Marcel Is Dying, And Half A Million Of Us Aren’t Ready

I have never met Marcel, but I am terrified of losing him.

That sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. I don’t know Marcel’s last name. I’ve never shaken his hand, sat across from him at a table, or heard him laugh in person. I know him the way half a million other people know him: through a little rectangle in my hand, where for the better part of a year I have watched a husband, father, baker, and giant of a man fight cancer without ever turning the camera off.

At its worst, the internet can be a reminder of all the horrible parts of us: the racism, the misogyny. It’s divisive and hurtful.

At its best, the internet is Marcel.

And somewhere along the way, this man I have never met became someone I need to live.

Marcel, a hulking figure over 300 pounds, and his loving wife own a bakery. They have five kids, all boys, and they all dance for no reason. Then one day Marcel got diagnosed with stomach cancer, and he decided not to turn the camera off. And for the last year, he’s documented his journey with cancer and appointments and treatments. 

From time to time, he would join TikTok if only to pose while the song “Still Alive” played in the background. The comments section became a community of about half a million extended family members who had never met him. Celebrities have offered encouragement and prayers. His spirits were always up. And then, on Thursday, after weeks of noting that none of the treatments were working––and his internet family trying to charter private planes, along with donations and plans to get him to City of Hope for possible experimental care––a noticeably thinner Marcel posted a photo of him in bed with the caption: “I’m dying.”

His commenting family has lost it. None of us have ever prayed this hard, commented this much, or wanted a person we don’t know offline to live more than we all have for Marcel. It’s like we can’t let him go. In the depressive cloud that is the Trump administration, we needed this win. We needed the good guy to come out on top. We needed him to make it through this because we are all running out of stuff to believe in. And Marcel never asked for this. He didn’t ask to be the hero of our creation. In just being himself fully, vulnerable, open, honest, silly, annoyed, frustrated, sad, weak. 

He’s helped me face my own mortality while realizing what being a man really is. 

I was given violence. I was given excess and alcohol and women. I was given the typical Black boy commandments that seemed to be passed on from generation to generation. You know the ones about how to treat women as objects and how to drink until there is nothing left.

I used to be proud of my fight stories; now they embarrass me. Because I was really outside during ungodly hours (you know the hours that only crackheads and jackboys keep), the idea of getting shot used to scare me. Now dying before I get to see my kids have kids is what keeps me up at night. Marcel’s vulnerability in the face of his own mortality has been the true meaning of bravery, which is why we can’t let him go.

And I’m stuck in survival mode. 

That’s what I’ve learned from the trauma of my past (even calling it trauma still makes me cringe) because I grew up when all parents beat their kids, kicked them out, and gave up on them. At least that’s what I believed. I used to believe that surviving the suffering life gives you makes you a man, because that’s what I was given. It was a contract I never signed, but somehow still felt bound to. 

Tears were no longer an outlet for emotional overheating; they became excuses punishable by something else to cry about. So I just stopped crying. For years I literally couldn’t cry, and then I had children and something hard inside of me softened. And life had meaning, just like that. I wish I could say that it had meaning before, but that would be a lie, and I don’t know how to explain this other than the idea of me dying didn’t matter much.

Like Drago in that one Rocky movie, I used to look at life “as if he dies, he dies.” And then my children got here, and we made leprechaun traps, and they took naps on my shoulder, and death became my biggest nightmare. 

Which brings me back to Marcel. We were with him when he told his children about the monsters in his stomach. We were there when he surprised his wife by showing up to his son’s wrestling match, even though she thought he was too sick to attend. We watched the weight loss and the different medications. We watched chemo take his hair and eyebrows but not his spirit. He’s literally living my fears in real time, and he’s never once turned away. He never tried to hide how sad it makes him feel or how empowered he feels on a good day. We all waited for his “I’m still alive” videos like a Beyoncé album drop because we needed him to be better to prove that God exists and She is just.

And now Marcel is dying.

I hate writing that sentence.

I hate that after all of this, after all the prayers and comments and money and strangers trying to figure out how to get this man to another hospital, cancer just won’t stop being unrelenting, and realize that this person didn’t deserve this ending. I hate that the internet, which can be such a spectacular monument to everything ugly about us, also gave us this strange, beautiful community that refuses to accept that a man we have never met can disappear from our lives.

But maybe that is what Marcel gave us. He didn’t give us a miracle. At least not yet. He gave us something harder. He showed us what it looks like to be afraid and still dance. He showed us what it looks like to be sick and still show up for your son’s wrestling match. He showed us that you can be 300 pounds, strong as hell, a husband, a father, a business owner, a Black man, and still say, “I’m scared.”

And maybe that is what being a man actually is. Maybe being a man is loving something so much that the thought of losing it scares the hell out of you. For most of my life, I thought fear was something you defeated. Marcel taught me that sometimes you just carry it with you. Sometimes you dance with it. Sometimes you tell 500,000 strangers that you’re dying and let them love you anyway.

I don’t know Marcel.

I’ve never met him. I don’t know his favorite food, what he was like as a kid, or what he and his wife argue about when the cameras aren’t on. I don’t know him in any of the ways we normally know people. 

But I know this: He made me want to live, out loud. And that’s a hell of a thing for a dying man to give somebody. So, Marcel, if you ever see this: I’m sorry we’re not ready to let you go. We’re selfish. We’ve gotten used to believing that if Marcel can get through another treatment, another appointment, another terrible day, maybe we can get through ours too.

Maybe that’s why this hurts so much.

Because you didn’t just document yourself dying. You documented yourself living.

And somewhere along the way, half a million strangers started living a little more because of you. I used to think surviving was the bravest thing a man could do. Now I think it’s admitting that you want to live.

Marcel taught me that. 

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