Editor’s note: Rob Bush passed away on Oct. 19, 12 days after his 65th birthday. Previously, Bush wrote about his experience with cancer in an essay published in The San Diego Union-Tribune on Sept. 3. The piece chronicled how his deteriorating health led to doctors finding that he had advanced esophageal cancer and ended with Bush being told his cancer had spread to other parts of his body. Deputy Editor Laura Castañeda hand-delivered that day’s newspaper to Bush at his North Park home. He told her he was at peace with himself. He left this second chapter, written before his birthday, for us to publish. His family supports it being shared with readers.
Bush was a freelance writer who covered the jazz music scene in San Diego. He is survived by his daughter Natalia Jordan, his grandkids Alyssa and Sara, and his brother Mark Bush.
The next doctor to visit me on May 28 came from the oncology team and he wasn’t there with good news. I had already been informed that my cancer had spread from my esophagus to my lymph nodes, lungs and liver, so I felt safe in assuming the news couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong. He sat down beside me and in the gentlest possible tone let me know that it was stage 4, and that there is no cure, no pending operation, no way out of the death sentence, barring some sort of miracle. As brutal as it was to hear that, I appreciated the honesty.
Eventually, they found a room for me upstairs on the oncology floor. I had never spent more than a day in the hospital, and I had no idea what to expect. I just knew that I was very, very sick (I had already lost more than 60 pounds in three months) with no end in sight. In all, I was to call the fifth floor at Jacobs Medical Center my home for the next 21 days. I arrived with nothing but the clothes on my back and a shivering fear of the future.
If you have to get a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, UCSD is where you want to be sent. I remember being eternally grateful for Medi-Cal. The staff on the cancer ward is cheerful, massively competent and very caring. I started to settle in for my long stay by learning to enjoy the view from my huge window overlooking the Interstate 5 freeway, and the ever-expanding UC campus, just off to the west.
When being in the hospital isn’t terrifying, it can be tearfully boring. Frequent visitors are the coin of the realm when it comes to surviving the experience with one’s sanity intact. I was extraordinarily fortunate in that respect. Not a single day passed without at least one visitor — sometimes as many as four or five. My brother came almost every day, and my daughter and granddaughter dropped everything to fly in from Houston for a week. My day gig for the last 14 years has been working as a jazz music critic, and I was blessed with regular visits from the music community, including Joshua White, Holly Hofmann and Mike Wofford, Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthony Davis and his wife Cynthia, Mark Dresser, plus Robin Adler and Dave Blackburn, to name just a few. The jazz community got together to hold a fundraising benefit to cover expenses as I worked toward recovery and some semblance of a monthly income while figuring out how to survive without a job.
So I find myself square deep in a genuine conundrum: on one hand, I’ve resolved to feel a sense of gratitude for all the ways in which I am lucky; on the other, I’d love to know how I skipped directly to stage 4 without warning? I feel blessed and robbed at the same time. My days are limited — I’ve been warned that I might be looking at less than one year — but in the meantime I’ve been afforded this extraordinary gift of wrapping up my personal affairs on my own timetable. Who else gets that?
It all comes down to quality of life. How do I want to spend the limited time I have left? I have grandchildren, after all, and they are especially precious to me, as is my daughter, who lives at a considerable distance.
When I was released from the hospital, I was issued a missive: stop the massive weight loss. That’s been a full-time job. I haven’t had an appetite in six months, so pretty much everything I consume comes through force. I’ve been told that I need the food to weather the physical trials of chemotherapy — which is a hard sell, to be totally honest — especially since chemo will not “save me,” it will only slow down the rapid growth of the disease. For now, I’m just trying to live, day to day, surviving in large part, thanks to prodigious amounts of ice cream.
I’ve been reading a lot of books about dying, like Joan Halifax’s “Being With Dying” and Sogyal Rinpoche’s “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” and I find them full of useful information. I’ll have to confess that I’ve never been so well-read as in these last few months. Many of my musician friends have dropped various books off — and I’ve probably read a few dozen in the intervening months.
Bottom line: I don’t have a lot of time left on the planet. I am trying to keep all of this in perspective with a sense of humor. On the negative side, my upcoming birthday (No. 65) will almost certainly be my last. On the positive, I won’t have to sweat out passing the smog certification for my aging Nissan Frontier come next September.
In case anyone asks, it was the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius who proclaimed, “Live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.” For now, that’s my goal. Eventually I’ll be right.
I’ve been inundated with healing energy from afar, scads of well-wishes and earnest assurances that prayers have been issued in my name, and I truly appreciate all of the positive vibrations and the forces they set in motion. People ask me to not discount a miracle that might set me into remission — and, let me assure you, I will not look down my nose at any reversal of fortune. But that’s not the same thing as planning on a miracle. I’m going to stick with gratitude for all that I have experienced in these 64-plus years on the globe. I’d plead with the reader to “wish me luck,” but the truth is I have been extraordinarily lucky every step of the way. At some point in the near future, I will become just a memory in the minds of those I leave behind. I hope it is a fond one.
