The Worst Sound
CNF By Melissa Flores Anderson & Andrew Wellner
Can I tell you about the worst sound I’ve ever heard?
It’s going to take me a minute.
My wife and I have been together a long time. She came with a kid. I made him mine. She and I made two more.
As our 20th anniversary got close, I found myself, after a 10-year absence, returning to journalism as publisher of a tiny newspaper. (Editorial note from Melissa: Andrew lasted longer than most of us, who turned to the dark side – PR or marketing). A desk job was a transition for me; I had been teaching, spending much more time on my feet, but school budgets and the poor decision-making they tend to engender pushed me out.
I wasn’t surprised when my back started hurting. Figured it was just an adjustment, and anyway, the back pain seemed more manageable than my teacher knee pain.
(I swear, this context is helpful, just bear with me.)
Three months into the new job, the back pain hadn’t gotten better. It had just slowly grown worse. Bad enough that I had to cancel some work events. I figured I owed it at least to my employer, but probably to my family as well, to do the work fixing it if I was going to ask for those kinds of considerations.
I started seeing doctors. Got a bunch of muscle relaxers. No help. Maxed out on over-the-counter painkillers. Some help but not enough.
Eventually it got bad enough I went to the emergency room. They don’t just hand out pain pills like I hear they used to. They have to do some investigating first. So they sent me through their CT machine.
I remember the E.R. doc returning after reading the results.
“Your spine, everything looks great,” he said. “But there’s two tumors on your pancreas and a lesion on your liver.”
(Is this the worst sound? No. Hold on, it’s coming.)
“Holy shit,” I mostly whispered.
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” the doc replied. “Do you have people you can call?”
“Yes,” I said.
That was the last I saw of that doctor, even though I’m pretty sure the E.R. was empty that day. Can’t say as I blame the man. When you work a job like E.R. doctor, opting not to stick around that kind of tragedy is just good self-preservation.
The wife was at our daughter’s school helping with a Halloween event. Maybe younger Millennials don’t feel this way. Gen Z certainly doesn't. But I’m an elder enough Millennial to still hesitate to communicate news like this over the phone. (Editorial note from Melissa: I got a text like this recently, surprisingly from a young Gen Xer, so maybe practicality or grief defy generations.)
Honestly, it’s a practical thing – how are you going to say something like that and then have to wait for the other person to get to you so you can comfort each other? It’s dumb.
So, when I called Amber, I just wanted to communicate one thing: “I need you to break free of the trick-or-treat thing and come get me.”
Of course, I should have known better. Amber isn’t the type to let me off the phone when clearly something is wrong.
“Just tell me,” she said.
“The doctor said my back is fine but there’s tumors on my pancreas and lesions on my liver,” I told her.
“What?” she said.
That was it. The worst sound I have ever heard in my entire 45 years on this planet. The fear. The confusion. The way she couldn’t even get through that one syllable without her voice breaking as the tears started. My utter lack of an ability to do anything about it in the moment.
Just the worst.
The absolute worst.
Twenty years together and I’d never heard that sound before. And I hope I never hear it again.
Amber is the type of person to keep a mental list of all the ways she doesn’t want to die. Pancreatic cancer has long been near the top. She knew immediately the implications of what I’d said.
Luckily we live in an exceedingly small town. The drive from our daughter’s school to the E.R. was less than five minutes. Still, those were among the longest five minutes I have ever experienced.
—
News like this is relatively easy to spread. After a few social media posts and phone calls to close family and friends, it pretty much spreads itself.
The social media posts predictably blew up. To the point I think they may have raised my status in the algorithm. Dumb little things these days tend to generate a lot more raised thumbs and comments than they used to.
About a week after we told everyone, the phone calls started rolling in. Every roommate I ever had, college friends I hadn’t talked to in years rang me up. At least one person from every job I’ve worked as an adult sought me out. One conversation lasted a good 15 minutes before I had enough context clues to figure out with whom I was speaking.
And a lot of those folks put me on their regular call rotation list. We hadn’t spoken since graduation and now here we were, chatting on the phone twice a month.
Texts. Emails. Cash donations. Random presents and care packages. The outpouring was immense. In the first month or so, I’d estimate, 60 percent of the tears I shed were tears of gratitude for how hard everyone was turning out for me.
Funny thing, though: it didn’t really stop.
It’s often said that you find out who your friends are when things get tough. Given the people I heard saying such things, I’d always taken that to mean that fake friends fall away and you’re left with just a tight group of diehards.
What I found was quite the opposite. Far from clamming up or falling away, people stepped up and tons of them started coming out of the woodwork. My list of “true” friends just grew and grew.
So, the statement is still true, I guess. I did find out who my friends were. It’s just I found out that there were many more of them than I’d ever imagined. Friends who were thinking of me and, in the moment, deciding to take the opportunity to reach out.
Like any adult, especially one raising three children, I’d mostly let these friendships lapse over the years. All of my hometown friends had gone to college far from home. I’d come back to the area but everyone else seemed to have stayed away. So, eventually, thousands of miles separated me from both my college and my high school friends.
Perhaps it’s my analog childhood talking but even in our glorious Information Age, proximity still seems, to me anyway, pretty key in maintaining friendships. I have friends locally. But keeping in touch with those farther flung was difficult.
At any rate, as chemo started and we moved through the monthly cycles of dripping poison and extended recovery, I felt more loved and supported than I had been in my entire life.
***
I don’t remember the exact moment I met Andrew, but he was in my “core” class in grad school, where we had a different professor each night of the week and triple the homework of a regular class. The first semester was intense, learning how to write news stories for print, broadcast, web, getting grilled on grammar rules I’d never fully learned. And we had spelling tests. Fucking spelling tests for students who were 20-40 years old. (Editorial note from Andrew: the spelling tests came without a list to study… the absurdity of it caused me to do something rare for me: act up in class and actively mock the teacher.)
I remember how I met Bryan, who was in our class, too, waiting in line for student IDs during orientation. Bryan reminded me of Ethan Hawke’s character from Reality Bites, and he chain smoked just like Troy Dyer, had the same messy hair.
Bryan, Andrew and I sat in a row at Apple computers and wrote to news prompts three nights a week. One of our first assignments was to pair off and write an obituary for a classmate. A morbid assignment, but it forced us to interview someone who was essentially a stranger.
I partnered with Bryan and made him die of a spider bite. He made me drown. I don’t remember who Andrew was partnered with, or his hypothetical cause of death, but I know none of us in that class ever imagined it would be pancreatic cancer, and in his 40s. (Editorial note from Andrew: I told my writing partner to say I’d died saving my family from a sinking battleship, a reference to The Royal Tenenbaums.)
The three of us spent so much time together that first semester of graduate school, sometimes with Angie, sometimes with Michelle, maybe because of that proximity he mentioned that can bond friendships, or unglue them when life leads to different geographies. But it was more than just the classes. We went to movies together and hung out at bars on Sunset Boulevard or the Westside, drank in dank, tiny apartments.
I had a crush on Bryan, who called me on the last landline I ever had with regular frequency to ask questions about our homework assignments. We would talk for hours, just the two of us, but when we got together in person, Andrew and Bryan were a package deal. Andrew wasn’t a bad guy to have around. He was funny and often made me laugh so hard tears streamed down my cheeks. He seemed younger, less jaded than the rest of us. He might have been the only optimist in a group of realists veering toward pessimism. (Editorial note from Andrew: I never thought about my perpetual optimism making me seem younger. It’s neat to see yourself reflected this way.)
Our program offered us the option of three international internship destinations or spending a summer taking courses in Los Angeles. Seemed a no-brainer to go overseas. Options were London, Hong Kong or Cape Town. So we went to South Africa with a dozen or so other students in our program and a professor whose stuffy name included III in it. Some mean girls on the program said I only went to be near Bryan, but it was the location that offered the best chance to build up a print portfolio and I wanted to write for newspapers. I wrote a dozen stories and still have the yellowed papers in a plastic bin under my bed. We all worked for the Cape Argus, but Andrew covered arts and entertainment while Bryan and I worked for the news team.
On one of my first assignments, I went to a township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha. It looked like the scenes in movies with huts made out of corrugated tin walls and dirt floors. I met a woman the same age as me, a mother with two small children, who spoke Xhosa. Through a translator, she told the story of how she contracted HIV from her husband, who worked on the other side of the country in a mine most days of the year. She gave birth to a son who also had the disease. They survived on anti-retrovirals provided by charity, but no one in her family knew her status because of the stigma of the illness. I remember in that moment how much life felt like a crap shoot.
After the internship, I went home to Northern California for a few weeks, and Andrew lived in my studio apartment in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a sublet. I had to pay the rent anyway, so I let him stay for free. He and Bryan at some point ate all the Jelly Bellys I had in a candy jar from my old job at San José State University. When it was empty, Bryan mixed a drink in it and used it as a glass. They left it at a car wash. That’s the story I heard. I yelled at them for being careless with my things, but really, I was upset that Bryan had started dating someone else in our program somewhere between South Africa and the start of the semester. He didn’t tell me. I heard it from Angie. He pretended he didn’t know me in classes. I didn’t know how to extricate my friendship with Andrew from Bryan, so I stopped hanging out with both of them.
I sat between Bryan and his girlfriend at graduation, our last names aligned alphabetically while Andrew sat in the last row, last seat. We scattered to different places, took our careers in different directions. Andrew and I both stuck it out working as journalists for too long, when it was clear it was a dying industry without many prospects for the future. I watched from afar as he became a husband, became a dad, became a teacher, became a newspaper publisher, became sick. When he shared his diagnosis online, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. I donated to help his family, saw the names of other grad school colleagues, and maybe a writer I know from Twitter who lives in Alaska.
It seemed unfair, someone younger than me, a father of three. But life is a crap shoot. I was sad, but also thought I didn’t have a right to be sad because we weren’t close anymore, had only been close for that short window.
I have one picture of Andrew, Bryan and me, from South Africa. I don’t remember who took it. The three of us are sitting on a twin bed in their temporary room in Cape Town. Andrew’s wearing a yellow button-down shirt that makes his sea-glass colored eyes look lighter. (Editorial note from Andrew: probably more than one button down. Nobody had yet told me that particular sartorial choice made me look stupid.) My cheeks are red and my hair is chin length, and I have on a cheap Old Navy t-shirt. The blue eyebrow ring I got in college is still in. Bryan is in a denim shirt, faded on the shoulders, like the photo is faded from the years I had it in a multiphoto picture frame on a wall where the sun hit for hours each day. It’s in a box now. It’s 21 years old, not much younger than we all are in the photo, with full lives ahead of us. We don’t know then that some of us have less time than others. Because life is a crap shoot.
So love your people. Say it out loud so they know how you feel. Be kind. Reach out, even if you don’t think you have a right to do it. Do the things you want to do while you have the chance, and leave a positive wake as you go.
Melissa Flores Anderson and Andrew Wellner went to grad school together to be journalists before the newspaper industry fell apart. Andrew lived in denial longer than Melissa, writing for newspapers for ten years before finally moving on to a career in mental healthcare and, eventually, teaching, before making a brief return to journalism as publisher of the Kodiak Daily Mirror. He lives in Kodiak, Alaska with his family. He has a wife and three kids. As Andrew shared, Melissa turned to the dark side (PR) after eight years in newspapers, but for a good cause (public higher education). She lives in Gilroy, California with her husband and 7-yr-old son, and regularly persuades people to write collaborative stories with her.
