"Dear Wife" (Version 33)

An excerpt from The Volume of Honora

Dear Wife,

I call you wife because I married you, not because I love you.  At one time I did, I’m sure love was the motivation for what we shared. When I started on this journey who knew what wonders I’d uncover—I wish I could undo them all now. You are too enigmatic, open-eyed, and powerful for what has befallen you. What I have brought on you, you must understand that like all earnest men, I did not comprehend it at the time.

I’m still not sure that I do. What is righteous in all of this, what is immoral, is a debate I’m sure generations to come will not agree upon. I am only sure now that I owe you an explanation; because I am becoming increasingly uncertain of the future, and the actual part in this I played must be known. 

I was young, when I became a doctor. I earned my undergraduate degree at NYU and studied medicine at John Hopkins, in Baltimore, Maryland. Because of my proximity to the capitol I earned fellowships on government projects where I made friends. Unluckily, these research projects did not hold my attention, and I started working with the U.N. 

I was in Sri Lanka, treating refugees from some civil war or another, when I meet the man, now, designated as “Saint Mercy.” He was known to us as, Christopher Marcellinus George. He was an honestly admired page of sorts. Christopher was born in Nigeria and came to work for the U.N. after his father died of AIDS in 1993.

Christopher George was a great man, not for what he gave to society; remember I knew him before any of us, could imagine any of this. Christopher was a great man because he was diligent, compassionate yet unrelenting. And I’ll admit this to you; there were times in my life, things that I saw that caused me to consider the theories of GOD. But what they’ve done to Christopher, what I was foolish enough to ignite was surely nothing more than the modernizing of Judas Iscariot and Jesus and I, accidentally, played Judas.

I never believed in GOD more than when I saw one of HIS good men killed in the name of the better good. You see, after 10-years of working together Christopher started coming to work late. He was off-task and losing weight. Tests were run.  He had cancer, accurately lymphoma, very aggressive. He’d ignored the metastasis that started covering his body nearly a year earlier. He said he “thought they were age spots,” but he knew, we both knew, better.

I swore to him that I would save him, or not let him die until he was ready. We tried every treatment readily available to us. We were certain they wouldn’t have worked, and they didn’t, which was a blessing because they were only a means to my end game. I cashed in all of the good-will I had amassed in my years of service. I had been at the forefront of some very nasty matters, and it was then I was given the opportunity to use those experiences to bring about a change worth my time.

I contacted an ardent cancer research team in Britain. I told them many things. And, despite all that’s said of us science men, we too are sweethearts for poetry that speaks to the imagination; so, naturally, Christopher and I were admitted into their classified trial.

Our U.N. counterparts were sad to see us go, and Christopher was sad too, but I was excited this was the chance. Christopher would be cured, and I would be his doctor. How nice would that have been? Books would’ve kept our story alive, our discovery preserved in papers and studied in museums, by everyday people, college students and colleagues.

In Britain we started on another battery of treatments reserved for the cutting edge of the first worlds. I’ll admit to you again, eight-weeks after starting treatments, I momentarily lost my taste for making history. I wanted a conventional cure to work. Christopher was suffering no matter the toxic cocktail we arranged to keep him from feeling the pain of our most recent attempts at saving his life.