These are the first words we hear Roger Ebert say in "Life Itself," telling us very plainly that this is a story we're going to feel.
I came to this story with baggage. Since last April, I've carried the loss of Roger, my friend and mentor. It was admittedly getting lighter until my cousin passed away from lymphoma not two months ago.
Roger's illness is something I experience from a very safe distance. Like many people, I wasn't aware that his cancer had returned until he announced it in his last blog post, "A Leave of Presence." I thought we had more time with him, but the next day, he was gone. I didn't know what the last few months of his life were like. I knew what it was that took him, but for me, cancer still existed in the abstract.
I'd never seen cancer up close until I visited my cousin in a hospital last August. I hardly recognized her, partly because we didn't know each other very well, mostly because of what cancer does to a person. In the brief 4 months she had left, she became the center of my life.
My freelance schedule afforded me some flexibility, so I was able to visit my cousin at the hospital often. When we found out that an expensive treatment might save her, I started an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds she needed to get it. When that treatment didn't work, I helped her draft a will. When she breathed her last breath, myself and the friends and family who were also there alerted the nurses, gave my cousin one last hug, and cleared the hospital room of all the knick-knacks we collected to get her used to living in a place she hated.
For a while, I was angry that nothing had prepared me for the reality of cancer. There wasn't a single movie or TV show that I could recall where a person had trouble walking because radiation or chemo had wasted away their muscle tissue. They make actors wear bald caps or shave their heads, but they can't seem to reproduce the pasty, colorless skin tone that comes from dying slowly. They can't script the absolute nonsense that comes out of a person's mouth when they're pumped full of morphine. They don't tell you that even when a person goes into remission, the road to health is still far off.
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