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### Joan Ryan # The gift of knowing how to live ## Joan Ryan Thursday, November 3, 2005
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Joan Ryan
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### Around my neck hangs a new accessory that goes with everything, or at least I'm wearing it with everything. It is a dog tag inscribed on both sides. On one are the words "Search for the Cause" and "No. 1047." On the other side are five more words: "In Honor of Ray Poggioli." The Marin Cancer Project is selling the dog tags as a fundraiser, and the order form asks the name of the cancer victim, patient or survivor you want to honor with an inscription. My Uncle Ray doesn't know he's on my dog tag. I'm afraid he'll think inscribing his name on a bit of metal is too short a step from inscribing it on a slab of stone. But the truth is I chose him for my tag not so much to honor his battle with cancer, which is in its seventh year, but to remind myself of what an extraordinary life looks like. My uncle sold lawn mowers and appliances at Sears before the cancer limited his ability to stand for long periods of time. He lives with my aunt on the ground floor of a three-story Victorian in suburban New Jersey they bought for about $35,000 in the 1960s. They have always rented out the top two floors to pay the mortgage. This meant they and their three sons, now grown, made do with two bedrooms and one bathroom. The window in my aunt and uncle's bedroom opened to a clothesline on which they dried their laundry even in winter. They finally bought a dryer in the 1990s. They never had a dining room. They ate around a table with a laminated top in the kitchen. If I had to choose the one place in the world where I feel most relaxed, it is at that table. It always seems to be a little sticky, and most times we have to shove the mail onto the windowsill to make room for the dishes. A plastic sugar bowl stands at the ready for the multiple cups of instant Sanka and tea that accompany our meandering discussions about family and politics as daylight turns to dusk. Mostly I listen and watch. My aunt and uncle are puzzles I'm still trying to solve. They get each other laughing the way old best friends do, they way I imagine they did as teenagers meeting for hours every day at a park bench in the Bronx. They make merciless fun of each other, doing dead-on re-enactments of some bungling mistake or faux pas the other has recently committed, then feigning long-suffering patience for putting up with such exasperating behavior. "Don't ever get married," my uncle would tell me. I wonder when I watch them if their relationship is a lucky stroke, two perfectly suited people who happened to find each other. Surely that's part of it. But, as my aunt is the first to acknowledge, my uncle is what business types call "the secret sauce," the ingredient that makes everything else work. He seems to have made the assumption early on that good things would always come his way, and he has never been disabused of the notion despite losing jobs, struggling to pay bills, coping with two sons with learning issues. He somehow seemed to understand -- not just in theory like most of us -- that such challenges don't change in any way the fundamental source of happiness, which is one's connection with people. There is an irony here in that he is by nature introverted and self-conscious. But his curiosity about people's stories and perspectives, and his ability to find something funny in almost anything, makes him the most popular man in any room. If you want to find him at a party, look for the crowd of people laughing: He'll be at its center. He has a way of pulling everyone into his humor force field, drawing out funny observations and witticisms even from those of us who are congenitally not funny. When he was diagnosed with cancer, he and my aunt never asked for the prognosis. What good was it? They already lived fully every day. They already appreciated the wonderful life they had with each other. My aunt became his tireless advocate, researching everything, interrogating his doctors, making a royal pain of herself if it meant relieving a bit of his pain or giving him a shot at a potentially more effective treatment. Her pit bull act allowed my uncle the luxury of skipping some of the mind-numbing, scary details of MRIs, CT scans, biopsies. Doctors shake their heads at his tolerance for chemotherapy. He actually gains weight during treatment. The nurses always look forward to his appointments because they know they'll laugh for the two hours he's hooked up to the intravenous drip. Sometimes people don't believe he's sick, because he's robust and engaging. In the summer, he swims in the community pool, back and forth for an hour, my aunt watching every turn of his head for breath, ready to call a lifeguard should he falter. But he never does. "He's amazing," my aunt always says when I phone. Though she has known him for almost half a century, there is still surprise and awe in her voice. A radiologist who had read his X-rays when he was first diagnosed seven years ago was stunned to see my uncle walk into his office a few months ago. The radiologist just happened to have caught the assignment to read his latest X-rays. "I can't believe you're still alive," he blurted, displaying a keen bedside manner. He said that only 30 percent of people with my uncle's type of lung cancer are still alive after a year. It's virtually unheard of to survive seven. But no one who knows my uncle is surprised. He has always assumed good things would come his way, and he has always been right. I know, of course, that good things don't always come his way. He just sees them that way. That's why he's on my Marin Cancer Project dog tag. What I'm honoring isn't that he has figured out how to survive. It's that he figured out, better than anyone I know, how to live. E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com. Her column will run on Thursdays while she is on assignment. Page B - 1 Get 50% off home delivery of the Chronicle for 12 weeks! |  |
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