A Meadowlark Sings

“Dad, the biopsy came back . . . it’s malignant!” The silence between them felt like a vacuum, an instantaneous void created in the long-distance phone space that separated them. The shock of her words threatened to implode Terry’s mind; his brain seemed to shrink to a crushing, single point upon the word malignant. When he finally spoke, his usual articulate speech came out as fumbled mush that even he couldn’t understand. Thus begins the life-numbing three-year journey shared by Marti, an energized, independent mid-twenties daughter, and Terry, her fumbling, beleaguered father. Through a parent’s eyes, we experience Marti’s intense struggles throughout the tortured scourge of her chemotherapies, radiation, and two bone marrow transplant therapies. As his precious daughter fights to survive, Terry’s anguished, helpless depression finds him recalling his sometimes-traumatic youthful experiences during his upbringing on a post-war Minnesota family subsistence farm.