It was also painfully evident that Michelle was right. I had to admit that I still wanted attention, needed to be needed. I was the insecure guy found on Facebook by an old girlfriend and reassured that I still looked great. But was wanting a little applause every so often a sign of character weakness or just being human? I knew one thing: I felt good that morning—and reinvigorated enough to bang out yet another column for the Tuesday paper. And then I fired off a somewhat sheepish email to Michelle, with a link to my Game 7 piece:
OK, I TOOK THE DRUG AGAIN. TRYING TO WEAN MYSELF OFF. NOT THERE YET. WORKING AT IT.
Knowing Michelle, I figured she’d have a good laugh—tell me I was predictable, or pitiful, or both—but also assure me that she had enjoyed the column. She was, after all, my most faithful reader. But she didn’t respond to the email on Monday, nor on Tuesday. When I called on Wednesday morning after arriving back home, she didn’t seem to notice or recognize the 973 area code that always tipped her off that it was me. Instead of her usual “Hi, Harvey,” she answered with her more official greeting from before caller ID: “Michelle Musler.” Her voice was unsteady, halting. I knew right away: Something was wrong.
Usually when I asked Michelle how she was doing, she would make some offhand remark about “becoming dumb” but laugh it off when I pressed for more information and say, “Oh, I’m fine.” This time there was no but, no laugh, no acknowledgment of columns I had written or the email I had sent. She just said, “I’ve been better.”
She explained that she had suffered another seizure, the first she had mentioned—at least to me—in a while, after an adjustment had been made to her medication. She had fallen on the stairs of her condo in the early morning while experiencing what she called a hallucination—she had imagined Robin Kelly was in the house, calling to her from downstairs. She admitted that she had for the past few weeks been making more regular visits to her neurologist for increased observation and testing.
“There are some things going on,” she said. “Just not ready to talk about it yet.”
“Michelle,” I said, “you’re scaring me.”
She offered nothing specific, only that she had more tests scheduled.
“Have you told the family?”
“No, I haven’t,” she said. “Because there’s nothing to tell them yet and nothing they can do.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing,” she said. I’d be among the first to know when there was more definitive news.
I called every day for the remainder of the week, trying to pry more information from her. She wanted only to talk about the Finals, specifically the Cavaliers’ J. R. Smith’s incredible mental lapse in Game 1: He had forgotten that the score was tied and dribbled out the final seconds of regulation without taking a shot. The Cavaliers went on to lose in overtime. “The look on LeBron’s face was priceless,” she said.
On the morning after Game 2, she told me that she was struggling to follow the action and to determine which team was scoring. The colors of the uniforms were confusing her. “But I’m still enjoying it tremendously,” she said. “One of the plays made by Durant caused me to nearly jump out of my seat.”
“How about I come up and watch a game with you?” I said.
“I’d love that,” she said. “But you’d better come soon.”
• • • • •
The day before Game 3, on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 5, Michelle finally broke the horrible news: She had what appeared to be a malignant mass in her lung—and her doctors feared that the cancer had spread to her brain. Hearing this news was a punch to the gut, leaving me in a near-speechless state of disbelief.
“When they showed me the report all I saw was malignancy,” she said. “It threw me into a tizzy. I told them, ‘This is pretty fast—I thought I was being treated for strokes.’”
But how could this be? How long had she known? Her memory was fuzzy, but I gathered from what she was saying that the first suspicious scans had been seen sometime in May. In cases of lung cancer, she’d been told that detection was often delayed until advanced stages. Metastasis could be swift, and lethal.
I did the quick calculation and realized that she had to have known something serious was afoot when I complained to her on the phone about not covering the playoffs just before Memorial Day weekend. So she hadn’t been speaking generally about making better use of time. She had to already have known that hers was running short.
I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, felt the tears come.
“Michelle, I’m so . . . sorry.”
“Well, I’m almost eighty-two years old—something was bound to get me,” she said.
What could I do? When could I come see her? She wasn’t sure. She was facing more consultations, more tests. The official confirmation of the two malignancies was made early the following week. The prognosis was dire. The family had to be notified. Brandon, who lived the closest of her five children, quickly arrived from Manhattan to stay with Michelle at her condo and help sort out a plan. The others began making travel arrangements to join him.
On the phone, in brief conversations, Michelle shifted between disorientation and clearheadedness, saying she had lost track of time but bragging to me the day after Game 3 that she had outlasted Brandon, who had fallen asleep before the Warriors won for a third straight time. Her obsession with the Finals at first sounded a little crazy, but upon reflection, it was quite remarkable, if not altogether unpredictable. Michelle’s life had taken the most terrifying of turns, and yet a basketball game could still be her anchor in the storm. It could momentarily distract—or anesthetize—her from the fear.
Trivial as it seemed, she still wanted to talk about the game when I called. But if that was
