Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (27 page)

General Pace, the sixteenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, couldn’t be there in person, but he sent a message. In summarizing what he thought of my work and my fight, he reached back to our little joke: “To borrow from a near-famous quote: Damn. He’s good.”

David Petraeus, at that point the director of the CIA, also sent along a note: “I know that you’ve been fighting a courageous personal battle since I almost had you on a plane to Afghanistan two years ago, and I truly have been inspired by your bravery and grit.”

Of course, I was flattered by such affirmation from these titans of my profession, but I also heard a charge of responsibility to continue to do what I had done all my life in the army—until the day I die. Which was fine with me.

As the former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens would say, the mission does continue. And as my friends in Outward Bound would say, as long as a ship is seaworthy, the Blue Peter nautical flag—indicating the vessel is “outward bound”—should always be flown.

Chaplain Morris summarized the sentiment as he continued to encourage me to share this book with the public:

NOVEMBER 2012

Everyone’s clock is ticking. But my clock, we can hear. What will tomorrow bring for us?

If MacArthur were alive today, I think he would agree with me that if you are able to draw from the morals in the preceding chapters, you will naturally and graciously receive the gifts of this chapter: a sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what is next, and the joy and inspiration of life
.

I have, and I’m not done seeking out and discovering. I’m not done asking questions. I’m not done learning. Because I am still alive
.

I propose to you that pain and suffering—self-inflicted or otherwise—is not merely a rude interruption of your journey, but one of the very purposes of the journey. The Bufords of your life aren’t something to ignore or eliminate, even if that were possible. They are meant to be confronted with the very best effort you can give for as long as you are able. Your bravery, your honesty, your pride and humility, your appetite for adventure, your love for others, your imagination, your wisdom, your seriousness and emotional expression—these are brought to bear not by the sweet and easy moments of your life, though you should savor those, too, but in confrontation with your Bufords
.

If I’m truly and finally proud of anything in my life, it is that I lived it in constant striving, continuous searching, and willing struggle, while conducting as honest an exploration of this world as I knew how to do
.

If you wonder whether you’ll live your life this way, think about this: Where would you be today if you accepted the wisdom you had at age ten? Should you accept the wisdom life has granted you at age twenty or thirty or forty? Or will you continue to ask questions and seek to broaden your understanding of yourself and the world around you? I already know you well enough to have a pretty good idea of what you’ll do
.

I’ve shared with you how these morals and ideas have guided me, and I’ve made some proposals to you
.

But maybe it’s most important for you to know this:

Knowing you, knowing each of you—Matthew, Joshua, Noah—I have complete faith that you’ll figure it out
.

I love you so
.

“HOW ARE YOU DOING?”

“Tell My Father”

Imagine loading your spouse and kids into the family car for a day trip across town. Instead of driving the highways, you’re going to take a narrow ATV trail—a route you’ve never even seen before. The only catch is that once you start for the day—and you
must
start—you can try to slow down, but you won’t be able to stop.

Now blindfold your spouse and kids.

Repeat this drive every single day until you die.

This is what life has been like for me, Kristin, Matthew, Joshua, and Noah. As the driver, I can see what’s in front of me once we start each day. I can feel the gas, clutch, brake, and steering wheel as we crash into obstacles and careen through rough turns, small jumps, and steep drops and climbs. It’s a rough ride for all of us, but at least I can see where I’m headed and have some sense of control. We’ll make this harrowing drive until I die and my journey will be over for good.

Kristin and our boys can obviously see more than a blindfold would allow, but they have no control over what happens, aside from offering the same thing friends and family are desperately saying to all of us over the walkie-talkie speakers piped through our radio: words of encouragement and advice about how to drive and occasional outbursts of sadness or anger at the inevitable setbacks of the trip.

My boys will lose a father at an age when most people lose a grandfather.

And Kristin? How can words possibly describe her pain and loss, or the strength of her love, a love that’s been tempered by the hardships we’ve shared? How can she not be afraid of losing
her husband and the father of her sons, the man she calls her best friend and soul mate? Or, practically speaking, the loss of the disciplinarian to our boys and primary source of income for our family? Sadness and fear do not begin to describe the feelings.

“How are you doing?” is the most common question we’ve heard since we started this journey. In fact, journalist David Murray, with whom I collaborated on this book, made an observation about that question one month into our work. In describing the first time he met us all in Chicago, he observed:

The problem for me is that I don’t think it’s possible to fully capture inside a few pages the raw and disorderly experience David and so many others would like to know.
^*

What is written here is meant to give you some sense of how we’re tackling our cancer fight. But it does require something on your part as the reader. You have to set aside your own imagination about what you think it must be like and trust that what I am telling you is what it
is
like. Because I cannot compete with imagination.

Everyone in our family has handled things slightly differently,
which is offered here as observation rather than a judgment of what’s good or bad, or what works or doesn’t work.

Joshua processes his emotions and thoughts inside and doesn’t share them with many people. He’s always right in the moment and not often one step further. If he had a credo at this age, it might be, “I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.”

One morning at about 6:00 a.m., he came downstairs while I was having my coffee and asked to sit with me in my favorite La-Z-Boy—the one we’ve had since Matthew was a baby. He lay sideways in my arms, and I cradled him and snuggled in close, just as we have every few weeks or so since he was little.

We rocked back and forth while I spoke my heart about the impact cancer was going to have, trying to give him a sense of how much he meant to me and how I was feeling. I was misty-eyed as I asked him how he was feeling. I felt him jostling in my arms, as if he were crying. But when I looked down into his face, I saw he was giggling! It actually made me a bit upset.

“Joshua! How can you laugh about such a thing? This is serious.”

He seemed embarrassed but kept on giggling as he replied, “Your
breath
stinks, Dad.”

Noah is very different. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, and he speaks his mind and asks questions not long after a thought has been formed. His most pressing question was about what would happen when I was gone. Will we have to sell the house? Change schools?

Just a few months ago, when my third chemo treatment failed, he asked Kristin in a deadpan voice, “Will I get a stepdad?” Kristin replied, “No, we’ll get another cat. I’m going to be a cat lady.” And this answer seems to satisfy him, though I’m not sure what it says about me!

To be honest, such experiences, combined with others shared in the book, did not encourage me at all about how they were doing. So it came as some surprise when their school social
worker, Jim Ciemny, wrote to me out of the blue, asking for my permission to let Joshua and Noah help another student.

Help? My boys?

Jim wrote, “I have witnessed some pretty amazing stuff with your children, and I am profoundly changed because of it.… There is an agreement of sorts, or pact if you will, between the two. They both agree that Noah is more ‘hands-on and emotional,’ while Josh is comfortable with being ‘perimeter support and more quiet,’ to use their words. Their ability to communicate, assign roles, and strategize is pretty amazing and advanced for their age. Simply put, it is empathy in motion.”

Jim has been working in his field for twenty years and spent half of his career working with troubled youth and broken families. He went on to explain there was a third grader whose father was a soldier who had been deployed for most of the past two years. The child was beginning to express intense stress (exhibited through unconscious self-mutilation), anxiety, frustration, and a reduced ability to focus on academics. While brainstorming about how to best support the boy, multiple teachers and specialists suggested Joshua and Noah as potential mentors.

I was more than a little concerned. I could only imagine Joshua and Noah were already carrying enough heavy rocks with a dad and two grandparents fighting cancer. Still, in my own profession, I had personally experienced how helping others had actually lifted personal burdens, so I agreed.

The boys were elated.

“And oh boy, did they help,” Jim later wrote. Joshua and Noah met with the young boy every week. “Surprisingly,” Jim said, “Joshua was the most verbal, assuring, and comforting role model for this child. He’d ask gentle questions and share his thoughts. Noah did as well, but his effort was more expected given his outspoken nature. It seemed mutually therapeutic for all involved.

“By the end of the school year, the third grader was stable, and he routinely sought out your children more than me when he
needed to be heard and affirmed. Talk about reciprocal fellowship!”

For two years, Jim said he saw the full range of emotions—sorrow, profound grief, tears, humor, sarcasm, silence, and joy. All of which was expected and normal, in his view. “They do complain, but it always comes back to you and Kristin and how much they feel loved.”

Jim closed his note by telling us Joshua and Noah reflected two themes every time he saw them, and he just had to believe they had learned them in our home: “Know where you started, where you are, and where you want to be; and don’t ever give up.”

*   *   *

Matthew is in a category by himself. As a teenager, he’s struggling with hormones, testy emotions, girlfriends, the rigors of succeeding and failing in sport, and high school life in general. Who’s to say what emotion comes from where? He certainly can’t tell, and he can’t explain exactly what he feels or thinks about it all, so I don’t think the answer can be known.

Rather than focusing on why the emotions are there or what generates them, I offered that it might matter more to focus on what to do about it. Because he couldn’t control what he felt or when he felt it, perhaps it was best to work on things within his control—behavior and environment.

On one particularly rough day, we sat together on the couch and he had a good, long cry. “Nothing is going right; everything is going wrong. It sucks!” he finally said with anger and tears in his eyes.

He doesn’t like to talk about what life will be like without a dad, and he has always resisted talks with me or others about it. On that day, I insisted. He and I sat at the kitchen table while Kristin cleaned up after dinner.