“You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe/ That you have something impossible up your sleeve…” — from “Fairy-tale Logic,” by A.E. Stallings

My grandfather, C. Gordon Zubrod, was the father of chemotherapy. Twenty-four years after his death, it saved my life. When doctors discovered stage III (or IV) metastatic ovarian cancer on Feb. 20, 2023, it was because I was having difficulty eating and drinking — I felt so full. In the emergency department of a local hospital, they took my cancer antigen level; it was 13,000. A few days later in another hospital, it had already risen to almost 14,000. The normal range, for those of you lucky enough to not know this, is 0–30. Later that month, after I’d begun treatment with carboplatin and paclitaxel, common adjuvant chemotherapy drugs to prepare you for surgery, my aunt sent me a note saying, “We are praying for Poppy’s magic to do its work.” His work, in particular, was developing carboplatin.

You can read The Emperor of All Maladies or watch the documentary if you’d like to know the details of how my grandfather, “Poppy,” came to be described as “the father of chemotherapy.” He left us, his family, an autobiography called Stairway of Surprise. When I was 23 and newly graduated from Johns Hopkins with a baby and trying to find my way, he asked me to edit it. This was typical of him — alert to the gifts and talents of others, no matter how latent, and eager to educate those talents to fruition. The autobiography was a retrospective intended to recount the “stairways” he and Kay, my grandmother, climbed together, seen from the vantage of his old age and his “letting go of the world.” This chapter begins (as they all do) with a quote, this one from Emerson’s poem, “Merlin”: “‘Pass in, pass in,’ the angels say, / ‘In to the upper doors / Nor count compartments of the floors / But mount to paradise / By the stairway of surprise.’”

Though I’d read the books and heard the stories, I never fully absorbed the impossible task of his research initiating platinum-based chemotherapy until I found myself with a port in a chair in a sunny room in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Two years later, I’m deeply aware of the magic of this quasi-poison, of the remarkable strength of the body and of the strange, kairotic nature of time. I’m inchoately grateful for Poppy’s gift to me so many years after his death. I am conscious that his reach is beyond the grave, and his presence is near.

Enduring the treatment for cancer is not as impossible, perhaps, as inventing it. When you read about those years at the National Institutes of Health (see “Career Highlights”) and the kinds of risks and contention required of this gentle man to devise the cocktail of intravenous platinum, like me, you will likely find it amazing that the treatment emerged after all. My grandfather suffered from terrible migraines and ulcers, and endured many impossible tasks, not least the time required away from his family of five lively children and his abiding wife. He fought many battles, tantamount to crossing a “sulphuric lake in a leaky boat” (“Fairy-tale Logic”), crossing to obtain and execute the trials necessary to mix an alloy that would address childhood leukemia.

On my wall hangs the scientific drawing of a dogfish that was central to understanding the blood-brain barrier problem of the pharmacology for cancer. He was studying this fish for pleasure and curiosity’s sake on Mount Desert Island, Maine, because it was summer, and he was between jobs. He’d resigned from the faculty of a medical school in protest for the unjust firing of his friend, and the marine lab had offered him the chance to come study for a summer. There was no plan, no direction for what he would study or knowledge of what was coming next in his life after that. Mount Desert became my father’s most beloved place on earth, to which the family returned summer after summer. We have pictures of the growing children lined up against the white garage. The seemingly arbitrary study became the “bone” snatched from the basking dragon that figured heavily in my grandfather’s later discoveries.

He once told me that he wanted to go upstream to see why so many children were drowning and to try to find a solution to prevent these deaths. His research focused specifically on childhood leukemia. His own life was threaded with loss of many kinds — his mother at a young age from pneumonia in childbirth (no antibiotics), the child she died birthing who drowned at age 7, the stock market crash preceding the Great Depression that ruined his father financially. He relied on charity to finish college and drove (and crashed) a Good Humor truck during medical school. His extended family and friends contributed to put him through school. Even before the impossible tasks of research and political battles, his life presented him with as many “dust specks, mote by mote” as you could dream up.

Is this a tale of resilience? Of vocation? Of piety to ancestors? Of education in the liberal arts? Of magnanimity? Thank God, the fairy tale resists easy interpretation. Undoubtedly, morality lurks in every dark wood and bread crumb. As I read them to my grandsons (ages 4 and 6) and we puzzle out the reason things happen or certain choices are made, rarely can we unriddle human behavior or moral luck. In a world groaning with war and political and interpersonal hostility, I want my gratitude for this impossible gift to ring out. I want the strange backward dawning understanding of gathered time to take its place in the conversation that leans toward despair. We have no idea what is coming for us, nor the balm, or near-poison, that will cure it and the hours of thankless toil, curiosity and human excellence that were sustained to produce it. Alongside Poppy, my two remarkable surgeons from Johns Hopkins, Jonathan Greer and Katherine Stewart, worked for 17 hours to remove the tumors (and the organs) and gave me HIPEC (internal chemotherapy). They spent hours with me explaining the medicine and studies to help me make critical decisions. They told me truly what they could not guarantee, what the risks were, what the range of possibility included. Deeply human, they offered muscular compassion.

All sorts of characters in books tell us that despair is for those who have seen the end (Gandalf, for one) and then remind us that we have not. Never in my strangest dreams did I imagine that I’d get metastatic cancer at age 54, endure nine chemotherapies and be grateful for my platinum sensitivity that was pioneered by my grandfather in the decade of my birth. Augustine has that wonderful chapter on time in his Confessions that reminds us that there are future events, discoveries, beauties coming for us that will illumine the dark moment we are in. Sometimes, impossibly, they are coming from our past and from the love and labor of someone who would have done what he did for you but did it for the life of the world and out of his own heart’s deep core toward those suffering little children in front of him.

One of the precious books in my library is Six American Poets (Joel Conorroe, editor) given to me by Poppy after he read it in his 80s, with annotations, a note on the dedication page to me and check marks next to his favorite poems. Years later, I’ve taught this very book to undergraduates many times, highlighting remarkable passages and lines like Emily Dickinson’s, “Hope is the thing with feathers-/ That perches in the soul-” or Walt Whitman’s, “And you oh my soul where you stand…Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them…” We would all do well to keep musing, venturing, throwing and seeking the stars. We may not see their patterns for years, “but even before we see them, we will live in their light.”

Christine Zubrod Perrin has taught literature and writing at Johns Hopkins University, Gordon College’s Orvieto Program, the Nashotah House Seminary and at Messiah University, most recently in the Literature, Language, and Writing Department. She is a two-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Arts Council Artists Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. She is the poetry editor of Forma Journal and has published The Art of Poetry (about poetry) and Bright Mirror (poems).