Cancer Free – Eli Evans

December 20, 2021

You did not especially like him, the former classmate who you were told a year ago had been diagnosed with cancer – he was smug and self-righteous, the kind of person who would get angry at you for letting your dog shit on the church lawn even though you’re Jewish, first of all, and second of all you picked it up and disposed of it properly – and yet when you find out that now he has died, barely forty years old, leaving behind a beautiful wife and two beautiful children and the beautifully lucrative real estate development firm he’d founded with two beautiful friends from his army days, you cannot help but feel an injustice has occurred, and moreover of such cosmic proportions that if there truly were a God, and the church, as it were, his home, its lawn would in fact be the perfect place for your dog to shit, and if you had it to do all over again you wouldn’t bother picking it up. But how would you feel if you knew that:
a.) He did not die of cancer, but run over by a truck while out for his afternoon walk?
b.) He was run over by a truck while out for his afternoon walk exactly one week after, at the end of a series of difficult treatments that had cost him his hair and a good deal of his once formidable strength, being declared cancer-free?
c.) He was run over by a truck, but despite reports of a “hit-and-run accident,” it had actually been a targeted killing carried out in the context of his participation, unbeknownst to the aforementioned family, not to mention his business partners, in the underground economy – drugs, guns, women who came for a better life and instead ended up shoving birds up their butts in exchange for food and heat?
d.) He had not been declared cancer-free but informed that his cancer, having not been cured, was now considered incurable and terminal. Unable or unwilling to subject himself or his family to the devastation of the coming decline, he told them the opposite, shared with them a week of happiness and relief, of baseball games in the backyard with his son and slow dances in the kitchen with his daughter and late-night cuddles on the couch with his wife watching her favorite romantic comedy, and then went and threw himself into oncoming traffic?