My grandfather, Kenneth O. Holloway (“Kenny”), worked as an engineering assistant at the Hanford Engineer Works (“Hanford”) near Richland, Washington. He never talked about what he did there, and died at the age of 35 — long before I was born. Given just a few morsels of family history and some internet tools, I wanted to piece together the story of what what brought Kenny to Hanford and what he may have done there.

As November of 2023 rolled around, I was running out of good options to treat the tumor spreading throughout my brain. In late March I went to the ER seeking an explanation for a bizarre mix of symptoms. Imaging and surgery yielded a diagnosis of glioblastoma, an incurable and highly aggressive form of brain cancer. This is not the kind of cancer you beat. It’s the kind of cancer that kills you.

Whatever Kenny may have done during World War II, he returned to Salem determined to push his education as far as possible. In the Spring 1946 semester, he enrolled as an undergraduate at Willamette University (WU), majoring in mathematics and physics.

The loss of a parent, especially in childhood, is one of the most traumatic events a person can experience. Not only do children face the loss itself and all of its emotional and material consequences, but the surviving parent must deal with their own grief while trying to raise children. It’s not surprising that all of the research on this topic points to challenges well into adulthood for surviving children.

My grandfather, Kenneth Orville Holloway (“Kenny”) worked at the Hanford Engineer Works in Richland, Washington, where he died suddenly at the age of 35. Other than a sketchy outline of his life, I knew almost nothing about him as a person or his work at “the atom bomb factory.” Starting with a handful of fragmentary family stories and a couple of online subscriptions, I took the first steps toward unraveling his story.

I’m told that my grandfather, Kenneth Orville Holloway (“Kenny”), worked at “the atom bomb factory” in Richland, Washington. He died in Richland suddenly at the age of 35, long before I was born. What little I knew about him was gleaned from stories told over the course of fifty years. But the older I got, the less sense many aspects of his life made.

By early June I’d finished chemoradiotherapy to stop further growth of a terminal brain cancer. There was a scheduled six-week pause to “give my body a break,” but the main questions on my mind were whether or not to take that break and if not, what to do instead. I had no interest in giving the thing that was still left in my brain breathing room, so I looked into treatments that a person with training but limited resources could try.

The progression of my terminal illness, at first symptomatically and then radiologically was in one sense a blow. It meant that my incurable and terminal brain cancer had shrugged off the standard of care, chemoradiotherapy, with barely a flinch. The period between the end of chemoradiotherapy and progression (aka “progression-free survival”) is highly correlated with overall survival in the glioblastoma clinical literature.

As the end of chemoradiation therapy drew near, I considered next steps. In March I’d been diagnosed with a tennis ball-sized malignant brain tumor. The condition, glioblastoma, is incurable and universally fatal. The tumor had been surgically removed, but was bound to come back. Before it killed me over the next year or so, glioblastoma would inflict untold misery not just on me, but the people I cared about.

In May 2023, about two weeks before the start of chemoradiotherapy, I’d noticed increasing loss of control over my left leg, especially in the calf and foot. I sensed this in two ways. The first was during my at-home physical therapy program. Repeating the same exercises day after day for weeks on end revealed those motions that were becoming more difficult or impossible. The second way was more subjective.

So far I’ve managed to tell my story while ignoring the elephant in the room: death. In March of this year I was diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer known as “glioblastoma.” It’s terminal, meaning I’ll die from it unless something else kills me first. It’s also highly aggressive, meaning it will probably kill me sooner rather than later. I’ve been treated with the standard of care.