By Karl Lisovsky, aka Kai Landauer | Fall 2025
Death Valley Rock
Out my back door, up the path and near the ivy, lies a rock, a red rock that I have had for thirty-some years, years that have spanned half my adult life, from getting my master’s, to the friends I made getting it, to getting married then getting cancer, and then getting lucky.
Carol Ann and I were in grad school together, UCLA, and we always seemed to hit it off well. She felt like “home” to me somehow, like maybe I’d known her in a previous life, or we were like sister and brother. She was comfortable, easy to be with. We laughed at the same kinds of things. We were friends, good friends. Could there have been romance? Maybe, in another life, but not in this one. And in any case, it might not have ended well.
In graduate school I met the woman I would marry, Janet, my life partner. We found a home at Lincoln Place Apartments in Venice, and settled there with our two-year-old son. Sometime later, Carol moved there too, and we were all neighbors. On Sundays, I spent time down in the alley with the guys, doing “guy” stuff (tools, lumber, hardware, you know…) out of our garages. I sometimes hung with a guy named Bart, a cool guy, friendly, straight-up fellow. Carol and Bart turned out to be neighbors.
Carol Ann took a liking to Bart and confided in me a bit, with questions and requests for affirmation.
“He’s not married, is he?” she wondered. He’s kinda mysterious.
“I think he was in architecture school. That I do know. I doubt he’s married, haven’t seen a woman with him. All I know is he’s got lotsa tools, so maybe he’s a contractor or something?
Carol Ann and Bart did eventually find each other. Carol Ann organized some get-togethers, where we all enjoyed being neighbors at Lincoln Place, played board games, did Shakespeare readings, even made pesto once with a bushel of basil from my garden.
But then, grad school was done. Carol and I started teaching ESL at Santa Monica College, making a living, having left the carefree life of graduate school.
Then, I got sick, diagnosed with leukemia. I went into the hospital, got chemo, then radiation, had several diagnostic bone marrow “cores” pulled out of my femurs, got many blood transfusions, spent the better part of six months in the hospital. Carol visited several times, and it was she who had the foresight to take a photo of me at that significant turning point in my life. The photo still stands as the defining visual of my leukemia days, and represents my Cancer songs on my website. I was thirty-eight years old.
And Carol Ann took that photo. Thought to take the photo. And when I look at it now, I see myself back then, in 1994, bald from losing my hair to chemo, the whites of my eyes overly prominent, in a drab T-shirt, suitable to a long stay in a hospital room.
“I’m going to Death Valley,” Carol announced on one visit. “Never been there, have you?”
“No, though at the moment, honestly, I’m not too keen on going there.” She smiled at that, and looked down at her shoes. “But,” I continue, “people say it’s a bucket list thing, you’ve really gotta do it, especially if you live as close to the place as we do.”
“I’ll bring you back something,” she promised.
Carol came back from Death Valley with a rock, a fair-sized bit of sedimentary rock weighing about eight pounds, resting easily in two hands, but rather heavy in one. It had that reddish brown color emblematic of the American Southwest, that we associate with the Grand Canyon. And now, for me, Death Valley.
“Thanks!” I said, not quite knowing what to say, being handed a seven-pound rock in my hospital room. I wanted to say, “Nice rock, Carol,” but neither of us found quite the right words. I do not know to what extent the irony of giving a dying man a gift from Death Valley was present in Carol’s mind, but that thought-wrinkle has stayed with me all these thirty-some years.
It was a rare awkward moment between us, but nothing more. We then picked up to talk about teaching and learning and ESL students and program directors. And spouses and boyfriends and two-year-old children and our apartments, and all those kinds of things that constitute the glue of human interaction.
Turns out, I would be one of the lucky 45% of people who survived AML back in 1994. I made it, through good luck and good fortune, some pain, but not too much effort of my own other than to lie in bed and take drugs. My wife Janet had the hard job: raise a small child, teach at UCLA, keep up with my life—or what might turn out to be what’s left of it.
But I did recover.
It has now been thirty-four years. And for all of those years, I have kept that rock. It has traveled with us from apartment to house. It’s been on a shelf, in the trunk of the car, ridden on my bike, been used as a doorstop, and now rests in my back yard in the shade of a white yarrow and a California purple sage. All but forgotten most of the time. Except when I find myself alone, maybe pruning the avocado tree or filling the hummingbird feeder. And when the breeze blows just right, and that blessed Death Valley Rock smiles up at me, quiet and solid, I am grateful for this little piece of Planet Earth that Carol Ann brought me from Death Valley, because in that rock inhabit the thirty-four years that have transpired. Leukemia, frightening as it was then, now is a distant memory for me, as is graduate school, where lifelong friendships are born while we are busy launching our lives and careers and families, without us even realizing how much it would all mean thirty years hence. So, here we are now, me, Janet, Carol Ann, Bart, and our grad school cohort, still visiting one another when we can. Carol’s kids, my kids, all grown with careers and partners, and I wonder how it all happened so fast, how a grad school buddy can turn into a lifelong friend—how I could ever be so lucky.
And now, still, in the shade of a California sage, this Death Valley Rock rocks on. And keeps rocking, after all these years.
