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By Root 984 0

a very poor, very black county in the eastern part of the state, where a lot of kids don’t go to college, the program College for Everyone has already started providing every high school graduate the chance to go. Those graduates who get into college and agree to work will have their tuition paid for their first year. It will be a demonstration that it can be done. The academic work found an umbrella at a newly created Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina. And the advocacy has taken him across the country working on raising the minimum wage and fighting for the rights of workers, particularly service sector workers. This may all seem outside my story, but this is a man who gave me everything he had, just at a time when he had every reason to focus on his own losses. It gives me such pleasure to see him again wrapped up in something positive, something inspiring of his own. So I sat silently—well, mostly silently—and happily through the meetings that took place in our D.C. house. Mornings in radiation, afternoons in meetings on poverty, evenings packing away what we would take to North Carolina. It seemed like life was regaining a cadence.

I would leave the house at 6:30 A.M. and drive over to Sibley Hospital to be there for radiation at 7:00. John stayed home, and while I lay on the radiation table, John was making the children breakfast. At radiation, I saw the same people every morning. A sweet man with a German accent and I were the earliest patients. He’d usually beat me in and be sitting in his black socks, wingtips, and hospital robe by the time I clocked in. We’d talk. If there was a new magazine on my table, I would share it with him, and he would do the same. We didn’t have to say many words to feel the connection between us, and we didn’t have to name our afflictions or say our names; they were not important. I never knew what kind of cancer he had. I never knew his name. I only knew we were on a journey together, and that was what was important. I finished at the end of May, and his last day, his freedom day as he called it, was to be June 11th.

Toward the end of my treatments, the clinic staff began to suspect that another patient was attempting to get a picture of me for her webpage, a “right-wing blog,” they said. I never learned what raised the warning flag and I never knew who the woman was, but as soon as I arrived, a nurse would escort me out of the waiting room into an examining room in the back, and when my radiation session was complete, they would walk me to a side door, avoiding the waiting room. I admit it made me feel good that these people wanted to protect me, even if from nothing more threatening than being photographed during those early hairless mornings. I didn’t begrudge her for trying, if she was, to get a photograph, but I was angry that she had cost me the last mornings with my German friend.

I would come in socks, slip-on shoes, sweatpants, and a sweatshirt so that I wouldn’t need to change into a robe—the changing time might eat into my get-back-to-the-children time. So I’d go into the radiation room and take off the sweatshirt and the T-shirt bra that since the surgery I had taken to wearing for comfort, and climb up on the table under a radiation machine that looked like the end of a gigantic ballpoint pen. My two technicians were entirely different sizes. Hope Shorter was engaging and warm, and very tall. Barbara Higginbotham was more reserved, but since she was short, she recognized when the height of things was an obstacle, and she always lowered the high table for me. They would circle around me, adjusting the machinery, marking my breasts, taking four times as long for setup as for the actual radiation. We talked some at the beginning and end of my treatments, but while they were working, I left them alone. I sang along to the same piped-in songs every morning. I even took to napping during radiation; they’d have to wake me up to tell me to go home.

Over time, radiation works like the sun, a sun focused on a narrow and tender spot of