Watchman on the wall

People sometimes ask me if I feel your stomach all the time, or your lymph nodes, searching for a mass, for anything swollen, for a sign, for the writing on the wall.
I don’t.
I don’t want you to feel examined.
I don’t want you to feel like you’re always almost sick.
People ask me how you’re doing and what can I say but, “Fine. I think.  He seems fine.”
But you seemed fine right before the doctor found a 9x9x9 cm mass in your lower abdomen.
You ate well, slept hard no night sweats, paddle boarded on the reservoir, played soccer.  The only thing was the occasional stomachache, and how you’d have to rest on the bike ride to school, but I thought that was because biking was new and you didn't have your stamina built up yet.
I’m sorry I didn’t realize.
I’m sorry I didn’t see.

I find myself thinking so often of Cyrano de Bergerac.  I’ll walk down a sidewalk and think, “a brick could fall from the sky right now, hit me in the head, and I’d be gone, BAM.”
That’s all it takes.
Michael’s been like this for years, always on alert, aware of the unconditional uncertainty, heading straight for worst-case scenario, catastrophizing physical pain.
He’s known longer than I have.
He’s known how the scythe strikes like a sword from a wall in an Indiana Jones movie. 
Truth is, with cancer, you’re ok till you’re not ok. 
Truth is, it’s gonna be here or it’s not whether I palpated or not.

If I could stand between you and Cancer, I would.  I would face off, like a game of Red Rover.
I would look Cancer in the dark of its’ colorless eyes and yell, “Red Rover, Red Rover, go ahead, send Cancer over.“
And when Cancer runs at you, I and all the people who love you, who linked hands to protect you, we’d fling Cancer back from whence it came, farther even, into the great and bottomless abyss.
We’d see Cancer coming and we’d form one unbreakable chain.  We’d grip so hard, reverberate from the blow but still hold, like a battering ram and the gate to the castle. 
We’d withstand the onslaught and keep you safe, keep you ours. 
But Cancer is a back door burglar, a middle of the night wall-scaler, a leviathan coming up through the sewers, a hooded hungry ghost.

I ask you what’s on your mind lately, books or movies or friends you want to connect with, and you say, “I don’t want IT to come back.” 
Then you say you hate that the cousins are leaving, especially in the middle of coronavirus.
My heart breaks every time you notice (and you always notice) when anyone is less than six feet apart, even on television shows when I have to remind you it was filmed before the pandemic.

I don’t want you to know about the falling bricks yet, you’re too young. 
Why can’t you still just look for shapes in the clouds?
I draw comfort in this: those who are familiar with the shape of the beast become the watchmen on the wall with impeccable aim.