One Year Later

Trying to deal with my last year at Western and with my dad

Personal essay by TREVOR DICKIE

Heading into my senior year at Western, I was riding high, feeling confident. In spring 2017, while registering for the coming fall quarter, I loaded up on classes. Keep the rest of the year mellow, I figured. No need to have a tough last quarter or two. That became a massive mistake.

I never felt I had much go wrong in my life. I hadn’t dealt with any terrible relationships, I was pretty comfortable in school and I worked in the outdoor industry, where I could talk about adventure all the time. I remember first thinking about this in a feature writing class. We were writing personal essays, and we read them aloud. A number of my peers had hardships and painful experiences to write about. Mine? It was about a time I got lost on a climbing trip.

After that, I had started to think about the idea that maybe I couldn’t really relate to people’s issues. I just couldn’t empathize, not out of a lack of care, but because I’d never experienced depressive feelings or terrible adversity. I’d told people about the feeling, and it became hard not to think of impending trauma. Like some weird form of karma, I was overdue for personal strife.

In June 2017, my dad was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Left untreated, the patient will likely pass away within three months of diagnosis. With successful treatment, living much more than a year with the disease is unlikely. It remains incurable.

The disease took my home from me. My comfort and confidence evaporated at diagnosis. The next three months were filled with doctor appointments and discussions about affairs and estate that I didn’t imagine having for the next 20 years.

I stopped enjoying being home with my family. Conversations were melancholy and uncomfortable. While in Bellingham, I didn’t want to call home. Every phone call had some tidbit of medical information that would ruin my day. “The tumor is mostly back, treatment hasn’t done so much,” Mom said during one conversation. That was only a couple months after the surgery, which removed over 99 percent of the tumor.

Suddenly, frontloading my senior year, making fall the hardest quarter, proved to be the wrong decision. My classes were destroying me. I couldn’t focus on school work and I didn’t want to be in Bellingham. I felt guilty. My dad had a year left and I was spending it away from him. I wouldn’t call home. Ignorance is bliss.

I didn’t attend class, but I didn’t go home either. I felt useless and couldn’t get out of my head.

After fall quarter, everything let up a little. I didn’t have obscene amounts of school work weighing me down. Instead of stressing about work and the disease, I was able to think about just one thing at a time and relax a little. I spent more time with my friends, instead of time in isolation.

It seems like it’s a direction I’ve been headed toward since — like everything is getting better. But to a serious degree, it isn’t. As my family approaches the one-year mark with my dad’s disease, we enter dangerous territory. An alien disease is taking over my father’s brain. But at least I front-loaded my senior year, because now I have time to deal with myself. When this is all over, at least I have some confidence I’ll be able to handle it.