Prostate Cancer Killed My Dad, Joe Biden Gets No Compassion From Me

On whose suffering counts

I was driving home with my 2 year old daughter and my then-husband when I got the call. It was cancer. Prostate. Stage 4. My father was living on the island of St. John’s at the time of diagnosis and would be flying back to Florida for treatment. I didn’t even know he was sick. I pulled the car over and tried to breathe. I could hear my mother on the line saying “hello? hello?” but I was so far removed from my body and from reality that I couldn’t respond. The bustle of the street, the sounds of my husband’s voice like whispers. The whoosh of my heart pumping blood deafening. Nothing would ever be the same again. There would now and forever be a “before” and an “after” this. My life clearly delineated by this moment. An illusion of safety that I didn’t even know I held was permanently shattered. It really can happen to anyone. No one is immune.

We went to the hospital shortly after he arrived. They did some scans and came back to us, saying “The cancer is in your bones. Without insurance there’s nothing we can do”. They discharged him and sent him home to die. I was in shock. Could they even do that? I thought they had to help him. I thought that they had to take care of him. I didn’t know they could tell a dying man “good night and good luck”. I didn’t know it worked like that. The casual cruelty astounded me.

My father was an independent contractor for most of his career and that meant that individual insurance was out of reach. Prior to the ACA, the cost for an individual plan was upwards of $1000 a month. When you don’t have insurance you don’t get regular physicals. They don’t catch things like prostate cancer early, when it’s treatable. He was trained to ignore the warning signs because in America, you don’t risk a 5 figure hospital bill unless you’re on death’s door. He wrote off his constant fatigue, he rationalized feeling bad, he never learned to be vigilant about his health. Such is the reality of life under a system where healthcare is a profit vector.

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

After months of trying to navigate the labyrinthian bureaucracy of our meager welfare state, I finally got my father declared indigent so he could receive Medicaid and see an oncologist. The prognosis was terminal. The cancer, they said, was too advanced to beat. If he had caught it early, if he had regular prostate exams, it would’ve been a near-guaranteed survival, but it was far too late. There were treatments, however, that could prolong his life to some degree. What ensued was nearly two years of drugs and chemo and a slow withering away of my dad. Watching him suffer, and diminish, and forget who I was, and become unrecognizable. Watching him in unbearable pain that the morphine couldn’t touch. Watching my mother try to care for him until it was no longer possible. It was one of most tragic and foundational experiences of my life and it has forever colored my view of the world. Namely, that denying people healthcare based on their ability to pay is mass murder. My father was murdered by the state.

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I’ve always said that what my dad went through is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but I can’t seem to muster any sympathy for Joe Biden. While he has the same cancer at the same stage, there are no other commonalities between them. In fact, Joe Biden has made a career of denying people like my dad the right to healthcare while simultaneously having access to the best medical care in the world on our dime. During a moment where Medicare for All was in the public consciousness, Biden said he would veto it if it ever managed to pass Congress. Instead of letting his son’s cancer make him more empathetic, Biden exploited that tragedy to oppose life saving treatment for the rest of us.

While the media and politicians are busy writing a hagiography of Joe Biden, of waxing poetic about his empathy and decency, to me he will always be the guy who stood between 330 million Americans and their right to good health. A guy who believes that basic human dignity should be behind a paywall. A guy who thinks the slow, excruciating death that my father and people like him have suffered is a worthy sacrifice for shareholder profits.

And that is the very least of his sins.

Joe Biden’s entire career has been one of supporting the barbarism of the powerful against the powerless. Of making sure you are locked into debt servitude for life. Of fervently supporting the crime bill that tore millions of black families apart. Of backing the Iraq war. Of supporting segregation. And in his final act, of participating in the wholesale destruction of an entire people.

Many will see the elated or apathetic reactions to Biden’s cancer diagnosis and scold those of us who feel no sympathy for the man, but I question their character much more than our own. Why do these people believe a man who has never had a shred of sympathy for us; for the poor, for black Americans, for Iraqis, for Palestinians, is entitled to our compassion? Why do they feel more outrage at our reactions to a bad thing happening to a worse person than they do for the crimes he has committed against humanity? Why does an unfeeling shrug command more of their attention than the endless images of the children he helped mutilate? Why is the violence perpetrated by politicians invisible to them? Why does my dad’s life matter less than his?

Those of us who feel no compassion for Joe Biden understand something our detractors refuse to see, that the people in power who stand between you and your right to a life of dignity are the enemies of humanity. Whether it’s murder by 2,000 pound bomb or murder by spreadsheet, these people believe your life has a price. They have paid for their status again and again with your blood. It is not a lack of humanity for you to recognize the barbarians and treat them as such. It is your human heart screaming for the universal right to be free.

No, I don’t have any sympathy for Joe Biden. Save me the lectures on decency and character while you look past the piles upon piles of dead bodies left in his wake. You will never convince me that his life has more value than my father’s, than Hind Rajab’s, than the countless whose names we will never know, who were an entire universe to those who loved and lost them, willingly sacrificed for one man’s political goals. My grief will always be reserved for the victims of the powerful — those who were consigned to death because their lives were rendered disposable by those who rule over us. We don’t owe a performance of compassion to Joe Biden. We don’t owe him anything at all. The architects of mass suffering deserve nothing from us. Least of all our tears.

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