Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (28 page)

I grabbed a glass of water, filled it halfway up, and set it in front of him. “This glass of water represents your life,” I offered. “We all have a pretty easy time of describing this part,” I said as I pointed to the empty half of the glass. “That’s fine, and we need to do that to keep our grip on reality and stay humble. But sometimes we have to work a little harder to figure out what’s in this part of the glass here,” and I pointed to the water. “What’s the water in your life?” I asked him.

He sat there thinking for several minutes, speechless. “Well, I’m not sick,” he finally said.

I chuckled. “Well, now we know what you’re not. Let’s focus on what you are. Focus on what you have, not what you don’t have.”

He continued to look at the table in front of him, his face contorted in discomfort. Nothing.

“Let’s start with something really close to you,” I offered. “Your mom and dad—give us a rating.”

“Well,” he said, “you don’t abuse me or treat me poorly.”

Again I reiterated the need to focus on what he has, not what he doesn’t have. Then he started getting it as he rattled off what we do for him and how we show our love and care for him, even when we’re upset with his behavior.

“How about your girlfriend?” I asked. “She’s smart, pretty, and two grades ahead of you, but she would rather have you as a boyfriend than any of the boys in her class. What do you think that says about you?”

He shrugged his shoulders and said he never really thought about it that way.

“You try now,” I said. Still, he sat there dumbfounded. After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “What about your guitar?”

His head shot up. Yes. He was exceptionally good at playing the guitar. He had worked hard to get there, and he didn’t need to be Jimi Hendrix to relish some pride in his abilities.

“How about your singing or the dedication and passion you put into swimming?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I’m not good enough to keep up with the older boys,” he responded.

I tapped on the empty half of the glass. “Yes, it’s important to know what you don’t yet possess and need to work at, but since you’ve got that part covered we want to focus here”—I shifted my finger—“on the water, on the part where there is something.”

He finally acknowledged that although he wasn’t where he wanted to be in swimming, he really had come a long way. In fact, he could see this logic in just about everything he did, from riding a bike to handwriting.

The whole discussion took twenty-five minutes. As we finished, he shifted in his seat, looked me in the eyes, and said with an apparent sadness, “This is hard.”

Yes. It is. But you get better at it the more you practice
.

*   *   *

Kristin, of course, is as close to the details and the roller-coaster drama as I am. Her modesty means getting her to talk about life’s blessings is as difficult as prying it from Matthew. In all of her life, it’s always been good enough to just live in the day, with her gut instincts and, privately, without much worry for tomorrow.

From religion to politics to the meaning of life, her thoughts are locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Not even my deployments would pry her tongue. She’s never had a problem acknowledging hardships and expressing sadness or anger with her own Bufords, but she’s always been content to distract herself with a few small hobbies, with the housework that needs to be done, or with the three sons she enjoys nurturing.

But with my cancer at age thirty-eight? And both parents with cancer in their early sixties? Everything about this experience
has forced her to open the locks on her vault. She’s private, but she’s not a recluse, so it’s much harder to maintain the balance she desires with how much and when to share.

“Is it okay for me to laugh or have fun when my husband is dying of cancer?” she says through tears that turn a heart inside out. “I feel guilty. I should be here with you.” It doesn’t matter what I tell her or what her friends say. Her character tells her it’s wrong, and she abides.

She knows life isn’t fair, and she knows she’s not alone or unique in her hardship, but the anger and frustration still pound at her door every day.

Drainage bags, open sores, dangling medical implants, and a constant and nose-stinging odor put a real damper on life as you might imagine it for a husband and wife at age forty. I’m not an invalid by a long shot, and I am physically capable in every conceivable way, but our lives are routinely punctuated by periods of complete misery that carry a dramatic impact.

These conditions have redefined the meaning of love, affection, and commitment for both of us virtually overnight. They have propelled us into a relationship more often seen at age seventy than forty. Considering the foundation we had going into cancer, our transition has been relatively smooth, but it has not been without struggle. The same prescription we’ve tried to employ for eighteen years still seems to apply: communicate, and if you must fight, fight fair and be gracious when you make up.

Nothing brings me to tears faster than the firm belief that Kristin will carry the vast majority of the “near madness, the insane sadness, the utter fear and confusion, and the disordering and swirling reality of the situation,” as David Murray so eloquently put it.

To use Kristin’s words: “Yes, life is unfair, but it seems just a little more so knowing that you’re going to lose your best friend who is seemingly unfazed by the trials of life, and a soul mate
who you just know brings out the very best in you—even as he pisses you off every now and again.”

*   *   *

What people really seem to want to know is, what’s it like to die in slow motion … to actually see your own death approaching?

Today? And speaking only for myself? It sucks. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. It’s pure torture. It’s pure joy. And it feels a little irresponsible, because I know I’m going to leave my family for something I know will be better.

If you believe that life owes us nothing and we owe it everything; that life is all about the fullest possible experience of the ride, good and bad; and that death is part of life—then there is a strange peace and comforting resolution to seeing it all unfold in front of you, even as it scares you to know you’re leaving your family in the lurch.

We all know, or have at least heard, that Death is supposed to come to us like a thief in the night. I caught Death trying to break in, and I’ve somehow managed to kick him in the teeth—for two years. With anger, happiness, and sadness welling up inside of me as I write this, can you imagine how good that makes me feel as a soldier or in light of what you’ve read about my life?

Death is going to get in, but I know right where he’s at. Considering the fact that Death is coming for all of us, the ability to see him coming and make it happen on my terms has to be the next best thing to living a long life.

I’ve experienced half a dozen curtain calls and am actually beginning to feel a little guilty for not meeting expectations. My funeral is going to be downright anticlimactic.

I say all of this with great humility, because every once in a while, I do reach down and grab hold of the electrified rail that is my reality from day to day and week to week.

Kristin and I were once discussing some routine tidbit of my
medical care, and she suddenly interrupted me, almost as if she were irritated by me poking fun at death. “Don’t you get angry or frustrated with all of this? Nothing ever seems to faze you with this stuff.”

The fact is, I do get angry. For example, I believe attitude and prayer are important, but I do get upset when people insist these are the causes and the cures for cancer. And it’s not true that nothing fazes me. A
lot
fazes me.

In each of the dozen or so times I’ve been flat on my rear end for days on end—believe me, I was fazed.

So then what? That’s my question about getting angry or fazed. The answer for me, for most of my adult life, has been just a few adapted lines from the Serenity Prayer I desperately try to practice:

If I could, I would further edit the Serenity Prayer and add, “And later on, when you gain more wisdom, revisit the things you thought you couldn’t change and try again.”

I experience fear as well, but more so for what’s going to happen to my family when I’m gone, not about what’s coming for me. My faith tells me where I’m going. I’m not eager to leave, but I’m very excited to see what’s on the other side.

My family cries, we yell, we laugh, and we try to talk about what all of this will ultimately mean for them. Mostly we focus on living the life we have and on what we can do when things don’t go as we want. On this last score, I am far more aggressive in providing authoritative leadership within my family and much less patient in accepting excuses.

If any of this—the stories to my boys or this epilogue to you—sounds like a prescription for how to deal with awful things
in your life, let me be really clear in declaring with great conviction that in my view, it’s all an experiment. And it’s all easier said than done. All I know is that as long as I have been able, I have tried.

So if you cross paths with them in your life, I hope you’ll tell my sons (or your sons or daughters) to pursue the morals in this story for as long as they are able.

I’m mildly allergic to overt displays of spirituality (I worry that they embarrass God), but I need to make an exception here, because to proceed without first acknowledging God’s inspiration in my life wouldn’t be right. I am thankful to God for inspiring me not just to be good, but to be
good for something;
and for his having enough faith in me to let me live life just as it seems he must have intended
—imperfectly
. The true wonder of this existence is that he has not tried to live my life for me nor relieved me of the experiences that have made me who and what I am.

I am proud of the life I have lived, but when people call me a hero or tell me how lucky my boys are to have me as a father, I look to my right and see my wife and closest friend, Kristin, and I am humbled.
She
is the hero, because she is the reason I have been able to be the soldier, father, and man I am. In the case of this book, I got the “bonus plan,” because despite the fact that cancer is stealing away my remaining time with her, she supports my efforts with love and care.

To my parents, Dennis and Illean: I’m sorry for being such a pain as a child, but I hope I made up for it as a man. Thank you for the solid foundation and for always letting me be me.

Tell My Sons
was born out of the persistence and determination of Chaplain John Morris. Well over a year ago, I started combing through my twenty-plus years of journal entries and emails to collect some important stories I could share with my sons. More than anyone, John is the one who convinced me to
produce a version I could share outside our four walls—with other sons and fathers and mothers and daughters.

My thanks to writer Jay Heinrichs, who was the first to help me wrestle with several approaches to writing the book and then encouraged me to write each story directly to Matthew, Joshua, and Noah.

When I wrote to David Murray on June 21, 2012, about collaborating on this book, his reply was a polite “I probably ain’t the guy for this.” But the more we spoke, the more I knew he was precisely the right guy for this. Exactly one month later, he agreed to our partnership.

When he asked me what the timeline was, I told him a Christmas gift was my goal, which meant we needed to be done with a draft by the end of September—just two months away. He replied he didn’t think that would be possible, but added, “I’m betting that you’re just the kind of guy who will prove me wrong.”

David listened, observed the common threads in my life, and then aggressively helped me find an approach I never would have found on my own. His candor, humor, objectivity, empathy, and keen eyes helped me transform my stories into My Story.

I owe an astonishing debt of gratitude to a number of people who first helped me with the self-published version of this book. Kerri Alexander, Mitch Albom’s copy editor, offered to copyedit this book and then insisted on doing it for free. Jim Kosmo, my literary consultant, provided counsel and friendship. Tom Kerber and Amy Quale at Beaver’s Pond Press treated me like royalty. And Paul Engleman provided an additional review and edit that helped this book along in a hundred little ways. Thanks also go to Shel Danielson and Scott Thomsen at Holton House Audio, and Wynn Grothem at Tri-Audio Productions, for their invaluable and generous help with the audiobook.

A huge thank you to the extraordinary team at Ballantine, who performed superhuman feats to bring
Tell My Sons
to the
world. Thanks especially to my editor, Mark Tavani, and his incomparable assistant, Betsy Wilson, for shepherding the effort with such deftness and care. To Libby Mcguire, Gina Centrello, Jennifer Tung, Richard Callison, and Kim Hovey: Thank you for believing in this book and in me. I’m awestruck at the speed, efficacy, and personal care and handling of Quinne Rogers, marketing director, and to my extraordinary team of publicists, Susan Corcoran, David Moench, and Cindy Murray. And to those in Subsidiary Rights, Digital, Legal, Promotion and Sales, and beyond—especially Denise Cronin, Toby Ernst, Matthew Schwartz, and Laura Goldin—thanks for all you’ve done.

Drs. Timothy Sielaff, Eduardo Ehrenwald (“Oscar”), Subbarao Inampudi (“Felix”), John Seng, and, most notably, nurse practitioner Marie Kramer were more than just my medical team. They have been like family. Their ability to work together is how a fifth diagnosis became the correct diagnosis, so their gift to me has been the last two years of my life.