Introduction

Regrets

Editor’s note: This introduction was written after I began posting chapters. I'm publishing it now because it frames one of the central themes that run through the entire memoir.

I spent four decades as a prosecutor—the last thirty-six of which were spent as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of California. It was a career built on gathering facts, following evidence, and reaching conclusions. The system, for all its many imperfections, was built on the idea that truth was immutable and answers were possible.

In the fall of 2020, I encountered a different kind of uncertainty. The kind that doesn’t resolve so cleanly. The kind that requires you to keep living inside the question, without any assurance it will ever be answered.

What follows is a journal I began after I was diagnosed with blood cancer—written for my family, my friends, and anyone else who finds themselves standing at a similar threshold. It is not a medical chronicle, though medicine is everywhere in it. It is written as honestly as I can manage about the reality of this experience: the fear, the clarity, the unexpected humor, the long stretches of waiting, and the strange gift of being forced to pay attention to your own life.

I am still writing it.

The story is not finished.

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Introduction

Regrets

My mother looked like death.

She lay supine in a narrow hospital bed, her abdomen swollen and tight beneath a flimsy gown—sutures and a metal port pressing against skin stretched to its limit. She had always been a slight woman. Now her face had collapsed into something skeletal and unmoored—eyes half-open but unfocused, her mouth working at sounds that never quite formed, as if language itself had slipped away.

The room was cold, harsh, and antiseptic, more laboratory than hospital. I paused. Recognition failed—not gradually, but all at once. My mind searched for something familiar, then froze. What lay in the bed resembled my mother in outline only. The rest had been altered—by disease, by surgery, by whatever the previous days had required of her.

I had to force myself to hold her hand. I feared it would be cold, but it was not. Words escaped me. What was their purpose? It was too late for anything that needed saying.

My mother was no longer a patient being treated, but something reduced—observed, endured, a body submitted to medical science in the name of something that called itself hope.

It was Monday, September 2, 1985. My mother was 60 years old.

I had flown in from San Diego the night before, leaving behind a new job and a wife who was six months pregnant with our first child—my mother’s first grandchild. Her illness had progressed quickly. She never complained about the pain until the cancer in her colon had already spread to her liver. By then, there was little to be done.

She was told she likely had only months to live. There were no meaningful treatment options beyond palliative care. The alternative was experimental—an approach being offered at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. The doctors there were guarded, but willing to attempt something new: surgically implanting a chemotherapy pump directly into her abdomen in the hope of slowing the cancer’s spread.

The odds were minimal. She agreed anyway, for a simple reason. She wanted to live long enough to hold her first grandchild.

It was a reasonable calculation. It did not work.

My mother died days after the surgery.

She was buried almost immediately. I know there was a memorial service. I don’t remember where it was held. I don’t remember whether I spoke, although I imagine I did. I don’t think I was in shock. I was just numb.

It took me years to understand the patterns that shaped our family—the inheritance of obligation, the different ways we learned to love, and the quiet ways we carried pain.

My father’s childhood was spare. He grew up on his own. His parents worked long hours, and he raised his much younger brother. He loved my sister and me, but tended to express it through provision, discipline, and expectation rather than affection.

My mother was different. Her love was constant, generous, and unconditional. I cannot remember her ever speaking harshly to me. If I disappointed her, she simply looked hurt, which was inevitably worse. She would have endured almost anything for the people she loved.

On the flight back to California, I had time to think. More than enough. I wasn’t a bad son. I did well in school, stayed out of trouble, and was polite to her friends. When I was home from college, I played duplicate bridge with her. I showed up when expected. She was proud of the life I had built.

But when I left, I left. In college, I made the obligatory weekly call. In law school, she caught me a couple of times a month. In England, an occasional letter. If she didn’t call me, I didn’t call her. My life filled up, as lives do.

She was kind. She was patient. She deserved better.

At the time, I didn’t understand what she was trying to do.

I do now.

I’ve made the same choice myself.