little harder. Nonetheless, I said yes, and Jenn gave me a ride home that night.

I realize now that she probably knew, or at least had some inkling of what was happening. She'd mentioned to me about getting sick in the morning, though it was always when she was sober, so I think subconsciously she must have known something.

The Athens Neighborhood Health Center is only about a half mile north of my loft in the downtown district, so when Jenn came over that next morning, she parked her car on the street, and we walked there. Jenn had the morning off, and it was a nice, spring day, so it seemed like a pretty good idea. Again, big mistake.

Even though the appointment was scheduled for 9:30 a.m., we sat in a waiting room for over an hour before the nurse got us in. Once we did talk to the doctor, I realized that Jenn would have been better off if she would have had to wait a whole lot longer to see him – like forever.

First, the doctor – a guy named Weber – thought I was her husband. Then, when she told him she wasn't married, he assumed I was her boyfriend. By the time she made it clear to him that I was just a friend who she'd asked to accompany her to her appointment, it was already too late – his demeanor had given him away. I knew something was wrong, seriously wrong, and so did Jenn. He told her he couldn't discuss the test results with her while I was in the room, without her first signing a waiver. She said she'd sign any damn thing he wanted signed, and he relented.

The cancer, he said, had metastasized. It had started in her pancreas and had already spread to nearby lymph nodes. I remember hearing the words: "Stage 4," "exocrine," "adenocarcinoma," "resection," "the Whipple procedure," "chemotherapy," "radiation," but quite honestly, I don't think much of anything registered with either one of us after we heard the "C" word for the first time.

From that moment forward, we hardly ever talked about it. Jenn didn't want to, and pretty soon, if I tried to get her to share her feelings, she crawled inside a bottle and wouldn't come out. I realize now that she was repressing the subject because of me. She was trying to spare my feelings – like my feelings were the most important consideration. But that was Jenn. So it became the elephant in the room. It was there all the time. We'd just try to ignore the elephant... somehow.

I don't know shit about medicine, so I'm not going to be able to explain many details about what went on after that day. I know that Weber said he wanted the Whipple done as soon as possible – considering that even though Jenn had cancerous cells in her lymph nodes, they were still localized. That along with her age, and the fact that she was, in all other ways, a healthy person made surgery an option in her case. He said that he had already contacted the best surgical oncologist at Emory University Hospital – a Dr. Mayer, and that he had scheduled the resection for Friday morning in Atlanta.

The rest of the time at the clinic was just a lot of processing of insurance forms, during which the clinic's nurses pointed out the good news – that Jenn's insurance through the University was probably the best coverage anyone could possibly have. I don't know how that could be considered good news, but I suppose if whatever puts you into the hospital doesn't also put you into the poor house, there is some silver lining.

I do remember the doctor saying one other thing – that it was quite rare for someone her age, her weight, and her general state of good health to have developed pancreatic cancer, and having apparently already asked her about her drinking in earlier visits to the clinic, he concluded that there were two potential causes – first, the amount of alcohol that she regularly consumed, and secondly, a genetic predisposition that apparently existed on her father's side.

I don't know why he said that – like knowing why she was sick would somehow make being sick better. He said that she couldn't do anything about the latter, but the former? That was up to her. He told her to stop drinking immediately. Fat chance of that!

We didn't make it back to my place until fairly late that night. There were just too many bars on that half mile walk. By the time she'd called in to The Georgia Review to say she wouldn't be in that afternoon, we were already on our second round.

If I'd fucked her before she got sick, I'd never have heard the end of it, so maybe my chivalry the previous two weekends had saved me some unpleasantness at some unforeseen moment in the future. Jenn had this uncanny sense about when people did things for selfish reasons – her family for instance – and so she would have known, and though I suspected that she already loved me, I think she would have held it against me. So I'm glad I didn't.

But that night, she needed me – really needed me, and no matter what lie I might have tried to convince myself of, the truth was I needed her, too. We were just two incredibly vulnerable people, and we were way more vulnerable together than either one of us would have been by ourselves. It was like our helplessness increased exponentially when we were together.

It's a miracle that we could even have figured out what the hell we were doing in bed that night, considering how drunk we were, but for some reason, both of us have absolutely crystal clear recollections of everything, and after an undeniably ugly, horrible day, it became the most beautiful memory that either one of us owned. Before midnight called an end to the second worst day of my fucking life, I was in love with a dying woman.

I don't know why she did this so quickly, but the next morning, Jenn left my place early and drove over to her office on campus, and told her bosses – the editor and managing editor – about her illness.

She asked to take a leave of absence immediately, and they tearfully agreed that that was probably a really good idea. She had long-term disability insurance, so she would continue to be paid when she wasn't working – at least for a while. When she came back to my loft after meeting with them, she told me that she was coming to Columbia with us the next day.

I was both delighted and terrified by that revelation. I wanted and needed her by me, almost as much as she wanted and needed me at her side, so we both decided that if it could be arranged – what with all of our gigs and her doctors' appointments – we would try our best not to spend another night apart from each other. Considering that New South was on the road a lot, and was about to begin a tour and Jenn had the surgery scheduled on Friday, and chemo and radiation planned for as soon after as the oncologist thought safe, staying together was going to be a challenge.

I was all ready to scrap the tour entirely, even leave New South so I could stay with her, but Jenn wouldn't let me. Our latest record had gotten really good reviews, and we were starting to play bigger venues – the way things were looking, in a month or two there would be no more Saturday night gigs at THOB – it seemed like everything might be starting to take off for us.

But the truth was I didn't care. And the even bigger truth was that that rocket launch was about to become the most pathetic take off in alt country history. Our rocket to success didn't even get off the launching pad – just sort fell over, and fizzled for a while.

But if I didn't care, Jenn, on the other hand, did. She said that sticking with my music – really trying to make it – was her first wish, and over the next year, I was committed to granting her wishes, one by one, until she was done wishing, so I was going to keep trying. In the end, I guess I was really happy that she wanted come to Columbia with us.

The problem was that I considered my fall from the proverbial wagon on that Monday an anomaly, an understandable slip-up, considering the fucking bombshell that the doctor had dropped on both of us. I really wanted to try to pursue sobriety, and I was convinced that it was the only way that I could ever make good music.

But Jenn, how in God's name could she avoid drinking and smoking weed now? If there was ever a time she needed bourbon and herb, it was then. And somehow I knew, knew it as clearly and as certainly as I knew my own name – if Jenn was using, I was, too. And if we were going to be together, and if I was going to try to make it, we had a problem, a big, big problem for which there were no simple solutions. Something had to give, and it turned out to be New South.

But the next day, she rode with us up to Columbia. We played two nights in a concert venue there, and the crowds were huge, the biggest we'd ever had – it seemed like every student in South Carolina was at one of those two shows.

By the time we came back on Thursday, every one of the guys in New South considered Jenn Ryan a part of the band. That was a way she had. She could talk to anybody – make anybody feel at home, talk to them in this unassuming way, so that they never wanted to stop talking to her. Anybody, that is, except every member of her fucking family.

Unbeknownst to me, she had called her parents to tell them about the surgery, and so when I drove her to the hospital in Atlanta to check in on that Thursday night, her whole family showed up – her mama and papa, her two brothers, and her sister and her husband – all of them having driven up from Fort Valley.

I don't know why they came. They acted like they really didn't want to be there, and if I thought that they all treated me like shit, that was pure kindness compared to the way that they treated her. It was almost as if they were convinced that her education and its attendant snooty ways had brought on the cancer – some kind of Old Testament retribution for the sin of thinking she was better than God – a plague just as surely as if water had been turned to blood, or frogs, or lice, or locust had descended from above.

The next day when she came out of surgery and the nurses brought her back to her room, I sat in a chair next to her bed holding her hand, while all six of them stood around it and then wandered in and out of the post-surgical wing, not saying anything to her or to me. Then, for the first time I saw it, saw the future – though she was surrounded by her family, I saw that she was dying alone.

Both Dr. Weber and Dr. Mayer thought the surgery went well, and we only had to wait a couple of weeks before Jenn could begin chemoradiation therapy. And then, once the chemo and radiation started, and she could barely keep any food down, the only thing that helped was smoking pot.

A month or two later, against our manager's advice, we kind of cut back on our gigging. That was because of me – or rather, because of my desire to spend as much time as possible with Jenn. We did an abbreviated tour of Midwestern college towns, then skipped the rest of the tour we'd planned for Texas, the Southwest, and the West Coast. In all, we only did about two weeks' worth of shows, and then we came back to Athens so I could be with her. After that, we went back to doing our regular gigs in the area. That allowed me to spend a lot of my time with her.

I'd bring my guitar over to her place, and play her the songs I was working on. But since all of them were about her, after a while they only added to the size of the elephant in the room, and it was all better left alone, and so, pretty soon I stopped that.

We didn't talk about the elephant. It was a classic case of repression. It was always there, but the bigger it got – as more and more disappointing test results came back – the more we would try to forget and would talk about something, anything else, and try to ignore the elephant somehow... somehow.

Music became the best distraction, though when we were together, I stopped playing all of my own stuff in front of her. Instead, we started doing songs together. I'd sing her classic country songs, and she'd get high and sing along, and once that happened, it only seemed natural – if Jenn was going to join in with me, I would join in with her as well – joints are sort of made for sharing.

The first one was "Bobby McGee." It seemed oh so appropriate. When we first started doing it, I'd do the original version – the Kris Kristofferson one from the guy's perspective, singing about "Bobbie," instead of "Bobby" McGee, but then once Jenn started singing along in that incredibly evocative, but absolutely simple vocal style she had, we changed it back to the Janis Joplin cover, talking about "he" and "him." Again, we didn't discuss it, but it was better if the guy, rather than the girl, died.

For fairly obvious reasons, her favorite songs were all of these really sad country tunes – you know, the "tear in my beer" canon: "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain," Sunday Morning Coming Down," "Green, Green Grass of Home," "Long, Black Veil," and "From Boulder to Birmingham," among others.

But her absolute favorite was the Jimmie Rodgers song, "Peach Picking Time in Georgia," which ultimately, was exactly the opposite sort of song. She said it reminded her of happier times, when she was a child, and her family was a whole lot more cohesive that it was now. She really got a kick out of that line about Alabama, since I was from there – you know, where Jimmie goes through what time it is in all those states – Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas, and then ends with "Then down in old Alabama/It's gal pickin' time to me."

She was kind of funny about some things like that – she really liked the idea of her being "my gal." It was kind of old-fashioned, despite the fact that Jenn was an unrepentant feminist at heart. As much as I had guessed correctly about the New South versus Old South conflict in her family, there were times when she clearly identified with the old. She was pretty nostalgic when it came right down to it. It became a kind of inside joke between us – I was "the New South" for obvious reasons, and she was "the Old South," the antebellum melodrama, minus the racism, sexism, and classism.

But old or new, it didn't take long before the weed we were smoking, ostensibly to relieve her nausea, led me down a familiar path, and then it took even less time before my trips to the liquor store became a daily occurrence.

After a few months, it started to get worse and worse, and the more depressed we both got watching the debilitating effects the therapy had on her body and how badly all the test results came back, the earlier in the day the drinking got started. Pretty soon, the mornings were all the same: for me, Seagram's in a coffee cup, and for her Maker's Mark in a juice glass – she always did have more expensive tastes than I did. Then, once we had a couple under our belts, a joint to help her keep her breakfast down.

And then the nights became just as predictable: we'd get drunk, and then I'd carry her to bed, and if she was up for it, we'd make love. But then after a while, it started to register with me: she don't have the spirit for that now. Once she went to sleep, I'd try to clean up – sweep up the hair from her floor and shit like that. Still, it's hard to sweep up after the elephant. It makes a pretty damn big mess.

On the surface, the booze and the weed made things better – sometimes almost bearable. If she had a particularly good day, she'd come to see us play, usually at THOB, but occasionally, if she was doing really well, at some more far-flung location. And though she didn't really talk about the elephant, there was one exception.

When she was drunk, she made cancer jokes, and for some reason, she always did it when other people were around, and no one laughed, and then the people would get up from the table, uncomfortably, and make some excuse why they had to leave. Occasionally, some people, our closest friends, would started crying, and then she felt bad, and so after a while, she stopped making the jokes. They really weren't funny anyway.

But when she did come out, and wasn't being morbid, we had fun. Those are some of my fonder memories. During breaks between sets or after we finished playing, we'd just drink our drinks and laugh out loud, and bitch about the weekend crowd. They never seemed to get the music exactly. Then again, nobody seemed to be getting it anymore.

And then it became obvious to just about everyone – the crowds were smaller, and pretty soon so was the press we'd been receiving. We had a deal to do another record with the label that had released our last two, but then they cancelled that. I wasn't writing very many songs any more, and the ones I was writing weren't very good.

Pretty soon, with the hair almost all gone, Jenn started wearing this Rasta hat that I had given her. You know, one of those black, yellow, green, and red knit Jamaican berets from which your dreadlocks are supposed to dangle, unless, that is, you decide to tuck them underneath. You see, that was one of her cancer jokes – she told everybody she was going to start growing dreadlocks!

That's why I bought her the hat.

I got it for her when we were playing Charlotte. I found it in this, like, hippie gift store, and I was real pleased that she liked it. She had such a pretty face that, even without hair, she was just so fucking beautiful. God, I loved seeing her in that hat!

It brought out, what I told her were her sharecropper eyes, those hazel-green orbs from which the life was slowly, almost imperceptively, draining. They always looked sad, even before she got sick, and even when she was the happiest. They just struck me as the kind of eyes that you'd see in those Dorothea Lange photographs of Dust Bowl victims, albeit in black and white, not hazel-green.

As she got weaker and weaker, it became harder for her to drink. It seemed to take a lot more out of her. So she just smoked more, and when she did, so did I. And for some reason, the pot made us even more nostalgic, and probably more philosophical. One night, I remember Jenn raising the last big spliff of the night in a sardonic toast, "We burn these joints in effigy," she said wryly. Even though it was the only thing that kept Jenn from being sick, we ultimately knew it wasn't good for either one of us. Besides, we both felt like we'd gone backwards.

At the end of last year, Georgia legalized medical weed for certain patients, and Jenn went straight down to Dr. Weber's office on the very first day to get her prescription. Georgia wasn't like some of the more progressive states where medical and even recreational pot was legal. You could only get cannabis oil, which didn't bother Jenn at all. She just mixed it with the pot I was already buying for her. It just made it that much stronger.