Spaulding's Father
By Aaron Freeman

I caused my sister’s brain tumor… I hope.

The tumor has devastated her life. She suffered withering headaches for more than a decade. By the time the tumor was identified on an MRI it was described as the size of a tennis ball. My sister named it Spaulding. Surgically removed, Spalding proved even larger, the size of a man's fist. Spaulding pressed the frontal lobes of my sister’s brain against the inside of her skull. It lowered her IQ by thirty points and causes life threatening seizures. Spaulding surrounded and crushed her olfactory nerve. Spaulding cost my sister her sense of smell and much of her taste.

I want Spaulding to be my fault. I would love to be proven the tumor daddy. I would dance like an 18 year old on Jenny Jones whose paternity test came back negative.

Decades ago I was seven years old and enamored of The Green Hornet’s loyal sidekick Kato. I fancied myself, like Kato, a Kung Fu master. I remember being into Kung Fu. I do not remember kicking my sister in the head. I am told the kick was hard enough to affect her vision. I remember her going to the Illinois College of Optometry for treatments of amblyopia, “lazy eye.” I remember her doing, endless, tedious exercises, retraining the eye to move normally up, down, side to side. I do not remember kicking her. I can’t recall whether I kicked her head in anger or play or was demonstrating imagined expertise. But she remembers, our mother remembers. And I have no doubt that seven year old I kicked my sister in the head.

The kick might not have birthed Spaulding. Science is not certain what causes hers or any brain tumors. But there is some reason for hope that I am responsible. The tumor pressed against her right eye, I kicked her on the right side of her head. She also surveyed members of her online brain tumor support group. Many of them reported childhood head trauma

But the reason my sister and I and everyone who cares about me want, hope and insist on believing her tumor is my fault is that according to the latest theory there are two causes of my sister’s type of brain tumor. One is, as we hope head trauma, karate induced or otherwise. The other possibility is that the genes that produced the tumor are in the same gene set that leads to breast cancer; which we massively don’t hope.

Nonetheless my sister’s therapist thinks she must have issues concerning my likely contribution to her misery. She says she does not. She notes that seven year old me and his forty six year old successor have little in common save genes and memories. That’s a great comfort to me, Further, I am so overwhelmed by the irony of my situation, that I’d be happy to have caused my sister’s tumor, that I am gentle in my self -torment.

There is no way to know exactly what caused my sister’s brain tumor. Like an Arab on Guantanamo Bay, it’s only certain that I am accused. G-d’s limitless humor decrees I must now hope against my own heart for a slice of guilt that I overwhelmingly do not want, except that I do, I want to have caused the brain tumor, absolutely.

And if it we prove her tumor is my fault I’ll sue the Green Hornet.