Eulogy Of Father

My dad died when I was twelve. In October of 2008, I was a normal ten year old, a fifth grader excited for Halloween. My mom worked at the Michael’s Arts and Crafts store on Robert C. Daniel Parkway and my dad was an Automotive Service Writer/Advisor for Sunbelt Nissan on Washington Road. My oldest brother Jeremy was in Delaware, his first duty station in the Air Force, while my middle brother Justin was still home. Justin had graduated from Evans High in May, and his Air Force basic training wouldn’t start until November. I loved my family the way every child does, with unending joy and compassion. I idolized my brothers, thought the top of the world was on my dad’s shoulders, and knew that my mom was the smartest person I’d ever met. I never once felt a shortage of happiness.
When I started fifth grade, I thought

life was grand.

My dad had just started letting me go on long motorcycle rides with him on his Victory. The bike was the shiniest blue I had ever seen, and he rode it to work every day. There used to be a straight-a-way where the roundabout by CarMax is now, and every night when he came home I could hear him roaring down that road. I imagined it as his way of telling us he was happy to be home before he even got to us. On the weekends, when I was lucky enough, he would wake me up super early and bundle me up in long johns, denim jeans, a thick sweatshirt, and a leather jacket just my size. My hiking boots were mandatory, as were warm socks. When we were ready, he looked just like I did, as if we were going to ride straight into a blizzard, despite it only being 60 degrees outside. But he would still tuck my pants into my boots, zip up my jacket and carefully put my bright pink polka-dotted helmet on my head as we tried our best

to be quiet so we would not wake up my mom as we slipped out the front door. He would leave her a note, of course, but there was no way to quietly rev the bike. In the early mornings the sky was a mix of pale pastels, ranging from blues to pinks to oranges. The smell of leather and gasoline was pungent in the air on the freeway. On the backroads of Georgia we rode for hours, the wind and the steady thrum of the motorcycle creating a graceful harmony that I could never experience in a car. I have never felt as free as I did on those rides, and he savored them just as much as I did. When we returned home it felt like coming down from a high, as if the past hours had just been a dream. The bike was a high point for him, and the day he stopped being able to ride it was one of his worst.
Halloween weekend was an exciting time, I’m sure. I cannot truly remember it. Years later my mother tells me that dad had been getting sick at work, an unusual sentence by itself because my father was the type of man who just refused to be sick. It was a sudden occurrence; one day he was just so sick that he decided to go to the emergency room. When they came home, I do not remember them telling me or Justin what happened. I do not remember how exactly I was told, but eventually I learn that James Brian Boquist was diagnosed with Stage 2 Pancreatic Cancer.
In 2008, the survival rate for Pancreatic Cancer was about 4%. Research institutes claim that 94% of patients die within 5 years of diagnosis, while 74% will die in the first year regardless of the cancer’s stage when found. These are the facts. What they do not tell you is that from the ages of ten to twelve years old I watched the strongest man I’d ever known try to fight something I could not see.
On November 12th he was admitted to the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) for surgery. My hatred of hospitals started then, holding onto my aunt’s hand as we navigated the stark white halls that stunk of antibacterial cleaners and the lingering scent of sickness. Lead into his room, I had to wait for my aunt to move so I could see him. At times I wish I had not looked, but I know my curiosity would have always driven me forward. On the bed, that crisp white bed with the thin sheets, laid my dad. I will never forget the color of his skin, which had once been the same rich tan as his Cherokee mother, was now a mottled, sickly yellow. For this first time in my life I felt something akin to true fear. What was happening to him? Why did these people turn my father yellow? I couldn’t speak, I was trapped in a bit of time where someone had decided to hit pause on my life while they went to grab some popcorn. When they hit play, I am coaxed towards him. I am embraced and he asked how my day was, but his voice does not belong to my dad. This voice is too scratchy and weak, but I forced myself to ignore it. I do not remember going home, yet I know my mom stayed with him in the hospital while my aunt and uncle took care of me. I visited that room many times, and each time my anger grew. I didn’t realize at the time that I was angry, but it grew with every whiff of cleaner, each new bedsheet, and all those nurses whose eye were so sympathetic it felt like they were oracles predicting my future before I had time to rebuke. Sometimes he would untangle himself from the restraint of those tubes and go for a walk in the hall, and something in me knew he would imagine the feel of the wind on the bike as he gazed out the window.
The day he was released, there was a special food tray. It smelled like joy in the midst of what I had labeled ‘the hospital smell’. The aroma of mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce and most importantly, turkey, wafted up my nose to tell me it was Thanksgiving Day. I can still feel how happy I was to get my dad as far away as possible from that hospital. It was almost as if life was normal, and this cancer thing didn’t exist for a day. My family gathered at my house, filling it up with people, food, and the atmosphere that only comes along with a family gathering. When Justin was able to call home for the first time since he left for Basic Training on the same day, I felt hope. A hope that seemed so small and fragile, yet it rocketed around the inside of my chest like a wrestler jumping from the rungs of my ribcage. For a while after thanksgiving, things were normal.
After getting diagnosed, my dad never went back to work, but staying home wasn’t that bad for him. He often enjoyed buying poster board and drawing out detailed plans for businesses, landscaping projects, and other architectural things. There were days I would get off the bus and he would be out in the front yard working on completely revamping the front yard. Other days I’d come home to find him building all sorts of things. At one point he began building a small work shed that would be lifted up onto a trailer so it could be moved. He started chemotherapy two weeks after thanksgiving, and he would go downtown to MCG every Monday for treatment. They would send him home with a ‘cassette’, which administered chemo 24/7. I was afraid of his port – the weird bump on his chest that pumped chemicals into him. Most days, he was normal and happy. To this day I question whether or not I truly experienced the pain of losing someone to cancer. I rarely saw him in pain, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. At school I tended to spend more time in the art room than with people, even though I did have a few friends. But it hung on the back of my mind. The knowledge that my dad was at home, sick with a deadly disease that I couldn’t help him fight, was not something I could ever forget. With that fact looming over me, I was thrilled when Justin’s Basic Training graduation came up in January of 2009. The doctors let dad off the chemo for two weeks to get it out of his system, and on the third week we flew to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. I was thrilled to see my brother again, and I know now how much it meant for Justin to have dad see him graduate. Our trip only lasted a week, but it was the beginning of a great year. Dad started intense radiation the week we got back, in addition to his normal chemo. This continued through May, which is when he completely stopped. He was told he looked fine after the PET scan in June. Hope was in our home again, and it told me that maybe we would be okay.