On ‘the razor’s edge of fighting for life while dying right’
You wouldn’t expect parallel themes of fighting brain cancer and the life cycle of a city, but Richey Piiparinen’s new book weaves his signature approach to urban planning and his battle with glioblastoma.
June 1991
A young 14-year-old Richey Piiparinen rides with his dad in a black GMC Jimmy on Cleveland’s west side after an Indians game. Suddenly, a car blasts through a stop sign, slamming into the Piiparinens’ SUV, tossing Richey and his father around as it flips down the road, settling on its roof. In the collision, Richey tumbles in the back seat; his father, a Cleveland police officer, is thrown into the passenger seat. Miraculously, Richey is relatively unscathed save for a cut on the thigh when he climbs out of the back. Paramedics rush his father to MetroHealth’s trauma center, but he dies from head trauma.
July 2007
A drizzly summer day. Richey, now 30, rides his bike again on Cleveland’s west side, coincidentally — eerily — near the site of his tragic childhood accident. He comes to an intersection and emerges, riding into the middle of the street when a car turns and speeds toward him. Richey is trapped by a wall of traffic on both sides, so he braces for impact. The car hits, knocking him on the hood, into the windshield, through the air and then headfirst into the pavement. Paramedics rush him to Metrohealth’s trauma center, the same place where his father succumbed to his injuries 16 years earlier. Richey is diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury including a hematoma in his right frontal lobe.
January 2021
Richey is 46. He’s been having migraines, recurring multi-colored “auras” in specific fields of his vision. One specialist says he needn’t worry but orders an MRI to be sure. A couple hours after the exam, he gets a call. It’s a brain tumor. Malignant. But more specifically, horrifyingly, it’s glioblastoma multiforme, what’s conventionally known as “the terminator.”
To the outside observer, it would appear that Richey (MUPD ’11) has endured an unrelenting series of cosmic cruelties. Coincidences so improbable that the only explanation would be that a malevolent force had been conspiring against him. To recap, there was the tragic loss of his father in the car accident. Then, the bike accident on the same road. And then, being treated in the same hospital in the same rooms within that same hospital for similar injuries that claimed his father. Finally, over 30 years later, brain cancer. Head trauma, reoccurring once more in its final form.
But Richey doesn’t see it as the workings of a universe hellbent on wreaking havoc in his life or random, disconnected accidents. Sure, the first one was a crushing blow, but Richey believes it very well may have set the second two in motion as if they were inevitabilities in one shape or another.
And he may have a reason for it. Unresolved trauma.
It’s the sort of trauma that, if left unchecked, embeds itself in our bodies, in our psyches, and manifests outwardly at some point in our lives, he said. For Richey, unfortunately, that means a cascade of events that brutally aligned themselves throughout his adolescence and adulthood.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Ohio University, his master’s in clinical psychology from Roosevelt University in Chicago, and then his master’s in urban planning, design, and development from Cleveland State. He’s spent his career mostly in urban planning and research, but it’s been largely informed by his background in psychology, more specifically social psychology, and centered on sociologist Emile Durkheim’s concept of collective conscience.
“Just as an individual has emotions and conscience, so do groups of individuals have emotions and conscience. So, everything I do is through the lens of the collective,” Richey said.
“It’s not just the individual psychology; it’s the aggregation of individuals in their psychology. That’s how I look at a city.”
Richey weaves his story of battling brain cancer — the psychology of it all, his philosophy of it all, coming to terms with his fate — with the rises and falls of Cleveland in his recently released book, “Octopus Hunting.” It’s an unflinching look at where the city has failed, the opportunities for growth, along with his hope for the future. The book jacket calls it a love song to the city where he was born, where he was shaped, where he lived, where he thrived.
“It’s the story of a person fighting for life against death, in a city, that in itself is fighting for life against death, in a region that in itself is fighting for life against death,” he said.
Soon after his diagnoses, Richey says that the idea for the book came to him.
“It’s not a moment I chose. It’s a moment that chose me,” he says.
There are those who would have crumbled under the weight of his prognosis, and rightfully so. That’s not to say Richey’s knees didn’t buckle, the wind sucked out of him as if he’d been sucker punched in the gut. That is, at least, initially. And not just him, but his wife Andiara, his three kids Angel, 13; Lara, 10; and Artur, 7 and his parents. Of those with glioblastoma, most make it 12 to 14 months. Richey’s on year four. Take that cancer. But Richey gained sobering clarity in the days, weeks and months after he got the news:
“There was (and is) shock, yes. There was (and is) immense sadness, yes. But I wouldn’t’ say hopelessness. Or helplessness. Rather, there’s some vague seed of a sense of purpose that is skating the razor’s edge of fighting for life while dying ‘right,’” he writes in his book.
If anything, that’s what you take from talking with him. A profound sense of purpose, a call to live. A challenge to face what haunts us. What looms over us. What stops us in our tracks and thwarts our progress.
“You gotta accept your losses, confront your fears that are built from the inside out,” he said.
“Having a chronic or terminal illness, you got two choices: face it or run from it. It doesn’t mean I’ll be alive forever, but I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna be kicking and screaming and not fighting.”
So, he took the moment that chose him, said, “ok,” and in the process, became more fully himself than ever before.
In “Octopus Hunting,” Richey sees a city grappling with a way forward despite enduring its own traumas — population loss, deindustrialization, economic woes.
“Traditionally, urban planning has always been about nuts and bolts, thinking like an engineer, instead of thinking like a counselor in a sense,” he said.
“So, the first thing is dealing with the trauma not only on the individual basis, but on the collective basis.”
If we can move beyond the bike paths, street grids, traffic patterns, and new development, unpack the trauma and fold in the psychosocial context of the city, he thinks we’ll see more success.
For his part, Richey says he’s unloaded his trauma. Cancer shoved him “beyond the veil,” connecting him with a world often shrouded by life’s many distractions. It’s a world that we don’t often see until we must, until we’re thrust there. But that’s where he is, a place where he’s found acceptance.
“Yeah, I’m at peace,” he said.
“Even with brain cancer. I’m at peace.”
