My Friend’s Stage IV Cancer Diagnosis Showed His Remarkable Strength
TOM HOXSIE, captain of the fishing vessel North Star, sat cross-legged beside a woodstove in his toolshed.
It was late February in coastal Rhode Island, gray inside and out, and Tom was cupping a warm mug of green tea on the stool where he spent his weekdays, part of a boat-building routine with his son that was leading to the off-season creation of a small wooden skiff.
The shed door opened to a hoop house covered in clear plastic, which snapped in the cold gusts. Outside, under snow, the raised beds of his garden were frozen solid. An old wool sweater hung on him like a loose sail. Tom sipped his tea, looked at his withered hands, and summed up the state of his life.
“I’m down to bones,” he said. “My ribs stick out. My shoulder blades stick out. My hips stick out. My thigh is thin until you get to the knee.” He had once been heavy, hearty, and strong. Now death drew near. He spoke of it in a tone blending clarity with calm. “This is it,” he said. “The end of the line.”
Across the arcs of our lives, many of us encounter strength firsthand. We all have our models: friends and relatives who recover from addiction, manage to thrive while suffering mental illness, or rebound after trauma.
I’ve known people who found resilience after losing a limb or an eye, surviving a brutal assault or divorce, or weathering public scandal. Some of the celebrated feel-good tropes can be true, too, like that of an athlete who returns from injury, surgery, and rehabilitation to notch new records, or a passerby who risks her own life to pull a stranger from a swollen stream. That is strength right there, we tell ourselves upon seeing such feats, strength.
What of strength in the face of something for which there is no prospect of recovery and little potential for good luck, public validation, or high drama? What of the resolve and grace that can emerge when the nature of a new setback itself signals a last act? What of strength as the curtain falls?
Such was the strength of Tom. A little more than two years before, in late 2018, Hoxsie, a descendant of a family that arrived in what is now Rhode Island in the 1690s and who had become one of the state’s mainstay inshore commercial fishermen, had been diagnosed with clear-cell carcinoma.
By early this year, his disease was in its final stages. He had dropped to 160 pounds from his former 280; his energy was low, his appetite intermittent, his pain immense. He had taken to foretelling his own end. “I like spring, summer, and fall but hate winter,” he said. “So right now I’m hoping to make it to Christmas.”
He actually had much less time than that. And yet there he was, waiting each afternoon for his son, Ben, a high school senior, to finish his school day so the two could pick up tools and resume the construction of a boat, built on the same lot where Tom and his late father had built countless skiffs before.
I SPENT the past winter with Tom, bringing him firewood for the shed stove and lunches for his shrinking frame and regularly warming tea for him among his tools, all the while interviewing him for the eulogy he asked me to give when his time ran out.
The last phase of his life had begun in pain and misjudgment. Tom was used to discomfort; his hands were a mass of calluses and scars; he labored in an industry of endless punctures, cuts, and strains, where the mentality is to wrap a wound in electrical tape and get back to it.
This meant cancer crept up on a man with high tolerances for hardship and pain. He had had a chronic cough since at least early 2018, had been feeling generally unwell since summer of that year, when he noticed he was shedding weight. Often his entire left side hurt; his arm and torso throbbed, he said, like a mammoth toothache.
But that summer, he delayed getting a chest X-ray because, in the inshore fishing business around here, the warmer months are when a commercial fishing operation makes much of its money. “We were working,” he told me once, as if this explained all, which on some boats it does.
And so Tom fished deep into the fall and then sought medical care. Ahead of the first tests, he half-jokingly wondered if he had pulled a muscle. He expected he might hear, he said, “that I had a heart thing.” The doctor told him something worse: Tom had stage IV kidney, lung, and bone cancer. He was 62.
Upon receiving the news, Tom asked how long he might expect to live. The oncologist offered no estimate. And so Tom began chemotherapy in early 2019, to get what time he could get, and suffered miserably with side effects into the spring, when, through force of will, he decided to return to work. “The bed will kill you,” he said. “The chair will kill you.”
I’ve got to do something, he thought. So he did. He lacked the stamina to set and operate his traps but knew he could tend to the oyster farm in Point Judith Pond that he ran with his older sister, Chris Morris.
Chemotherapy had bought Tom time. Time was what he wanted. He set about making sure to use it well. As a lifelong commercial fisherman, Tom had a way of being that merged natural rhythms and people comfortable with rugged labor.
Aware that he was dying, he took stock of his life and his businesses and decided to ensure these traditions would continue.
He commenced a giveaway—a large and sustained campaign of generosity to distribute his knowledge and equipment.
This project grew beyond easy measure or accounting. Throughout 2019 and 2020, Tom distributed barrels, pumps, hoses, nets, gaffs, buoys, toolboxes, bales of twine, baskets of shackles and cleats and other hardware, and many miles of rope.
For some items, he selected his recipients with care, dropping off wetsuits or fishing rods or surfboard fins for friends. He invited others to wander the two lots where he stored gear and make claims. He sold a few items at a discount, including his favorite surfboards and a good-as-new hydraulic pump. And he sold his fish-trap business to a younger fisherman who might fill Tom’s boots for a generation or more.
When he was unsure that anyone local would want a particular item, Tom reached out on social media to potential recipients from afar. In 2019 he contacted Danny Lester, an eastern Long Island waterman, and offered him four big sacks of treated twine, which Tom had used for fish traps—a form of commercial fishing that has been slowly vanishing and that the Lester family still practiced.
Danny sent two crew members in a truck to New England to collect on the unexpected offer. “We’re glad Tom reached out, because you can’t find that twine anymore,” he said. Some of the twine has been put to use, fashioned into perch fykes.
Sometimes Tom gave away equipment to strangers, almost sight unseen. Eventually he and Chris loaded fish baskets and left them on the docks for fellow captains and crew to rummage through. “We’d put a load of stuff by the dock and sit in the truck and watch people come and take it,” she said.
By mid-2020, 25 truckloads of equipment had gone out of his lots. By then he was slowing down. In a conversation that spring, Tom said he was interested in having a vegetable garden. No longer fishing, he had days to fill, and he recalled that his father, who was also a commercial fisherman, had grown wonderful garlic and other crops late in life.
Tom’s gear lot was overgrown. Maple and tupelo saplings, over the years, had risen skyward; the lot was thick with trees. Tom watched as my sons and I cleared them, and then he bought rough-cut pine planks from a sawmill and I bought compost from a farm and together we put in six raised beds and two potato patches.
In his last summer, we grew tomatoes, turnips, radishes, arugula, basil, cilantro, dill, carrots, peppers, onions, and chamomile, along with the spuds.
WE PLANTED garlic in the fall of 2020 with a hope that Tom would be alive to harvest the following July. In the winter, under Tom’s eye, as his body was shrinking and pain growing, we removed a few more trees, bringing in more light, and we discussed what he wanted to grow for 2021.
Leeks were high on his list, so we planted leeks and pored over seed catalogs, planning harvests he knew he might not see. He was wasting away before everyone’s eyes.
When asked about his pain, he would sometimes say he felt like he was being stung by a swarm of hornets. And yet here he was, his fishing equipment distributed, planning new crops and building a skiff with Ben.
The optimism, I thought. The example. He had other motives, too. He told me, near the end, that the good things he knew should not be wasted by his death. “It’s the lost knowledge,” he said, describing what he loathed about his own end. “How much is lost from generation to generation?”
He died in early May, after a swift final decline, just after Ben took the new skiff they had built onto the salt pond, and as the garden was rising, healthy and green, as he had foreseen.
How much is lost from generation to generation? In Tom’s case, almost nothing, because of how he chose to meet, with strength and dignity and foresight, what is coming for us all.
A version of this article originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of Men's Health.
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