Fighting cancer is the ultimate chess game

No one I had ever met would have been able to tolerate three years of bone cancer and its horrifying onslaughts. The night before his hospital admission I found him sitting on the edge of his bed. I could tell he was quitting. He had had enough. I began to rub his shoulders. His bones sharply protruding, obstructed the smooth flow of my hand. After a few minutes I turned, dropped to my knees, and faced him. His jaw bones were vivid, accentuated by his thinness. I looked into his sunken eyes. Beneath his illness there was still the little boy with the extraordinary good looks that could have broken a million female hearts. All one had to do was to look deep enough, to see beyond his cancer. I was a single dad raising three children. I always had the answers but now I was only a spectator with a box seat. I didn’t even know what his cancer looked like. It wouldn’t come out to fight me. I would have traded my life for his. Wouldn’t any parent? Cancer, the nemesis of all that was good was trying to take from me what it had no right to take, my son. Didn’t God know that he couldn’t give me something this beautiful and then take it back.

The author Joseph Triolo was born in the Bushwick Ridgewood section of Brooklyn. After retiring from the New York City Police Department he spent his time raising his three children. His primary focus was learning to rear them as a single parent. The author holds two bachelor degrees from SUNY Stony Brook as well as a Master’s Degree and a permanent New York State teaching certification.