Mr. Henson

I’m selfish. In July of last year, Mr. Henson had pain in his lower back. A visit to the doctor revealed cancer. My understanding is it had something to do with the plasma of his blood, but it’s beyond my comprehension. But it's called multiple myeloma. When I emailed him to check on him, he was feeling well and was pleased to tell me, they caught it early. He expected to be teaching again in mere weeks. But he had a setback, and he ended up in the hospital. After his family kept sending updates on his progress, they joked they were spamming everybody, so they started a blog to update all his well-wishers. I continued to email him periodically to let him know I was thinking of him. At one point, in one of his bouts of hospitalization, the cancer had metastasized to his brain and lungs. I think he had something with his kidneys and liver at some point too. The most recent update as of yesterday said Mr. Henson was on “comfort care.” Now I hadn’t heard the term before, but I looked it up, thinking the brief description they had sounded like hospice care. They said he was on minimal antibiotics, oxygen, and a morphine drip for pain. He was in and out of “alertness,” as they put it. So I looked up “comfort care,” and it was indeed the same as hospice care. They had given up. His cancer had become untreatable, unresponsive to chemo, unresponsive to any therapies they had tried. They wanted to stop inflicting unnecessary pain on him – the pain caused by all these tests they had put him through. They were letting him go.
He died yesterday morning.

I kind of want to end on that note because nothing could better express the finality of the loss, but then I realized the trite cliché about the importance of celebrating life, not mourning loss. Well, I still think that’s bullshit. I think you celebrate life during a person’s life. You can’t celebrate the life immediately after death. You have to mourn first and feel the pain. Pain and suffering – so common in human existence. And Mr. Henson knew a lot of suffering, especially focused in his final year of life. He fought his battles so bravely and quietly. He often made great progress, only to fall ill with a fever, or find himself feeling weak, only to discover a resurgence of his cancer.
But I'm selfish. I didn't leave school even for a day to visit him when he was in the hospital. I did nothing for him when I was home from school. Selfish.
Selfish.
Selfish.
And now he's gone.
Random memories of Mr. Henson come to mind. In seventh grade – shoot, maybe it was eighth- we in the band were rushing horribly, and Mr. Henson was trying to correct us and change his conducting. Then he cut us off. He said, “You’ve got to stop rushing. Otherwise I start doing this – “ then he started jumping up and down waving his arms around – “and I’m not a horsey.” From then on, we kept asking him to “do the horsey” again. We did get him to do it once, but for the most part he was way too embarrassed to every do it again.
Goodbye Mr. Henson. You will always be loved, sir.