Nonfiction by T.K. Schuberth
“The Stoic Parent” received an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Golden Quill Writing Contest.
Early on in the [Covid] crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table—I was in need of practical assistance.
—Zadie Smith, Intimations
Ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius didn’t just write about philosophy. They engaged in mental exercises to force themselves to live in the moment. The practice I recall most vividly is of a man holding his newborn and imagining the baby as dead. When I first read the Stoics, I didn’t have children and could intellectually understand the point. Because we are so worried about what might happen, we never enjoy the person in front of us. We don’t live in the moment.
The fucking Stoics never had to wait for follow-up scans or biopsy results for their teenager.
People often think my fourteen-year-old is sixteen if not eighteen. He grew ten inches and three shoe sizes during Covid. After his first vaccination shot, a lump formed in his neck. When the doctor looked at my history, she ordered a scan—for the next day.
My history.
I’m used to discussing “my history” in examination rooms with posters of rolling hills and pamphlets about free wig Fridays. The medical profession tries, but when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at forty-one, I didn’t want a yoga class. Statistics and a little humor were what I craved.
An MRI reveals my son is fine. An inflamed lymph node from the vaccine. My history isn’t in him—yet.
My mother’s first diagnosis came when I was fourteen. Ovarian cancer. Surgery, chemo, remission. My senior year of high school, I went to the gynecologist for the first time. A week later, a grapefruit-sized cyst was removed from my ovary. Two weeks after that, I learned it was benign. I went to college. My mother got breast cancer. Two years later, the doctors told us she had lung cancer. She didn’t. She had a bacterial superbug—likely picked up in the hospital during her other surgeries. What a relief.
It’s now Wednesday. My son doesn’t want to miss math class, but his ankle has been bothering him all week. It’s swollen. When he was younger, he was such a Stoic that by the time he told us his throat hurt, he usually had a full-blown ear infection or pneumonia. So when he asks for Advil two days in a row, I make an appointment.
In the pediatric waiting area, a toddler screams while her mother ignores her; an exhausted dad rocks a baby; and my son, in his David Bowie T-shirt and size eleven shoes, looks at his phone.
After twenty minutes, they call our name.
The exam room is cheery, the white walls broken up by green panels and a menagerie of cut-out decals. A bird, a bunny, a chicken, and what appears to be a mouse, although his size relative to the other animals makes him look more like a rat. A sign above the exam table, in English and Spanish, reminds parents not to leave children unattended because they could fall. My son sits on the table, his feet flat on the floor.
We have been waiting half an hour, and my throat is dry. The air quality is poor. For the past four days, a fire in the Columbia Gorge has left a haze over Portland. Kids are kept in from lunch. Sporting events are canceled.
The nurse takes my son’s vitals. Mercifully, she is wearing plain purple scrubs. No little hearts or cartoon characters. She asks questions off a computer screen. How long has your ankle been swelling? A few days. Was there an injury? No. When does it hurt? The morning.
“It hurts more in the morning than at night?”
“Yes.”
“Now you’ve got me interested,” she says.
When she leaves, my son comments about all the box-checking. From his perch, he could see her screen and the decision trees produced by each answer she clicked. I say something about evidence-based medicine being better. My logical son nods and goes back to his video game.
When he was five, he asked why people believed in coincidences. Things, he reasoned, just happen. Why do people say they are connected?
He also thinks Santa Claus is stupid. Always has.
When the doctor comes in, my son puts away his phone. She’s a resident with a silky ponytail. She asks more questions. Looks at the ankle. It’s twice the size of the other one. He needs an X-ray. Then she turns to me.
“Any auto-immune diseases in the family?”
“Yes, I have ulcerative colitis.”
I see her mentally flip through a list of possible diseases and know my history has entered the room. I keep my voice steady, hoping my son will hear only routine answers to routine questions. Nothing to worry about here.
The resident mumbles about how it could be other things, but he’s too old for many of them, before settling on, “Let’s get the X-ray and go from there.”
Yes. Let’s.
She asks if we know where radiology is and tries to explain. She doesn’t usually work at this clinic. I say thanks, we’ll find it and be back. It’s almost five o’clock.
On the short walk over, we pass through a glass hall. I can see across the river. The skyline looks like it’s been wrapped in wool. A friend’s house is in the “be ready to evacuate” zone. That’s only thirty-five minutes from here.
I mention the resident’s bedside manner. I don’t want to ask him directly, but I’m trying to figure out if my son is worried about anything she said. “This is likely just an injury. It would have been better to get the X-ray before speculating. She’s new. She’ll learn.”
I’m annoyed at the resident for making me worry if my kid might be worried.
My son doesn’t seem worried. He’s hoping the café is open. He’s hungry.
My stomach hurts.
I’ve always carried worry in my gut. Growing up Catholic, I took the “do not lie” commandment so to heart that I threw up when I lied. This stopped as I got older, but I still avoided lying because of the nausea it brought on.
Then, at thirty-six, I went for a colonoscopy and left with an auto-immune disease. Ulcerative colitis, cousin to Crohn’s. In 1932, gastroenterologist Burrill Bernard Crohn and his colleagues identified a group of patients with inflamed small intestines. I like to imagine his peers giving Crohn the honor. “Burrill, your work on this disease that makes people shit themselves to death is so important. It should really be named after you.”
My son comes out of the X-ray room and says he bets the technician is good with kids.
“What do you mean?” I ask, eyeing the technician with his straggly rat tail.
“He kept repeating my name. Kids like that. I don’t know, he was just mellow.”
“Maybe he was high,” I say.
My son barely laughs.
We go back to the white and green room.
The animals on the wall are black silhouettes, and as we wait, I begin to imagine they are fleeing. Fire, rising water, higher temps. Statistically speaking, they should be worried. We all should be. My kids’ science classes seem to be equal parts “isn’t nature wonderful,” and “if you’re paying attention, you know we’re fucked.”
Like all parents, I want my son to feel safe so he can go out in the world and not always assume the worst. I want him to know most people asking for directions won’t hurt you, although you need to keep an eye out. Most runny noses and coughs will get better on their own, but sometimes you need antibiotics. Most scientists agree that we’re past a tipping point, and as a species, we’re ….
Statistics tell me my son’s swollen ankle is a sprain, a fracture at worse. I’m going to tell myself that story while we wait. I look at my healthy son playing a game on his phone. He’s laughing, thrilled at his own performance, oblivious to the animals fleeing up the wall.
The resident with the ponytail comes back and pulls up the X-ray.
“The good news is, it’s not a fracture.” Then she catches herself. “I mean, there’s no bad news. Come look.”
We’re looking at the inside of my son’s body in black and white. She is pointing to an inch-long oval mass on the outside of the ankle bone. “This is causing the inflammation.”
Ok, we’ve seen the evidence. So what is it?
She begins by saying, “benign cyst.” Good start. Referral to orthopedics. They’ll call tomorrow. All good. Then she keeps talking. Why is she still talking? We have an X-ray that suggests a benign cyst. We know nothing more. How about we wait until we have more evidence?
But she keeps talking.
“When you look at the report, it’s going to say cancer, metastasis, things like that. But this is probably just a benign cyst.”
She said cancer. Does she know she said cancer? And probably?
“So you think it’s benign,” I say. “You can tell that from the X-ray? Or do you need to do a biopsy?”
“Orthopedics will need to look at it. Sometimes these just go away on their own.”
She said it could go away on its own. Cancer doesn’t go away on its own. So she thinks it’s a benign cyst. But she also didn’t know what building we were in, and she just said we won’t know until orthopedics reviews it.
I’m looking at my son, who is giving a thumbs-up to the resident. His way of saying, I’m hungry, we’ve been here for hours, can we go now.
I ask again, and she repeats, “orthopedics.”
We’re walking toward the car when it hits me. Did my son hear her say cancer?
He was ten when I was diagnosed. He remembers the surgeries, my bald head, the months of having to be quiet so I could sleep.
I drive home through the haze. My son switches through the radio. La-Z-Boy giveaway. Jesus loves you. He settles on “Margaritaville.” The song came out in 1977, the year I was born.
I wonder if my friend’s home is on fire.
I pick up my partner and our other son, who is twelve. Everyone is annoyed. We get the kids home, and I say, “Dad and I have to go get food.” I call and order Tom Yum soup.
In the car, it’s just the two of us. Me and my partner. The man who shaved my head, emptied my mastectomy tubes, made me laugh during chemo.
“What’d the doctor say?”
I’m driving down our street. “He has some kind of cyst or tumor and it’s in an unusual place. She’s going to call orthopedics tomorrow.” I grip the wheel. “She showed us the X-ray. It looked big, on the outside of his ankle. Then she started talking about how we’ll see words like cancer and metastasis on the X-ray report.”
“What does that mean?”
“I asked if she could tell if it was benign from the X-ray or if we needed a biopsy. She said she’d have to talk to orthopedics. I know she’s only a resident, but what the fuck!”
I can hear him breathing.
“She didn’t say ‘it’s likely a benign cyst. We see them all the time in boys his age.’ She didn’t say that. Why didn’t she say that? If she was really worried, she would have said … but she didn’t … she ….”
I pull into the parking lot. I rest my head on the cold steering wheel, and my partner stares out the front window.
We know exactly what happened in that waiting room with the little animals fleeing for their lives. I was triggered. Then I came home and triggered him.
That’s what trauma does.
My history will invade my child’s body. It already has in ways I cannot choose. But I don’t want him to worry. So I tell him it’s not a big deal, as my body screams because it remembers the MRI that turned into a big deal. The stomachache that led to an autoimmune disease. The pulled muscle that was a cancerous tumor.
The next day, an MRI is ordered. I keep telling myself the most likely scenario is it’s a benign cyst. Yet any comfort I might take from “most likely” runs smack into my history, and my body says, fuck you.
My history. My body. A body that I want to believe ends at the tips of my fingers and the edges of my skin. A body I have learned to live in, believing that whatever they find, I can handle, because it is my body. My bones inside my skin. Mine.
But when that resident turned from my son’s ankle and asked, “any history …,” mine became his, and the walls of my body disintegrated. My son is my body is my history is my … teenager, who is hungry and needs a ride to school.
I know I’m privileged. I know things could be worse. When I talk about having cancer or ulcerative colitis, I always follow it up with, “I have good health insurance and a supportive family.”
And yet, when my son’s MRI comes back, and the tumor (no longer a cyst) is “likely benign” and requires an appointment with the orthopedic oncologist, my body isn’t interested in how lucky we are. “Me” is now “him,” and it is much harder to minimize his pain with a list of our privileges.
In Intimations, Zadie Smith tries to make sense of her own privilege during Covid. “By comparing your relative privilege with that of others,” she writes, “you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world—if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that. Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like ‘privilege.’”
Suffering and its aftermath, trauma, don’t reside in the realm of reason. They live in our muscles and cells. They grab us by our guts and piss on our arguments about privilege. And some days, they turn stupid wall decals of mice into rats, gnawing at your child’s ankle.
Smith looked to the Stoics for practical assistance about how to live through a crisis. I never held my infant son and imagined he was dead, but after sitting in an exam room with my teenager and my history, I think the Stoics may have been onto something.
I heat up some soup and watch my son as he hunches at the kitchen table over a gigantic pumpkin. Like me, he’s always loved to draw and make things. His gingerbread houses have ranged from pagodas to mid-century modern, and his Aliens Halloween costume would make Sigourney Weaver proud.
Using a Swiss Army knife, he flicks bits of orange from his finger, then stretches his spine over the chair back, pleased with himself. I walk over to admire his work. In beautiful medieval script, with flourishes worthy of an illuminated manuscript, he has carved, “Fuck Off.”
“Lovely,” I say. And I mean it. I see my child. I feel his delight. And in this moment, I am content with our history.
T.K. Schuberth holds an MFA from UC Riverside-Palm Desert and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Chicago, where they focused on gender, sexuality, and religion. They have had careers in finance and academics and were a Tin House 2020 workshop recipient. Their writing has appeared in The Coachella Review, Litbreak Magazine, and The Copperfield Review, and their unpublished novel, Opening the Bodies, was chosen as a Launch Pad 2022 Prose Top 50 manuscript.