Lessons From a Goldfish
“Dear Sean, I’m writing for advice,” the message began.
“I lost the whole lower right side of my face [due to cancer] before having it rebuilt. My surgeon was a genius.
“...I’m five years without cancer, but my 12-year-old constantly worries about me, and is afraid my cancer will come back. We’ve been through a lot. I tell her that I’m okay, but it doesn’t always help. What do I do?”
Dear friend, you’re asking the wrong guy for advice.
I have no children. The closest I ever came to having a child was when my wife got me a goldfish for Christmas. His name was Gary.
I travel for a living, so I took Gary with me everywhere since Gary would have starved at home alone because, sadly, Gary never learned to cook.
So I carried Gary in a Mason jar when I traveled. He rode in the passenger seat. Late one night in Texas, I was checking into a hotel. I plopped Gary’s jar on the counter and started digging through my wallet.
The teenage clerk stared at Gary and said, “Is that a fish?”
“Yes.”
The clerk blinked, then replied—and I’m not making this up—“So I guess you want to upgrade your room to two kings?”
So anyway, eventually Gary died of natural causes. And by “natural causes,” I am, of course, referring here to our cat Cuddles.
So I am not qualified to raise a goldfish. Let alone give kid advice.
Still, I have this theory. And I realize this is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. My theory is that every human is a 12-year-old, waiting for his or her life to begin.
When I was a 12-year-old, I underwent a lot of trauma and tragedy. My father died by suicide and our world was upended.
Ever since, the one feeling I craved was security. Security was missing in my life.
But here’s the thing. The feeling of safety is a strangely elusive thing. Security is something you can NEVER achieve. The harder you try to “feel” secure, the less you do.
Even so, I have found that the 12-year-old kid inside me doesn’t actually need security at all. Because, after all, security doesn’t actually exist. And you can’t “need” something that doesn’t exist. Security is an illusion since nothing lasts. Everything is impermanent.
What 12-year-old me really wants, especially in moments of fear, is for someone to hold me.
Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous, I know that makes me less masculine. But remember, I’m just a giant 12-year-old.
And you can ask any therapist, what a 12-year-old needs is love. Real, physical affection. A 12-year-old needs someone—anyone—to hold them and remind them that, yes, even though everything in life vanishes, even though nothing lasts forever, love will.
So in short, my theory is that all 12-year-olds need to be held. They need to be hugged. They need to be squeezed. Kissed. Comforted. Touched. And they need this to happen yesterday.
Especially middle-aged 12-year-olds who have survived cancer.
As always, there are nuggets of truth lurking in Sean's entry today.
My wife and I both are cancer survivors, and the main thing we learned from our experiences is that facing cancer should NEVER be done alone. We leaned on each other, especially through the difficult times when we were simply too weak, or too stunned by pain meds, or too brain-fogged to do anything ourselves. I simply could not have made it through my treatments had not my courageous wife stepped up to the plate and took over everything. And then 5 years later, our roles were reversed when she had her own cancer episode.
Those occasions of adversity made our bond even greater, and today both of us are cancer-free and have recovered completely. But I think it is entirely possible that by both of us having cancer and needing each other in the darkest parts of those times -- her overseeing my many meds and acting as intercessor with my doctors, me holding her head while she vomited into the toilet and driving her to her appointments, and both of us crying late into the night -- might have been preordained to make us see that we are not simply two separate individuals, but rather two halves of a whole.
And yes, hugs were very important medicine during those times. LOTS of hugs and the simple reassurance that we were there for each other. We consider ourselves blessed to be in each others' lives.
And even some 62 year olds need that too.