Glue

“Believe me, it was the glue monster,” I told the doctor. Despite his crooked eyebrows and stifled snicker, I knew it was true. There is a monster that creeps around my house in the middle of the night, holding a syringe of glue. Although I can’t describe him, because I have never seen him, I ask you to trust me. The doctor thinks I am crazy, but I think I am afraid. Fear gets chalked up to delusion far too often. Maybe being afraid of a glue monster hiding under my father’s bed makes me less insane and more human.

I have always wondered how the cancer got there in the first place. When my dad first told us about his incurable diagnosis, I suspected glue poisoning. The glue monster got him. The doctor, however, insisted it was “cellular luck.” If only you had been there to experience the silence that comment deserved. How about cellular bad luck, dude? Personally, I found my explanation much more compelling, but either way, the truth didn’t waver. Glue or biology, my dad is driving in the fast lane to the unknown, and there is no magic solution. There is no solvent to flush the glue out of his system.

I am not ignorant of the gravity of the situation when I use glue as a metaphor for cancer. Cancer is a word that sucks the air out of the room the second it is uttered. To reduce all of that to a white, sticky substance that spends most of its existence crusted beneath the fingernails of children seems disrespectful. But I do it anyway. For those who find this metaphor wildly inappropriate, I would remind them that I am not having a particularly appropriate experience. In the years I have spent watching my favorite person battle his own body, I have wondered whether it feels like being forced to slowly swallow glue.

If you swallow enough glue, it will lodge in your throat and fill your lungs until you run out of oxygen. I have never tried this, for obvious reasons, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Suffocation via glue sounds like an atrocious way to die, if you ask me. Not that any part of dying sounds inviting, but I imagine the first few seconds would be the best. The glue would kiss your tongue and linger there just long enough for your toes to grip the floor and your eyes to squint shut. At this point, you would be one of the only people on the planet to experience the sensation of glue in your mouth: cold, slippery, vile. You would know it was there, you might even be afraid, but it wouldn’t be killing you yet. Anyway, I imagine there are worse things to digest, although nothing comes to mind right now.

After the first moment passes, it would go rapidly downhill. The glue would slide like slime off a snail, gripping the sides of your esophagus. I don’t know what instinctual response would come next: clenching, coughing, gasping. You might flinch, cry, pray, or even lose consciousness. You would know this was your body’s hopeless attempt to survive even a second longer. There is something particularly humiliating about the body continuing to fight long after the mind has decided it is finished. Or admirable, I suppose. I have never known which. You would eventually arrive at the acceptance that this was it. You were dying via glue, and there was nothing you could do about it. It would be a rather unfortunate thing to have in your obituary. I mean, it is a toxic crafting paste, after all.

My dad takes it like a champ, I have to say. Little by little, the glue infiltrates different areas of his body. He rides the waves, high and low. He surrenders to a timeline he never agreed to, making the absolute best of circumstances that have given him very little to work with. It is painful and jarring to watch someone fill with toxins, knowing there is nothing you can do to stop it. It is especially gut-wrenching when that person is your best friend, or when that person is giving, kind, patient, strong, and deserving of none of this. There is a cruel irony in watching the man who has dedicated twenty-six years of his life to the mission of gluing me back together slowly come undone himself. The same hands that held me together are now attached to a body I cannot fix. Dying slowly via cancerous fucking glue.

When I first realized this was our life, him filling with glue and me watching it, I decided I would make the grandest gesture anyone could make. I would sit. So I do. I sit with him in the corner, on the couch, in the hospital, in rooms filled with inside jokes or painfully stale silence. I sit with him on good days and bad ones because that’s literally all I can do. Sitting, for the record, is a pretty pathetic contribution to a medical crisis. It requires no special training, no medical degree, and very little physical effort. I am exceptionally qualified. I plunk myself down beside him because although we are losing different things, neither of us should have to lose them alone. We love each other. Someday, on a date and time neither of us is entitled to know, we will lose each other. So sitting is the only thing that makes sense.

It isn’t cancer that causes me to think irrationally; it is grief. I would much rather spend the rest of my life hating a bottle of glue, or some grotesque glue monster creeping into his bedroom in the middle of the night, than accept something so profoundly indifferent. In the face of a diagnosis that threatens his existence, I can’t think logically. I operate out of pure fear. I live in the future and in the past. I wonder about my capabilities to do anything without him, from walking to driving to breathing. I question whether he forgives me for the things I’ve done. I stare and contemplate. I reminisce and reassure. I grieve in advance over and over and over and over and over and over again. But mostly, I ruminate over the day the monster broke into my house. Why didn’t I warn my dad sooner? How did I not see it coming? Could I have fought it off harder?

Everything was good, or so I remember it. Everyone was healthy, the candles were lit, and the house smelled of autumn. We were home, the doors were locked, and we were safe, or so we thought. But the glue monster had other plans. It crept in through the forgotten back door and abandoned its original agenda to wander the rooms, surveying everything it wanted to steal from us with a sparkly, covetous eye. Then it found him. It struck with force and precision. The glue was injected into my helpless, undeserving, sleeping father. Proud and callous, the monster simply walked away.

The scariest thing happened next. The sun rose, the leaves fell, and the house was just as warm as it had been. It was as if nothing had happened at all. It’s bizarre, truly, that something so powerful and destructive can go unnoticed for months, even years. We all went to work and went about our days, never suspecting that this monster had already taken so much from us.

Call me crazy for believing in monsters; you and the doctor can bond. But I fully believe in the unforgiving entity that crept into my home. I am desperate to make cancer tangible. I need to turn it into something I can point my finger at and resent. There is no mercy when it comes to cancer, just luck. (Bad luck, remember?) I am left arguing with biology, which, as it turns out, is a deeply unsatisfying thing to argue with.

I don't know if I will ever make peace with the lack of control I have. I don’t know if I will ever stop searching for something or someone to blame. I don’t know if I can ever let go of that one night I left the back door unlocked. I don't know if I will ever stop thinking or wondering, crying or bargaining.

I guess you could say that I don't know much but, I do know this: I am just a daughter who is petrified of losing her father.

Glue is sticky. Every time I watch another piece of my dad change or disappear into glue-filled cells, I grab onto him even tighter. I hug him, and the second I walk away I can feel the residue on my fingers. It follows me home and clings to everything I touch. For all the time I spend wondering how to rid the glue from his body, I have started to notice that it has rubbed off on me, too. I could wash it off, but I don’t. The residue is the closest thing I have to holding on after I let go. Perhaps my obsession with glue has less to do with finding something to blame and more to do with my need for something to hold us together. Or both.

I love him. So I sit. I hold on. I stay sticky and scared, and I would not trade it for anything. I can’t fix him, but I can stay. It is the privilege of my life to be this stuck to someone I love.

Love, unlike the body, does not operate on a finite timeline. It is the one kind of glue with no solvent. It cannot be dissolved by cancer, chemotherapy, a prognosis, or the absence of a heartbeat. I will love him long after his last breath, and my own.

Call it what you want. Toxins, cellular luck, or a monster creeping into his bedroom in the middle of the night.

Me? I call it glue.