The news came by fax. It came by phone. It came by email. Messages brimmed with sorrow. I mourn. I cry.
Two bombshells dropped around us just before Memorial Day, blasts
close enough to cause me to run for shelter into the arms of others. Just a presidential term removed from losing a college friend to the Big C, word arrived out of Minnesota that fellow Woodstock alum Scott Reinhard has testicular cancer. A few days later, a short obituary from the Northwest Herald was passed along to me announcing that Julie White had died in a car accident at age 24.
For reasons frightening and familiar, this news was difficult to absorb. All of age 32, I was overwhelmed with a fear of dying and began lamenting paths taken and avoided since 1968. I became some despondent, I did something I rarely do these days. I read a book.
It wasn’t just any book. It was Mitch Albom’s “Tuesday’s with Morrie.” Out of the literary loop since James Michener wrote “Space,” even I know it won some deserved acclaim. Oprah liked it enough to push for a movie version of the death waltz danced by Mitch’s college professor in the middle of the last decade. And it was Mitch Albom, one of my favorite sportswriters — Bobby Knight bashing aside — and a double-digit winner of annual journalism awards.
“Tuesdays” had sat on my living room coffee table for weeks (dare I write, months?) waiting for that free moment. I ingest Sporting News issues when they arrive, but otherwise have put off my reading to-do list until I have a cozy fireplace to help me enjoy the experience properly. Time has been very limited for a while now trying to do all of the things a 70-hour-a-week worker requires to feel productive. But as I packed up some belongings for a trip back to Woodstock — Carter’s first visit to the homeland — I felt very drawn to the little tan book about death.
Julie White is the reason why I sat down and finally read it in one sitting. I knew her only as a little girl, the tag-along accompanying Kristn White to movies. She was a bicentennial child, which put her a full two schools behind me growing up. Not much in common except for a love of her big sister and family. That Julie White had died a long time ago, quite unintentionally, when I failed to keep in touch. The young woman identified in the May 24 obituary was someone I never knew.
Sitting in her parents’ home protected from the quiet Sunday morning drizzle, I got to meet Julie again. An artist like her mom, the youngest White was completing a degree in graphic design while raising a little girl (Hannah). A free spirit like her brother Mark, Julie once bought flowers for everyone she met on campus. At times a lazy student in high school, she exhibited a worldly wisdom that repeatedly stunned those around her. That she loved her family all of her life was assured.
I am a bit ashamed that is as close as I managed to get to Julie White, because I know I would have loved talking with her. We could have shared philosophical exchanges over email and begged the other to take a quick look at a web site in development. We could have reminisced about growing up in Woodstock and shared what it was like from the vantage of a different decade. I would have sent her pictures of Carter that might have found there way into a bit of artistry she was working on. We would have shared our lives.
Scott Reinhard is still very much alive. He wants to follow up the MALS degree he received last month from Hamline University with an MBA in Finance from the University of Minnesota. He hopes to successfully defend his first Reality Fantasy Football title this fall. He’s a new groom anxious to introduce his bride, Jennifer, to his friends and neighbors. With the exception of the timing of the painful and sudden growth, he is enjoying life and looking forward to the next chapter.
That freakish ride we live turns at the most unexpected times. Our little Kinko — a lifetime bachelor — was married on Sunday. His first day trip with his wife as a couple was to the hospital to begin a nine-week chemotherapy treatment that is certain to make him physically weak and ill.
The predicament endured by this Scott, not quite thirty-something, brought back memories of another Scott I used to know. A joker and friend to the end, Scott Seator doubled over back in the mid ’90s while trying to catch a frisbee at a wedding. A couple of operations and many chemo sessions later, he ran out of time. They called what got him “Whilm’s Disease,” a highly curable cancer when found in small children. It’s almost non-existent in adults, something Scott almost bragged about. A baseball fan forever, he left just as September callups were starting to bloom. He never did see anyone break 61 homers.
Testicular cancer, Scott Reinhard tells me, is most prevalent in men our age. In between shots and pills, Scott is on a mission to spread the word and get his buddies to check themselves over. I tried to follow that advice, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Nor do I know if not finding anything means anything. Scott was checked out with a clean bill of health not a year before only to have the cancer show up out of nowhere on the eve of his wedding.
This has been a lot to absorb in pretty short order. My head is still reeling, and my worries abound. Death. Cancer. Tuesdays.
Which brings me back to Mitch and Morrie.
Having finished Albom’s thesis on life the same day I started — a combination of the book’s rapture and brevity — I am amazed it took me so long to start. I find myself saying that about a lot of things, whether it be as grand as writing a screenplay or as simple as sending a Christmas card. There never seems to be enough time or energy in the allotted day to do all of the things waiting their turn in the back of my mind.
I identified with Mitch Albom even before he got to the part where his long-forgotten college professor welcomed his student back from his deathbed. Long before Morrie suffocated from the weight of his own lungs, the inevitable conclusion to ALS. Here was a man who had life figured out by age 20 only to find his diploma wasn’t enough to make his plans successful. I don’t have the stellar sportswriting career as a fallback, but I do suffer the same warped notion that working twelve-hour days and twice on Sundays is the key to getting over the final hurdle to life-long happiness. “If only,” I repeat again and again. And, “just one more week of this.” These are my mantras. They keep the Christmas cards from ever getting written.
I suppose when I’m in this state of mind, I find a lot more profound and eternal truths than might actually be there. “Love each other or perish,” Morrie used to say. And, “you have to learn how to die in order to learn how to live.” I’ve had a week to sort through my feelings in between 12-hour work days, and those are the phrases that keep coming to mind.
Carter remains oblivious to the tumultuous weeks that have passed our way recently. His coos and belly laughs serve as medicine for the ills of the day, any day. This new boy surely senses a minor glitch in his father, but thus far he’s been spared that byproduct of speech and literacy — pain — that appears from time to time. He giggles at what he doesn’t know. Mostly, I try to giggle with him.
Perhaps the hardest part of the freakish ride is accepting that eventually it has to end. I look down past his Clendening nose into his Isbister eyes. I want to protect him from death. I don’t want him to ever suffer my death, and I don’t ever want to have to live without him. One of the two has to happen. I’m trying to focus on the little man bouncing on my knee instead of the end of the line.
One of the last things Julie did was complete a web project for school. Kris passed along the URL right before I headed home. I wanted to include it here — http://students.uww.edu/whiteja10/index.htm — but it’s no longer around. The Web is a reflection of our life, after all, and sites are born and die just as we do.
I wish Julie was there for you when you click. But no matter, I’ll let her close this journal out herself with a profound and eternal truth …
It’s time to say
goodbyeIt won’t be easy
but it makes it that much more worth having
when you finally
get there