Checkmate: Beating Cancer at Its Own Game

Being hospitalized can be boring. Necessary, certainly, but boring all the same. They say that “time flies when you’re having fun,” but it drags by as slowly as a glacier when sitting in a room with only a television for company.

Throughout my six-month long monthly hospitalizations for non-Hodgkin lymphoma treatment, I passed the time doing things like painting. I had a large easel and everything. My wife stayed with me for the first week. She was allowed to sleep in my room on a pull-out sofa bed of sorts. To make the days go by faster, we played chess. We played everywhere: in my room, down by the coffee kiosk in the main lobby and, when the weather was nice, we played in the atrium—an open-air garden built into the hospital. On several occasions, friends traveled a hundred miles to sit and play chess with me. In a previous life, I used to play chess all the time. I have fond memories of days and nights spent playing chess in my small cabin in Alaska beside a roaring fireplace. The chess set was special to me. I bought it in the fall of 1994 when I was a visiting professor in Moscow, Russia. The board and pieces were all hand painted.

Even if you aren’t hospitalized as I was, but you are instead staying home on sick leave while undergoing treatment, you need something to do. People need a purpose. Having something to do isn’t only about passing time; it’s about hope and the future in the face of uncertainty. You could decide it’s finally time to learn a foreign language (online), read a stack of great books, paint, draw or write a memoir. You could use the time instead of wasting it. Hope springs eternal. Sometimes hope is all we have.

Throughout my cancer ordeal, from diagnosis to “Ringing the Bell,” I wrote poetry about my thoughts and concerns and fears, especially about my fear of dying. I wrote enough poems to fill a book. One poem in “Running from the Reaper: Poetry from an Impatient Cancer Survivor” came to me one night in a dream. In the dream, I played a game of chess with Death. We made a bet that if I won, I would get to survive this cancer. Death lost. He kept his bargain. I’m still here.

Checkmate

To pass time, I sometimes played chess during hospital stays.

Despite my chemo brain, I could still beat most challengers.

On the last day of six excruciating months of chemo,

Death comes and we play a game. It was the first time

I’d seen him since we ate churros in the desert.

Several times, he had me against the ropes, but I fought back,

took all his pawns, killed his queen and chased his king into a corner.

“Checkmate!” I gloated, toppling his king. “You lose.”

As a sullen Death departed, he stopped and glared over his shoulder.

“You know, Johnny Boy,” he hissed with his forked tongue.

“This isn’t over. I’ll be seeing you someday.”

“Someday,” I replied with a smirk as I do a little happy dance.

“But not today.”

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