The Villain

"Write it all down," is what he said to me when he could still talk.

He can't talk now. He can't eat, drink, or open his eyes for more than a few seconds because he doesn't have the strength. When he does open his eyes, they are no longer the bright sparkling blue they once were. Instead, they are dull and hazy. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul.

The family is on death watch as they count the seconds that pass between breaths. He squirms in bed, searching for the comfortable position he never finds. He tries to rise up out of the misery to catch just one deep breath, but all that come are shallow gasps. As Death's stallion approaches the seconds turn into minutes, and with the desperation of a dying man, he surfaces and tries to take a shallow breath. He tries to cough, but can't. The sounds of a once-happy home are now filled with the mechanical whirring of the oxygen machine, with its plastic tubing coiled along the floor.

It terrifies the family that he knows what is happening to him. The youngest family member hopes he has escaped the hell of his body and is playing the ultimate round of golf under a deep blue sky, as puffy white clouds float lazily by and a refreshing breeze lightly blows through the pampas grass. He will eventually reach the eighteenth hole, but until then, he fights the cancer.

Cancer is a villain unlike any other. The disease moves like a swift stallion upon which Death sits in a black saddle, emblazoned with the names of those it has chased and caught since the beginning of time. It is cruel and advances with a vengeance and fury that is unrelenting and unforgiving. Treatments are available for those lucky enough to catch the dark rider before he mounts his saddle, but for those who can hear the galloping rider---who can smell the foul breath from the ashen stead's nostrils---it is too late. The villain has won.