From LIVING WITHOUT FEAR: Understanding Cancer and the New Therapies (Whitston, 2001), by Michael Bugeja, Ph.D., and Thomas Wagner, Ph.D.
Michael Bugeja's earliest memory happened at age 5 outside his home in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, an enclave of New York City. The year was 1957, and he was standing curbside with his mother. He remembers the blue Pontiac of his mother's brother, Emmanuel Apap, approaching and then slowing to a stop. And the young Bugeja could see his beloved grandfather on the passenger side. The grandfather, known affectionately as "Pop," immediately opened the door and stretched out his arms to receive the boy. The young Bugeja was excited. Whenever the boy saw Pop, it was a special occasion, because the bald-headed once-muscular man was the head of his ethnic family, and as such, commanded respect. And Bugeja was the grandfather's favorite, a coveted honor.
In the 1920s Pop emigrated from Malta to America so that his family had a better chance of survival. A biologist might say that the grandfather's feelings for the boy had as much to do with Darwin's theory of evolution, applied culturally, as with familial love. After all, the young Bugeja was already seen as intelligent enough to solidify the family's foothold in the United States, the land of opportunity. In a quarter century's time, Pop was able to buy and eventually bequeath a home to Bugeja's mother.
Darwin, of course, has its down side. This carving out of new habitat took its toll on Pop, the head of the clan. As an immigrant, he could only find work as a laborer at the cork factories in nearby Newark, New Jersey. And although Pop's family would thrive, fulfilling the American dream, the patriarch would suffer personally and develop lung cancer from inhaling cork dust and toxic chemicals. His body could not tolerate the rapid change of environment. Accustomed to the then-pristine waters of the southern Mediterranean, Pop just couldn't adapt to the industrial pollution that accompanied prosperity in North America. And at age 63, he was dying.
Although the grandfather might have favored the young Bugeja for social reasons, the boy genuinely loved the older man because he lavished attention on him in an otherwise work-oriented ethnic family. But something was very wrong today at the curb. As the boy was about to leap into Pop's arms, Bugeja's mother whisked up her son in her arms and begged the grandfather not to touch the boy. She, too, was under the influence of biology and environment. She had lived in Malta until age 3, when her father had summoned her and her mother to America. She married in her 20s and quickly became pregnant, losing three babies to stillbirth and miscarriage before bearing her only son, Michael. Nonetheless on that day, her behavior was suspect, even to the child. Under normal circumstances, her actions would have constituted a scandalous betrayal; Pop, after all, was the patriarch and could inflict severe punishment--disowning her and writing her out of his will--for such an offense, the withholding of her son from the grandfather's embrace.
Suddenly, however, the grandfather appeared to have lost his powers. This was obvious even to the boy, listening to the patriarch plead with Bugeja's mother to hold her son “one last time.” The mother clutched the boy and cried “no” in Maltese and turned away to walk back to the house. Pop, hobbled by cancer, could not get out of the car to follow. Finally he agreed and closed the passenger door of the Pontiac, vowing not to touch the boy. The mother turned around again and came closer to the curb, allowing the old man to whisper goodbye from a “safe” distance. And then Pop solemnly nodded to the uncle, who pulled away from the curb, driving Bugeja's grandfather to the hospital, never to be seen again--ending a melodramatic but all-too-common scene in the 1950s, because of fear of cancer. Many people then falsely believed that cancer, like leprosy, was contagious and so forbade contact in the advanced stages, yet another indignity in a myriad of indignities associated with disease.
In the decades to follow, lay people have learned much about cancer. The media, in particular, have dispelled myths like the one above and also have encouraged the medical community to share information with patients and their families. For instance, Bugeja's grandfather knew that he was going to die--not because doctors informed him, typically withholding such information from terminal patients--but because his body communicated that to him. His consciousness knew it. Yet fear thrived throughout his illness because he and his relatives lacked knowledge.
The more people learn about cancer, the less they fear it. And while present-day information about symptoms of the disease, along with its possible triggers--smoking tobacco and eating fatty foods, for instance--are commonly known, cancer still strikes fear in families because few people understand what is occurring at the molecular level.
Copyright 2001 by Whitston Publishers, All Rights Reserved
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