Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (9 page)

He’s a perfectionist, and his sense of pride is often too much for his ego to handle, but when he takes on a task, you can bet your life it will be done exceptionally well.

When I hear people call him crazy for ignoring a warning or advice about what can’t or shouldn’t be done, I can only nod in agreement and smile, because I’ve heard those same words as a cadet, a student teacher, a soldier, an officer, a husband and father, and a cancer survivor.

Our man-to-man experiences helped me temper my immature, youthful memories of him. His “madness” was actually all about taking calculated risks, often choosing a path of difficulty and challenge over comfort, being literally and figuratively willing
to walk on thin ice, and relying on actions over words to get things done.

I know your memories of me may be dominated by visions of the same hard hand my dad held over me, and naturally I want you to see virtue in my madness. I can only hope my stories about his actions will help you see the wisdom—and love—in mine.

Words mean things. Words, mean things. MacArthur didn’t say to disregard them; he said to make sure you don’t substitute them for action. My experiences in combat and with cancer, and the conversations that resulted, have taught me that too many people seem to think sentiments are strong enough without action. Don’t you believe it
.

Or as a drill sergeant once told me, hope in one hand …

 … 
TO BE PROUD AND UNBENDING IN HONEST FAILURE, BUT HUMBLE AND GENTLE IN SUCCESS.

1977, with Dad’s number 26 race car

SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 2010

When the day finally came to leave the hospital on September 8, five weeks after I went in, I felt like a baby bird being pushed from the nest with no feathers on its wings.
^*

I had only been eating solid food for a few days, weighed 130 pounds (down from 165), and could barely walk. Bullah was still a fist-size drainage pocket inside my body, and Buford was still a quarter-inch-wide slit across my abdomen that leaked digestive juice 24/7.

Oh, and I still had cancer.

When we got home, my eyes misted at every turn. Everything was just as I had remembered it, but I was not, and that mismatched feeling was intense.

I glanced at the massive half-acre garden that had taken me three years of backbreaking labor to create—completed just two months before my cancer diagnosis. Now I was so weak and feeble I couldn’t even trim a rose.

On my way to the bathroom to take a shower, I walked past our bedroom. Intimacy of any kind with my wife would not be possible for the foreseeable future.

I went to take a shower, and I was not at all prepared for what
happened. At the hospital, the only thing I ever saw in the small vanity mirror was my face. In our bathroom, we had mirrors large enough to see my body from the waist up. Undressed, I turned to get a towel and caught a full glimpse of my naked body. The sight took my breath away.

I could see every rib in my chest, my shoulder bones jutted out in sharp points, and my arms and legs looked like sticks. My butt was gone, my back just connected to my legs in one seamless line. And I was hunched over like a ninety-year-old man.

What had I done to myself?

I sat down on the toilet seat and sobbed uncontrollably in deep heaves. The visual reminders of the changes were just too overwhelming. For weeks, I had thought of myself as the same strong, fit, army soldier I’d always been, and I had wondered where this silly potbelly had come from. Now I realized my stomach was about the same size it had always been; the rest of my body had just shriveled around it.

Food selection became an Olympic event: great hope for success, devastation in the frequent failures.

And every crap was an emergency.

My body seemed incapable of controlling its temperature. If I pulled on a sheet, I’d wake up soaking wet; if I used nothing, I’d wake up freezing cold. And my bandages could never contain the volume of leaky digestive juices for more than an hour.

For the first time in my life, I experienced night terrors, and they were frequent. I would wake up yelling and thrashing from dreams I could not remember.

Each of these conditions prevented me from sleeping. I was exhausted, but I could never get more than two hours straight. I had to sleep on a twin-size air mattress in our living room—the same one I’d used in Iraq for a year.

For the next three months, we measured success and failure by digestion, weight gain, and bowel movements—and also by
my mood, which wasn’t quite what it had been when I’d seen myself as a jut-jawed army soldier.

After a few weeks, and with the Serenity Prayer rolling through my mind constantly, I resolved that I needed to push some boundaries to see what changes I could effect.

I started with the pain medication. Many of my conditions stemmed from the fact that my entire body was half-asleep, yet I still seemed to feel pain. After a brief consult with my doctors, and against their advice, I stopped the meds cold turkey. The all-night drenching sweats, the agony of restless leg syndrome, and an incomprehensible level of nausea made me appreciate the “rebound effect” of any heavy narcotic. For four days, I seriously considered popping a couple of those pills, but I held out hope, based on others’ experience.

Just one more day
, I told myself every night.
It will get better
.

In the weeks that followed, my bowels began to move, which improved my mobility and digestion and advanced my healing dramatically. Soon I found I could do useful work around the house, though I liked warning people it would not be wise to pay me by the hour.

I still experienced a lot of pain, but not much more than when I was on the drugs. And I found that a clear head made the pain tolerable.
Tradeoffs
.

Whenever I felt like complaining, I thought about being stoned, constipated, and thick-headed. The power of that perspective helped me maintain my resolve.

But then on November 2, 2010, a CT scan revealed the remaining cancer had rapidly progressed and was now inoperable. The treatment options were essentially nonexistent. “I think you’re looking at March or April at the latest,” my oncologist told us. He was giving me four or five months to live.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. My diagnosis had been a “slow-growing” version of pancreatic cancer. What had happened in three months that it was now going rogue?

We moved my treatment from the Mayo Clinic to the Virginia Piper Cancer Institute in Minneapolis so I could be closer to home. To die.

I began preparing for my funeral. I wrote to my childhood priest, planned and wrote out a set of funeral details, expressed my final wishes, and even organized the funeral reception. I thought about writing letters to you boys and Kristin, but I already had twenty-two years’ worth of journal entries. What more could be said?

At Piper, my newly assembled medical team injected new energy into my treatment. They actually listened to what I told them about the inconsistencies in how the cancer was acting. In contrast, at Mayo I received blank stares and resignation. I hadn’t gone to Piper for a second medical opinion, but that’s what they wanted to give me.

Mayo doctors had dismissed several tests because they didn’t think the outcome would change my treatment options for pancreatic cancer. Of course, this would have been true
if I had had pancreatic cancer
.

Three weeks later, on Thanksgiving of all days, pathologists at Piper confirmed with an unmistakable air of giddiness that they had discovered what two previous pathologists at two different hospitals did not: I did not have pancreatic cancer, nor did I have any disease even remotely related to the pancreas.

I had gastrointestinal stromal tumor—or GIST, for short. There was still no cure, but the good news was that there were chemo treatments consisting of a lot more than magic beans and hope.

*   *   *

At a very early age, I had the chance to taste both exceptionally bitter defeats and the sweetest successes. My dad raced cars. And until I was fourteen, every Friday and Saturday night was filled
with adrenaline as we prepared for the excitement of Raceway Park in Shakopee, Minnesota.

In many ways, the emotional ups and downs I experienced later in my life always paled in comparison to watching “Dynamite Denny” race his black, gold-trimmed ’57 Chevy around a quarter-mile asphalt track every summer. It had flames painted on the hood and front fenders, a white-and-red-trimmed “26” emblazoned on the door panels and roof, and slightly canted front tires that helped with steering on the steep banks of each turn.

The deep-throated grumble of that 350-cubic-inch small-block engine with no muffler filled my young senses with a strength and power that seemed supernatural. We knew those races were coming every week, but Dad always startled us when he fired up the engine to put it on the trailer for the race. My brothers and I knew nothing of racing outside of Minnesota, so to us his races may as well have been NASCAR events.

At the track, my brothers and I would head to the back of the grandstand, where two massive trees stood twenty yards apart. After a heated debate over who was going to be number 26, we ran our own twenty-lap “hobby stock” footrace around those trees. Bumping was allowed, but anything too rough would earn a black flag that meant “out of the race”—a ruling that was self-administered, because we were gentlemen, after all.

Two things we always wanted but were never allowed: to drive with Dad to the races and to hang out in the pits during the race. At the end of the race, everyone was allowed into the pits, but not knowing what happened during the race gave it a mystical quality. To conjure a feeling of intense anticipation today, I need only remember what it was like waiting for those big wooden doors to open.

One night we approached a chaotic scene in the car stall where my dad parked his truck and trailer. Something was wrong, and tensions were high. A fight? No. Someone badly hurt? Worse. Dad’s race car had been “claimed.” An arcane and rarely practiced
rule of racing in those days said if you won a race, another driver could claim your car for $150. In return, you would get his car, which was presumed to be a piece of junk.

It speaks to the enduring power of human emotion that here and now, some thirty years later, my eyes fill with tears as I recall that day.

My brothers and I quietly sobbed as we watched the great Satan, Gene Kreuger, drive off with our beloved number 26.
Hate
is a strong word, but that’s what I felt that night.

And what did we get in exchange? A pink car with a plain white “X2” painted on the doors. We were horrified. Not only had we suffered the indignity of having our car taken, but we got an abomination in return.

Dad was stone-faced. He and his crew scoured the pits that night for every can of black spray paint they could find. It was 11:00 p.m., and everyone was tired and ready to go home, but he wasn’t leaving those pits until he made that car his.

The next weekend, after seven nights in the garage with his pit crew, he took that car out onto the track and not only beat Gene Kreuger but won the feature race. There was no boasting or thumbing of noses at Kreuger. The victory alone was enough.

The lesson regarding the failure and success of that experience was all unspoken. The car is important, but it’s the skill, attitude, and the determination of the driver and the team that wins the race. Dad never did get his old car back, but only because he didn’t want it anymore.

*   *   *

Few memories endure like a fistfight. The act touches the nerve root of the human instinct for survival. My first came at Palace Playground in Saint Paul, Minnesota, when I was twelve years old.

Billy Bean was a bully right out of a storybook—he had
long, oily hair and was always dirty and unkempt. When we saw Billy, we instinctively went the other way.

If Billy was the stereotypical bully, I was the stereotypical wimp. I knew how to stand up for myself verbally, but if things ever got physical, I walked away, a pattern of behavior that eventually made me a target.

One day I looked at Billy the wrong way. I didn’t need any hints about what to do when he responded with an invitation to fight. I dismounted my tire swing and took a direct line toward home. But Billy followed, taunting me as I walked the long, hundred-yard blacktop path that led straight to the driveway of our home. I was tempted to run, but I remembered Dad said never to run from a predator you can’t outrace.