Comments (0)On Leukemia
August 21, 2009Meredith Jacobs
Special to the Jewish Times
I remember it was late. The kids were asleep and Jonathan was not yet home from work. The phone rang and it annoyed me because, after weeks of faithfully watching, I was finally going to learn who the handsome, young bachelor doctor was going to pick.
It was Jonathan’s college friend, Brad. “Hey, Brad, Jonathan isn’t home yet. I’ll have him call you when he gets in.” I thought that would end the call quickly, but something in Brad’s voice made me turn off the TV and focus.
I didn’t learn who the bachelor picked that night. Instead I learned that Brad and Beth’s son Ian had been diagnosed with T-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Brad also told me the date for Ian’s bar mitzvah, which they had just received. “There’s a high cure rate for this disease. The doctors are optimistic,” he said. “Then we’ll celebrate at his bar mitzvah,” I added; and I was sure we would.
The painful treatments destroyed the cancer his immunity. Ian died four months later from meningitis.
I met Ian when he was a little boy, maybe 3 years old. He was just a year or so older than my daughter. He was beautiful, with dark hair and dark eyes like his two younger brothers. But what I remember most was his imagination. He would pretend to be everything from a doctor to a firefighter and when he was pretending, everyone had to call him “Chai” as in “Dr. Chai” or “Fireman Chai.”
No longer Ian, Chai was a grown-up who called his parents by their first names. And, although Ian pronounced “chai” like the tea, I love that it is spelled like the Hebrew word for life.
His parents talk about Ian’s love — lust actually — for life. He threw himself into everything with energy and abandon. He would have been an amazing adult.
I don’t know how a parent survives after something like this. But somehow Brad and Beth do. Together with their friends and family, they have created the I Care I Cure Foundation in Ian’s memory. It raises money to fund research creating treatments and cures for childhood cancers that are less painful.
I Care I Cure’s mission comes from something Ian said that haunts his parents:“Why does it have to hurt so much?” Believing that their son died in part from the cure, Brad and Beth work in Ian’s memory so that no other child will have to have it hurt so much.
We just mailed out the invitations for our daughter’s bat mitzvah. And we just vacationed with the Besners. They surround themselves with friends who knew Ian. It makes it easier when they speak of him, that they don’t have to then explain who he was.
They kindly asked about our plans for the bat mitzvah, but there is pain in their eyes that doesn’t go away. Through their eyes I looked past all the fancy flowers and beautiful dresses, past the food and the fanfare, past the ceremony and the services, and saw that when it comes down to it, we’re celebrating a young life being lived. A milestone reached and achieved. Whether she grows to be a doctor or a firefighter, please G-d, just let her grow to be.
For information about I Care I Cure, go to icareicure.org.
Meredith Jacobs is the author of “The Modern Jewish Mom’s Guide to Shabbat” and co-author, with her daughter Sofie, of the upcoming “Just Between Us: A Journal for Mothers and Daughters” (ChronicleBooks, spring 2010).