Tyler Dawson steps out from inside the house and heads over to the garage. As the door opens, he sighs and grumbles. The garage is a mess, just as it always is. He moves the mess of tools and wood to either side of the garage and heads for the mower. As he walks the mower out towards the lawn aad thinks back to why he’s here every weekend, like clockwork, as soon as spring hits. The reason As a man drives up and struggles to get out of the car:, he knows exactly why he does this: it’s all for his dad.
He thinks back to that day in Westfield, New Jersey. He remembers his sister crying in another room and then his parents coming to him, but not much else.
“I’ve repressed most of it, ” he said. His parents say he was 15 and they had already known for a year before they told him. They weren’t too worried at the time because the cancer had been caught early, but Tyler was still upset. It would be only the beginning of his father’s troubles.
Tyler waves to his dad, Paul Dawson. Paul slowly inches his way towards the door and smiles back. Tyler puts his ear buds in and turns on “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones almost as loud as it can go. He primes the engine and pulls the chord to start it. No response. He pulls again., but to no avail.
“This damn thing,” he says. “Some days it starts and some days it’ll take forever to get it to work.” Tyler said with his frustration evident.
He primes the engine again and pulls the cord. The engine springs to life.
He thinks back to the second semester of his freshman year in college. A part of his dad’s spinal column had moved out of sync, causing him to slowly lose his ability to walk, until an operation restored it. Paul had elected a procedure that would have restored his ability to walk; a procedure highly recommended by his doctor. Unfortunately if anything went wrong during this operation, Paul would probably die.
So Tyler spent the whole day in the waiting room in St. Joseph’s hospital in Kansas City. To keep him from thinking about it, his mom had him play cell phone games. It helped, but didn’t take away all the worries he had.
“After the operation, he looked like he was a half step away from death. I mean, they had to intubate him before the operation, so he could barely talk.” Tyler said.
That night, Tyler came back to his dorm and drank to try to end his depression. Instead it only deepened. His girlfriend told him that drinking would make everything worse, but instead tried to drink his pain away. He spent the night throwing up and becoming more depressed.
Within the next few weeks the surgery that was supposed to be a permanent correction wore off and his dad slowly lost his ability to walk again. It was then that Tyler decided to help take care of his family any way he could. His mother suggested mowing the lawn and taking time to be with his family every weekend. He knew it wasn’t a huge sacrifice, but it would allow him to take care of a father who had taken care of him.
Tyler presses on with the mowing. The blade makes its way steadily through the grass as he looks up to an ever-darkening sky. He knows a storm is coming, so he’ll have to hurry up and just do the front yard. He won’t make it to the backyard today. He’ll have to hold it off to his next visit.
At times, he worries whether his father’s fate will be his own. The American Cancer Society says that other than skin cancer, cancer of the prostate is the most common cancer in men. They also say that the threat of a man getting prostate cancer is greater if his father has had it. They also say the chances are greater still if they were young when they were diagnosed, and Tyler’s dad was only 49. He knows that getting prostate cancer is only a matter of time, really. While other men won’t have to worry about testing until age 50 or so, and he’ll be getting a prostate exam at the age of 40. His dad’s doctor even suggested getting exams at the age of 30.
“I do worry about it, but I don’t want to say anything around my dad to make him feel bad about [the cancer]. There are times when I’m mad about this, but I don’t want to be mad about it,” He said.
But these worries are cut away just like the grass. He finishes up the lawn and returns the mower to its garage sanctuary. And it’s there the lawnmower will sit, pristine and untouched in a halo of sawdust and unused tools until next week when Tyler returns to mow the lawn as he does every Sunday. For now, though, as he takes off his green-stained shoes and grabs a soda, it’s time to spend time with his parents.