FOREWORD
J.A. Pitts
My friend Jay Lake published this book in June of 2010 as a great big fuck you to cancer. He had already had some surgeries and was in store for more, whether he knew it at the time or not. His last few years were a rollercoaster of love and loss, pain and hope, wishful thinking, and hard, cutting edge scientific exploration.
Yep, Jay was one of the first civilians to have his genome sequenced. With the help of some amazing friends, he ran a fundraising campaign to have both his DNA and RNA sequenced. This was such a unique request, the scientists who sequenced his DNA had no process for figuring out how to charge for the activity, but they worked it out.
In the end of this exploration, Jay was able to give the world a unique look into the formation and sequencing of his cancer tumors and allow for new avenues of thought on treatment. His final push was to get into a gene therapy—specifically around his white blood cells—with the National Institute of Health. He knew it was a Hail Mary pass, but was willing to trust science to the very end. While the findings were hopeful, in the end it was not enough. We lost Jay on June 1st, 2014, just days before his fiftieth birthday. He left a huge hole in a lot of hearts.
Jay believed in science. Tooth and nail, heart and soul, he believed that with enough study, insight, and experimentation, we could unravel not only the cure for cancer, but the very heart of the universe. Ignorance was abhorrent to him.
When he titled this book The Specific Gravity of Grief, he did not choose those words just because they sounded cool. The title evokes the juxtaposition of the scientific against the emotive. Grief is not measurable; we cannot explain it in numbers or rational theory. Jay sought to explore that incongruity, to help find a language to understand something that eluded him.
Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of a substance to the density of a reference substance; equivalently, it is the ratio of the mass of a substance to the mass of a reference substance for the same given volume.
Basically, Jay understood the world to be a certain way, and he was struggling to understand the ratio of grief to that world view.
This book is a fantasy—one where a fictional Jay Lake survives cancer but manages to alienate those he loves. He and I discussed the content of this book many, many times. It reflects his anguish over his writing career, the struggle to be a good parent, and the constant work required to have grown up relationships when his world was falling down around him.
Do not believe for an instant that this is a book about joyous validation or miracles. It is full of hope and pain, self-loathing, and a grudging acceptance of one’s place in the universe.
This is a roadmap of one man’s attempt to survive the deterioration of his very existence and how he imagined one could live, despite the worst.
Jay was my friend. I hate that I can no longer call him, hear his laughter, groan at his inappropriate remarks, and love him for his foibles and his remarkable humanity. We have his memories, but frankly, those are just not enough.
Not like we got a vote.
I was Jay’s truth-teller, his secret keeper. He would talk to me about the darkness and the fear because he understood I would help him see the light. Our phone calls more often than not began with pain, but by the end would culminate with laughter or the relief of tears.
If you would know the road ahead, read this book. If you fear the dark, read this book. If you have a loved one who is struggling, read this book. Jay was a brilliant writer. You will not regret this journey.
—John A Pitts, 2016