Big Mike: Just Human

Tim Imse told me he was scared a couple of months ago. The news still was, well, new to him at the time.

He’d first gone to the doctor about the lump in his leg late in the winter. Now he’s gone.

I’ve never understood why people say someone who has been struck down by cancer is “courageous.”

What do they mean?

What do they think people are going to do when the doctor says that lump or this mole is malignant and you only have a few weeks or months left? Run away?

Where to?

Is there a state in the union where cancer somehow goes into remission as soon as you cross its border?

If there were, everybody who gets the bad news would run — hell, they’d steal a car and tear out at 103 miles per hour — for that state.

But there’s nowhere to go when you have a cancer that’s going to kill you.

And that’s why Tim Imse was so scared.

There was no escape, nothing he could say, no plea he could make, no bargain to be struck to get himself out of the fix he’d found himself in.

He was going to die and he was petrified.

As I would have been.

And you.

No, nobody’s “courageous” when they’re counting the days.

Just human.

I remember the last day of November, 2001. Tim poured boiling water into his French press coffee maker. He set the stove timer for five minutes, as always. He told me five minutes was the perfect amount of time for his coffee to steep. Fewer than five minutes and it’d be weak. More and it’d be mud.

And, as always, he climbed back into bed in his room next to the kitchen in our ground floor apartment on Carpenter Street just off 18th Street in the East Pilsen neighborhood. That five minutes more of delicious sleep meant so much to him.

When the timer would buzz, that’s when he’d be officially up for the day. He’d come into kitchen and stir the grounds and steaming hot water a few times. Then, carefully, lovingly, he’d insert the spring-loaded press into the big beaker.

A well-made cup of coffee was one of the prime pleasures of Tim’s life.

As always, we had NPR on as we went about our morning routine. I’d been sitting in my recliner in the dining room. (Yeah, there was a recliner in the dining room — what would you expect? We were a couple of bachelors living in the city’s arts district. We also had a schwa — you know, that bug eyed guy who’s supposed to look like an extraterrestrial in the kitchen. That was Tim’s. The baseball bat that we kept in the living room as a precaution against some young, ambitious Latin King who might be tempted to break into our place? That was mine.)

Anyway, the Morning Edition announcer broke the news. George Harrison had died the day before. His last words — “Love one another.”

Tim immediately pulled out the vinyl double album “All Things Must Pass.” He placed it just so on the turntable and then touched the stylus to its groove with all the precision of a neurosurgeon. That was another of Tim’s prime pleasures — music. He had a turntable so he could play certain things on vinyl, a CD player for other things and a tape deck for still others.

Tim said: “We have to listen to this.” After a pause, he added, “All the way through.”

So we both called in late to our respective jobs. It was the least we could do for George Harrison, our mutual favorite Beatle.

That’s how much music meant to Tim.

Now Tim’s gone. He died yesterday.

All things must pass.

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