At Halloween, I celebrate the symbols of death because after decades of trying, I still can’t control it.
In July, I finally went for an endoscopy and colonoscopy. I’m a blood cancer survivor. Radiation and chemo at the age of 18 for a rare lymphoma causes later side effects, and I’m at a time in my life when the treatment of my youth can cause cancer. Year after year, I’ve lived with it—not always living. I never expected to get this far, and to be fair, no one else did either. But I’m here now, and I have so much to lose. I read the report: high risk of esophageal cancer in three locations. When I say high, I mean 50-60 percent chance that one of those cells is going to go werewolf and start an avalanche that will kill me. And this is just one of the many timebombs I’m living with.
I hung the report up on my writing whiteboard: memento mori. Memento mori (Latin for ‘remember that you [have to] die)
You just want to run into a warm dark place and shed everything that will hurt when you lose it. You just want to protect yourself from pain. Much of my life is spent trying to stop the pain. And I’m trying to change that.
I’M A CANCER SURVIVOR
My story is in my mission: golf ball tumor under my ear, surgery, chemo, radiation. I did it all. The chemo wrecked me. Then burned the slow erosion of radiation. Chemo hits fast and then washes out of the body. But the radiation melted me down to 80 pounds. They burned me every day in four fields for months, starting in August at the University of the Hospital of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I’ve written about it often: the icy linear accelerator room, the stainless-steel table I’d lay down on naked, covered by a lead blanket. They forced a wax bite into my mouth to hold my head still, and I had to fight the vomit for twenty minutes. The metallic reek of ozone aggravated the nausea. My battle with cancer and the resulting disability is described in more detail at my mission page.
HORROR ROLEPLAYING TO PROCESS
I tell people there is difference between fun horror and real horror. Fun horror shambles with a zombie or flies with a vampire. Real horror is watching a scared young couple try to explain to their toddler why he needs to stay still when they radiate him. People read fun horror for entertainment. It gives you a thrill. I found the symbols helpful and fun when playing D&D.
Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game, for those uninitiated. You create characters, and a DM tells a story in which those characters interact. Jon and I discovered D&D when we were 14, and it created a bond of shared stories that we have continued for the rest of our lives. There are many settings for D&D based on various fantastic themes. Ravenloft is a setting based on gothic horror and its many forms. The atmosphere is dark, a bit moody and uses tropes like vampires, zombies, the reanimated, ghosts—often based on classic stories like Dracula and Frankenstein.
We played D&D on the weekends at a little comic bookstore in Levittown called Pyramid Comics. The table hardly fit. The shop was the hobby of a teacher. It didn’t make any money. Everyone got pizza. I got milkshakes. I couldn’t swallow solid food anymore. And with a sore throat, I dungeon mastered my horror. I DMed the gothic horror setting of Ravenloft. Sometimes I used modules or wrote my own adventures. We lit candles, played mournful violin music in the background. Mood is vital to horror storytelling. I read the Ravenloft tie-in novels all through treatment, in the back of the car on the way downtown in Philly. I remember Knight of the Blackrose by James Lowder, Heart of Midnight by J. Robert King. Some of the authors whom I read then I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years. They don’t know the special connection they played in my life, the catharsis they helped me create. They fed stories into my head and pulled out sickness in the most intimate way. Then I processed it on weekend nights at the shop with help of friends. It created an outlet. It helped me get through the real horror. It’s one of the reasons I became a horror author.
I play Ravenloft once a year now with a group I founded on Roll20, an online gaming site I discovered during the initial covid outbreak. I say initial because it ain’t over. I know. I have covid as I’m writing this, and we’ve watched my oxygen levels drop every day. We’re scared of what’s going to happen in a day when the steroids and the antivirals are done. I’m still sick. I can only do Ravenloft once a year because of the intensity of emotions it brings back. I use it.
My first game was set in a classic gothic world called Saxony: haunted houses, dark circuses and a child’s nightmare. I set my second game in a domain I created called Kemet, based on ancient Egypt. Here, the sun burned too hot. Too much life can be as toxic as death. And finally, this year, I created a city domain based on Victorian London, a city I called CryNoMore. Demon hat sellers, street serial killers and haunted fog.
Playing Ravenloft was nearly the last act of my life—a joined story with dear friends. At the start of October, in the final weeks of my radiation treatment, I sickened, thinned. My attachment to this world grew slender. I went to DM Ravenloft at the shop. All my friends came. I found I couldn’t lift my head from the table, but still I told the story. We played a module, celebrated the darkness. I could hardly narrate from the swelling in my throat. I felt so light–a dried leaf ready to blow away. When I came home, my mother took me to the hospital. They admitted me fast.
FADING FROM THIS WORLD
My mother worked at the hospital. The staff was family. I’d been there many times. This time, they treated me differently. They spoke in low tones, and when I slept or was still, I could see their faces. They waited for me to die. I lingered for weeks in that state. I didn’t feel any great apotheosis or awareness. I just felt less . . . and less. I faded. Everything thinned. It turned grey. I couldn’t see people anymore. I didn’t connect to what they said. And then something shifted. It changed. The color returned. I saw light. I’d turned a corner, and through random chance, I’d survived. Not destiny. Just wild biology. I can’t say it was willpower. I just remember feeling sad that I was going to let everyone down.
You just want to run into a warm dark place and shed everything that will hurt when you lose it.
Fox
REMISSION ON HALLOWEEN
They released me on Halloween. I was declared in remission, so it’s a special time for me–a second birthday. I celebrate both Halloween and Samhain. What’s the difference? One is about the scary stuff: monsters, vampires, zombies—especially for me. I decorate my house with my wife Allison. I have a regiment of scary movies to watch. I bake. I love it. And I venerate and worship on Samhain. For a pagan, a year is a cycle of life. Samhain is death in that cycle. But not an end. It’s a renewal.
Our table from September to October 31st. The house comes alive with color, candles, lights, scary images, faces of death and symbols of autumn.
When I got home, friends joined me. We put on a horror movie, Evil Dead, I think. My dearest friends Ed and Jon were there with me. And I heard the trick-or-treaters outside in the apartment complex. I couldn’t help myself. We created odd costumes with stuff we found around the house. It was easy for me to go out as a cancer patient. My hair had hardly come in yet, and I looked emaciated like a zombie. We went to a few houses with pillowcases, scored some nice candy then went back to the apartment to continue the movie. I couldn’t swallow the chocolate, so I let it melt in my mouth. It tasted so rich and earthy, comforting. It tasted like being alive. I felt like a child again. The world felt so new.
CELEBRATING SYMBOLS OF DEATH TO HELP COPE
I think we suffer so we can know joy. And I have sought joy.
So now here we are again, approaching Samhain, and I think of that time. I savor every moment, every nuance. I can’t get enough. Celebrating the season connects me to this life—the color, the food. As I told my BESTIE:
I’m going to bake a thousand pumpkin cookies, write Poe-like poetry, dress in a plague doctor’s costume, march in a parade, collect autumn leaves, watching zombie films, summon dark spirits and dance to a slow miserable waltz.
There is an emotional process to ritual. Symbols represent mental concepts that create our consciousness. Patterns define our identity, and we exist and process through our symbols. It’s all about life. I mix our decorations with symbols of death, decay, dark images along with symbols of autumn, change, pumpkins, leaves. Then I celebrate the season. For the pagan, the year is a cycle of life, and we prepare for the dark season, starting with the day marked as Samhain. Sometimes these symbols and patterns are the only way to process our emotions, and they’ve helped me find peace with cancer, death and inevitably, change.
I didn’t feel any great apotheosis or awareness. I just felt less . . . and less. I faded.
Fox on dying.
As I watched my oxygen levels drop over the last few days, I wondered, would I die of covid? I still might. These burned lungs can’t handle much, and I have the immune system of a dead slug. And I found myself more at peace with the idea than I realized. After that, I asked my wife to take down the GI report. I didn’t need it anymore. What’s the point of stressing over stuff you can’t control?
All I can do is process my fear, not give into it and celebrate the symbols of death instead of letting them control my actions. And that’s what Halloween is for me.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease…
“Part medical horror, part supernatural suspense, MERCY is a hard-hitting fever dream of a novel. I enjoyed the hell out of it!” ~ Tim Waggoner, author of The Way of All Flesh and Eat The Night
William Saint is dying of cancer. Stricken with fever, he is rushed to Mercy—notorious as a place to send the sickest of the poor and uninsured to be forgotten—and finds the hospital in even worse condition than his previous visit. The grounds are unkempt, the foundation is cracking, and like the wild mushrooms sprouting from fissures of decay around it, something is growing inside the hospital. Something dark… It’s feeding on the sickness and sustaining itself on the staff, changing them. And now it wants Willie.
“Dunham has channeled his many brushes with the other side into the exquisitely rendered, lyrical supernatural hospital thriller MERCY. 3.5 out of 4 Skulls.” – FANGORIA
