Death Be Not Proud by John J. Gunther

spend an hour or so in his workshop. He demanded that he be allowed to do his work in his own special way. Thank goodness he was well enough for that. He loved every minute of that summer. Frances was with him all the time and I came out weekends. Our friends dropped in and Frances’s brother and my sister were steady visitors. We had a Japanese cook who enchanted Johnny not only by the splendid things he made to eat but by his skill arranging flowers from the garden. “Tom,” Johnny announced to him one evening, “you are an artist.” But I do not know whether it was a lamb chop or a spray of roses that he was referring to.
    Particularly I remember Johnny’s considerateness, even when he got sicker. of course he wanted his classmates and other friends of his own age to come for weekends, and several did. But he would hesitate to ask them, for fear they might be bored—inasmuch as he himself could not join them in sports or outdoor games. He was vehemently worried that his illness might upset our future plans and about how much it was costing and about Frances’s work and my book. I was less than halfway through Inside U.S.A. and hopelessly behind. Johnny knew that the deadline for delivering the MS was October 1, and he knew perfectly well that I could never make it. His first question when I came out, expressed with lively irony and disbelief in the veracity of what I would tell him, was, usually, “Well, how many whole chapters did you write yesterday?” Then: “You’d better hurry!” As to the work Frances was doing he would remonstrate with her gently and then encourage her, “Remember your destiny, Mother!”
    This is from the diary Frances was keeping:
     
    Yesterday, wet, cold. Bought peaches and strawberries. Johnny dressed and cheerful when I arrived. Read Henry V —Johnny read aloud the great speech. We recalled English chronology. Nap before dinner. . . . John came at eight. We played “Twenty Questions.” John’s thought: Henry V film; Johnny guessed it. Mine: top button on John’s pajama jacket. Johnny’s: Prof. Einstein’s signature; we didn’t guess it.
     
    These were some items from his conversation at about this time, as taken down by Frances:
     
    I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mother.
    I think I’d like a bottle of champagne at school for my birthday.
    My thinking is independent of my temperature—it just depends on my stimulants.
    I’m going to write a theme “On Being a Guinea Pig,” with teleological aspects.
    I handed in my theme on theories of hom work just two days late—as proof of my argument and justification for not having done it on time.
    In my Fourth Year, I’d like to take just Math, with a tutor, and Relativity with Professor Einstein.
     
    A major problem continued to be what to tell him. If the tumor was indeed mostly gone, how then explain the continued bulging? But beyond this there were larger questions. Why was Johnny being subjected to this merciless experience? I tried to explain that suffering is an inevitable part of most lives, that none of this ordeal was without some purpose, that pain is a constituent of all the processes of growth, that perhaps the entire harrowing episode would make his brain even finer, subtler, and more sensitive than it was. He did not appear to be convinced. Then there was a question I asked myself incessantly. Why—of all things—should Johnny be afflicted in that part of him which was his best, the brain? What philosophical explanation could one find for that? Was all this a dismal accident, purely barren and fortuitous? Beethoven was struck deaf and Milton blind and I met a singer once who got cancer of the vocal cords. But if the connection of circumstances was not fortuitous, not accidental, where was justice?
    Johnny said to me once, “The worst thing is to worry too little, not too much. Let’s keep up a tension.” It was as if he were girding himself for the struggle only too obviously under way,