Frank climbed utility poles for forty years. He worked through ice storms and August heat, in three states and two marriages, and he was the kind of man who believed that pain was something you noticed once and then put away. The hardest thing he ever did, he says now, was tell his doctor he was scared.
It took his daughter to get him there. She had noticed the weight loss before he had, the way a daughter does. She made the appointment. She drove him. She sat in the parking lot afterward while he tried to figure out what to do with his hands. Frank has always been a man who fixed his own truck and built his own deck. The idea that there was something he could not simply outwork was, at first, harder to accept than the diagnosis itself.
He learned, slowly. He learned to nap in the afternoon without feeling lazy. He learned to let his daughter pick up groceries, to let his neighbor mow the lawn, to sit in a support group full of men who looked nothing like him and discover that they all sounded the same when they were honest. He keeps going to that group. He says it is the second-hardest thing he has ever done, and the most useful.
Frank is mostly retired now, though he still consults for the company a few days a month, mostly mentoring the younger crews. He talks to them about ladders and grounding and the right way to coil a rope. Sometimes, if the moment is right, he tells them about the appointment, and about the parking lot, and about what it took to walk back inside.
