Head Cold
I’ve been amazingly free of sickness during the last fifteen months.
Well, that is if you don’t include cancer.
Or the after-effects of chemo.
But now I have a cold–or a head cold, if there’s a difference. You know the drill. My nose is running like a streaker in Alaska. My throat is itchy. I have a slight cough. I’m tired and sleepy, and I’m running hot and cold. And then there’s the obligatory headache, the kind that keeps you from doing much of anything except, as you see, complaining.
I remember when all of this “you’re gonna die” cancer business began, fifteen months ago, back in October of 2007. The doctors and nurses told me to watch out for colds, because my immunities would be down. But how do you watch out for a cold? It’s like telling someone to watch out for grey hair or freckles.
I think their point is to take good care of yourself, especially when you’re getting a cold or right in the middle of one. But guys are notoriously bad about taking care of themselves in these situations. We’re great big, helpless babies, by and large.
So I guess I need to “cowboy up” and take care of myself.
Feed a cold and starve a fever, right? Or is it the other way around? I can never remember. So I just eat a lot either way.
Met a friend for breakfast. Meeting another one tomorrow. Met my parents for lunch. Have lunch plans for the next two days too.
If I get lucky, and it’s feed a cold, then I should be okay. And if I’m wrong? Well, at least I’ve helped the economy a little.
Crazy Weekend
“So… how are you guys doing?” people ask, somewhat tentatively, as if they’re anticipating a really bad answer.
They know the Chastains have a gloomy cloud floating overhead, one that is dark and threatening to drop a nasty storm on us at any time. And as a result they think we’re much sadder than we are.
Truth is, however, we’re doing well. We’re not walking around with our heads down, kicking rocks and stepping on spiders. We’re not all sad and gloomy, obsessing on the future.
Maddye doesn’t wake up and think, “Oh no, Dad!” LeAnn isn’t, I assure you, overwhelmed with thoughts of ”poor Jim.” Ford isn’t writing melancholy tunes with overtones of death or metaphors of a disintegrating father figure.
I’m not thinking about ”it” all the time. For where does that get me, really?
For now, we’re happy. We have each other. We have today. We have a crazy busy weekend, packed with fun things. And that’s more than enough.
Tonight, Ford will play an acoustic set or two at the Second Wind Coffee House on Buchanan Street in Norman, starting at 8 p.m.
On Saturday, LeAnn will be coaching Whittier’s Math Counts team at the State Finals, held at the Embassy Suites in Norman. Once again, she has one of the best teams in the state, and she’s very excited about their chances.
I’ll be speaking to a writer’s group on Saturday morning, then heading to Dallas to do a big house concert on Saturday night. It will be a night of music and poetry with my friends Billy Crockett and Nathan Brown. Several of my friends are heading that way, and I can’t wait to see them!
Maddye’s weekend looks a little less exciting. She’s got a senior paper to work on. But Maddye has a way of finding fun.
So the Chastains are not sad. We are doing well, thank you. And we hope you are too.
Alternative Therapies – Part 2
Last month, I posted an entry entitled “Alternative Therapies.” It was, I thought, a fairly humorous, yet horrifying, look at the situation people like me find themselves in. That is, because we’ve been declared “terminal,” we are sitting ducks for every person out there with a miracle cure.
We get these calls, letters, emails, begging us to consider this product, that procedure, this ritual, that prayer.
Indeed, each week I receive a fairly steady stream of well-wishers who have something that will cure me of the stage IV colon cancer that has metastasized to my liver and lungs. And Alternative Therapies was about how some of those calls or suggestions or contacts can get downright awkward.
Most of the people who make these contacts have their hearts in the right places, I think, but you’ve got to wonder about their brains. Others are undoubtedly snake oil salesmen, looking to make a quick buck off anyone regardless of their situation. (As my friend John used to say, there’s a special place in hell for people like that.) Others may actually have something worthwhile to offer. Problem is you’re never quite sure.
Just this week, I’ve been contacted by someone with a prayer that has reportedly healed every person who’s ever prayed it. I’ve been contacted by someone about a faith healing group from another country who would come and lay hands on me, if I so desired. Someone else contacted me about a product that has shown great results for people like me, but I was concerned when I saw the word “amway” in the email address.
(By the way I’m not poking fun at any of these people. Honestly. I’m just reporting what has happened.)
Others call and leave a message: “Are you the Jim Chastain that is in the newspaper? Well, if so, you need to call me right away, because I’ve got something you’ll really want to hear.” They always seem to leave a long distance number.
Beep! (That’s the sound of me deleting their message.)
Anyway, I usually get several responses from readers after I post a new blog. Some respond on the Oklahoman site, and some send me emails. But when I posted Alternative Therapies, nobody responded. It kind of bummed me out.
I worked hard on that, I thought. Didn’t anyone find it interesting?
Perhaps it’s a touchy subject, my search for wellness or the fountain of youth. Perhaps Alternative Therapies wasn’t as funny as I’d hoped it was. It was, I’ll admit, a bit dark.
Perhaps no one knew what to say.
I think we all want to believe there’s a magical (or natural or spiritual) fix for whatever has taken us down. Although my entry was humorous, there was a sadness, a loneliness, behind it too. Can you believe this stuff actually happens? it implied.
Truthfully though, it rarely bothers me when someone contacts me about a miracle cure. I mean, I’ve become sort of a detached, third-party observer to these things. I listen with fascination, like a reporter who’s on to something big.
That’s not always the case. Sometimes the calls hit me hard for a moment or two. I don’t want to pretend I’m tougher than I am. But for the most part, I don’t mind getting these calls. They are, at the very least, interesting.
But still, you’ve got to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say. In other words, you need to listen closely, objectively, unemotionally, so you can put each caller in the proper category.
Category 1 – quack. Category 2 – huckster. Category 3 - possibility.
Here’s a call I received recently that will hopefully illustrate what I’m talking about, this wheat and chaff business. (What follows is a paraphrase of a real conversation.)
“Is this Jim Chastain? From the paper?” the caller asked.
“Uh, yes. I think so.”
“Well, Jim, you don’t know me, but I have some important information for you. I wasn’t sure whether or not to call, but I thought, what the heck. I’ll just tell you what I have to say and you can decide what to do with it.”
Bad sign number one: The caller did not know me or anyone connected to me. I had no ability to hold him accountable for what he had to offer.
Good sign number one: He wasn’t going to try to force a decision right then. Could be a sales technique, but he seemed fairly genuine.
Bad sign number two: The caller had a folksy style of talking, like a farmer or someone you’d meet over at the county fair. This isn’t bad, per se, but he was, after all, going to give me advice on an issue that modern science had been unable to fix.
“Jim, there’s this clinic just over the border in Juarez, Mexico, and let me tell you, they are doing some amazing things over there. I was just like you. I had cancer and was told I needed chemotherapy and radiation and that I would probably die anyway. But someone told me about this clinic, and I thought, well, what do I have to lose? And so I went over there, and they gave me this natural product, and I’m telling you, six weeks later, the cancer was gone. Completely gone.”
Bad sign number three: The clinic was in Mexico. Not just Mexico, but Juarez, Mexico. In my experience, Juarez Mexico is not the first place you think of when it comes to quality medical care. No, even Mexico would fall someplace way down on the list. Perhaps 62nd or so, just after Turkey.
Bad sign number four: The caller was very unspecific about what type of cancer he’d had. I mean comparing colon/liver cancer with, say, brain cancer or skin cancer is like comparing apples to horse apples.
“I know what you’re thinking, Jim. Mexico? That’s where the desperate people go. But let me tell you, this clinic is different. It started out in Illinois, in 1898. And after awhile, they moved it to Dallas, Texas. But the FDA was getting on their case, because they don’t want it to get out that there’s a natural cure for cancer. So to make it easier, they moved to Juarez.”
Bad sign number five: The clinic had been forced to move at least once, possibly twice, due to FDA concerns.
Bad sign number six: The caller repeated that paranoid tale I often hear about a nationwide conspiracy to keep cancer patients from knowing the truth about a “natural” cure to cancer. The FDA is always the bad boy in these stories, doing its best to send all the money to the doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals.
Bad sign number seven: The caller pronounced Illinois with an “s” on the end. That creeped me out.
“Now Jim, here’s what happened. There was this guy in Illinois who had a horse that he just loved, but the horse got cancer. The vet told this gentleman that he’d have to put the horse down, but the guy couldn’t do it. So he took his horse out to a farm out in the country and let the horse roam around freely. After awhile, the horse started getting better. When this fellow took the horse to the vet, they discovered the cancer was gone! They figured it had to be something out there in the field that the horse was eating, so they went out there and took clippings of everything the horse ate. Then they bottled the stuff up.”
Shall I go on? Why of course I should.
Bad sign number eight: Patient number one was not a human.
Bad sign number nine: The miracle cure is essentially horse feed.
“Now Jim, when you take this stuff, here’s what will happen. After a couple of weeks, you’ll get this bump or boil someplace on your body. Could be anywhere. Now the bump will keep getting bigger and bigger. But don’t mess with it; don’t even touch it. Eventually it will burst open, and this fluid will ooze out of it. That fluid’s your cancer.”
Bad sign number ten: Basically everything I just wrote.
“Now here’s the deal Jim. You just call these people, just call ’em right up, and they’ll get you in the same week. You don’t even have to have an initial exam. I don’t think you have to have a passport to get over there, just a driver’s license. Now it’ll cost you 4,000 bucks, but that’s a heck of a lot less than chemo.”
Bad sign number eleven: the lack of standard medical protocols.
Bad sign number twelve: The money, of course.
The man wanted me to take $4,000 cash to Juarez, Mexico, at a time when Americans have been warned by their government to stay away from border towns, due to violence and kidnappings. Once there, I was to purchase some unknown substance that horses liked but the FDA frowned upon and attempt to get it back into the good ole US of A. Then, I was to consume that unknown product, hoping a gigantic boil would surface on my body and eventually burst, at which time I would be healed.
So, which category do you think I placed this caller in?
Book Update
It’s been two months since I posted a blog entry entitled “To Read or Not To Read, That’s Not the Question.” Time flies when you’re, uh, having fun.
The idea behind that blog was to get the best of your best book suggestions. In other words, assuming the doctors are correct when they say I’m going to give up the ghost somewhere in the near future, what books MUST I read before that happens?
That’s not, hey, here’s a great book you might want to take a look at. I’m talkin’ absolutely, indisputably, unbelievably fantastic books, the kind that may change my life.
It’s a tall order.
Well, I’m pleased to report that I received a lot of responses to that particular entry. Apparently, we have a lot of readers out there, which is good since I’m blogging like there’s no tomorrow.
Anyway, your book suggestions have now been tallied, and I thought you might want to know the results.
Drum roll please…
We have a forty-three way tie for first!
That is, forty three books received one vote.
Unfortunately, no books received more than one vote.
Arrgghhh!!!!
Truthfully, a few books did receive more than one vote. Unfortunately, I’d already read them. A Prayer for Owen Meany. 1984. Animal Farm. The Catcher in the Rye. The Bible. The Harry Potter series. (By the way, you can view a list of my favorite 100 books of all time at my website, www.jimchastain.com , under the heading Books, if you’re completely bored or if that interests you in any way.)
So, while I’m waiting for someone to break the tie, I guess I’ll keep reading whatever I happen to decide is a MUST read. Right now, that means Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens and The Glass Castle, a terrific memoir by Jeannette Walls.
The Movie Star Look
In 1983 I attended summer school at Northeastern State in Tahlequah. I lived with my great-grandmother, worked for my brother-in-law Terry (all three of my brother-in-laws are named Terry), watched the Chicago Cubs on WGN, ate Kentucky Fried Chicken from down the road, and read The Shining, which scared the crap out of me.
My summer school classes were speech and classic literature, interesting summer-like topics I believed. And it would be fun, going to a school where nobody knew me. I’d be anonymous for a few months.
But while going to classes in the morning, I’d get stopped all the time by strangers. “Wade!” they say, while holding out a hand for me to shake. (I’m not sure it was Wade, could’ve been Bill, or Ed, or Herbert, for all I remember. But for purposes of moving on, let’s say it was Wade.)
Or they’d walk by me and wave or give me a shout out. “Wade, man, how’s it going?”
I apparently had a near twin on campus, someone who must’ve looked way-too-much like me. I mean this happened every single day day I went to class, sometimes multiple times. In fact my sister Lori, who lives in Tahlequah, told me she was at a restaurant in town once and saw me with some people she didn’t know. She came over to give me a hug, and it took something like a couple of minutes after she was up close to Wade for her to figure it out.
Creepy.
Apparently this guy was a football player, someone later told me, although that makes the misidentification even stranger, because I weighed about 155 at the time. Too bad I never saw him.
This has been a strange recurring pattern in my life. People have always told me that I look a lot like someone they know. I guess I have one of those generic faces or it’s my curly hair or something else.
Anyway, just after college, people began telling me I looked like that guy from the t.v. show Bosom Buddies and the movie Splash. (Tom Hanks was then just becoming a star.) But I’d seen those shows and noticed only a slight resemblance, so I thought people were exaggerating. But when the movie Big came out, I noticed we did look a lot alike. I know that probably sounds crazy now, but it was something about the hair, the shape of our faces, our skin color and general build then.
This only lasted a few years. Hanks is seven years older than me, so his hairline began receding before mine and he put on a little weight. I started wearing glasses again and cut my hair short. Before long we stopped looking like each other at all. But for a few years, it was cool, looking like a movie star. I mean, Hanks may not make the top ten list of actors one would choose to look like, but he’s no Ernest Borgnine.
During my middle thirties, people would still tell me, from time to time, that I looked a lot like someone they know. Someone from Minnesota, Oregon, Turkey, or Catoosa. A friend would then confirm it. “Yes,” they’d say. “He does look a lot like Chico.”
After I lost my arm at age 40, these types of comments seemed to disappear into thin air. Apparently the absence of a major appendage was preventing people from making facial comparisons. So to distract people from my arm, I decided to change things up. I reduced my shaves to once or twice a week. And I grew my hair out again, so it was dark, curly, and wild, the “mad scientist look,” according to Skye, the girl who cuts my hair.
Since that time my hair has been compared to that of Christopher Walken, Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future, and Kramer from Seinfeld.
However, it’s been quite a while since that brief period in my life when I had the movie-star look. 15 years or so.
But during the last two months, as chemotherapy has caused an alarming amount of hair loss, I’ve been noticing another movie star beginning to emerge in the mirror, staring straight back at me: Woody Allen.
Think about it. The dark glasses. The pasty-white complexion. The once little bald spot on the top of my head has become, uhh, ginormous. I’ve even got some of his quirks. Neurotic. A somewhat shaky demeanor. And the writer’s angst. With a little more weight loss, someone might actually want to take a look at my screenplays.
But alas, as more and more hair falls out, a new look is surely coming. For right now I’m beginning to look like “one of those guys.” You know, someone who seems incapable of accepting that hair loss happens.
Before long, I’m sure I’ll be heading back to Skye and telling her to “just get rid of it.” As an act of solidarity, I’ve already had one friend offer to get shaved along with me. He’s mostly bald already, but I appreciate the gesture.
When I asked Ken Raymond and John Clanton, the Oklahoman team who’ve been following me around, if they might want to accompany me when I get my hair cut off, they both said ”yes” way too fast. I seemed to notice a gleam in their eyes, a slight increase in their breathing, a sliver of a smile, and a smacking of their lips. They’re both follically challenged, so they seemed more than willing to escort me over to their team.
Others, who are in the medical field and are amazed that I have any hair left at all, have urged me not to cut it. But it’s inevitable.
So one of these days when you come to this site, you’ll probably see them put the razor to my head. And then we’ll see who else I start looking like.
Pain in the… Brain
I’m writing from the Cade Cancer Center at OU Physicians in Oklahoma City. I’m starting my umpteenth chemo treatment, so I must write fast, before “chemo brain” sets in.
I awoke early this morning because I had scheduled breakfast with my writer friend Molly Griffis. I try to eat a good breakfast on chemo days, because who knows how long it will be before I feel like eating again.
Anyway, as I was getting ready to leave, I started feeling nauseous. This is not uncommon, of course, for someone doing chemo, but nausea usually only lasts two or three days after chemo and I was two weeks out.
I proceeded to do two or three dry heaves. If I’d wanted, I could’ve puked right then. My stomach was churning like an Amish girl making butter.
But here’s the rub. The nausea was all in my head.
They call it anticipatory nausea or anticipatory symptoms. Like the phantom pain I sometimes feel from my missing right arm, my brain was anticipating the chemo I was about to receive that day. And as if punishing me for some past misdeed–perhaps a college frat party gone amok or those John Grisham books I read in my thirties–it was telling my body to be nauseous even though there was no real reason for it yet.
Fortunately, even though the nausea was just a bad joke my brain was playing on me, I could take an actual nausea pill and make it go away. That’s right, real medicine works for fake symptoms. Wish that worked for phantom pain in my missing right arm, but it doesn’t.
For me, anticipatory nausea always begins in the 24 hour period before chemo. Our brains are that scheduled, that capable of looking forward to what’s coming our way. It’s pretty amazing, really.
The trouble is, this week my brain started anticipating the chemo a day early. So I had two days of fake nausea, rather than one. It wasn’t fair.
I guess my brain was lodging some other grievance. Perhaps it was that year I watched Survivor or American Idol. Maybe it my brief stint as a deacon. Or maybe it was when I took my daughter to see Barney, the Musical.
I’m not sure. Perhaps my brain just thinks it’s funny.
Road Construction-Are You Kidding Me?
So I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks ago, when a friend calls me on my cell phone. (Don’t worry, I have one of those bluetooth gizmos for my phone, so I’m actually able to take a call and drive with one arm.) He asks me what I’m doing, and I say driving home.
“Has the I-35 road construction started?” he asks.
“What I-35 road construction?” I reply.
He starts talking about roadblocks and closed off lanes and reduced speeds and long delays between Norman and Oklahoma City. But I cut him off.
“Didn’t they work on I-35 for something like ten years and then finally open it up about two years ago?” (I know the answer to this question. It’s YES!)
My friend proceeds to laugh.
“I guess I’ll just let you find out for yourself,” he says.
A few days later I’m sitting in a long line of traffic. My normal twenty to twenty-five minute drive home has turned into a thirty to forty minute drive, while the drive to work takes at least five minutes more than it did.
Consequently, someone has robbed me of approximately twenty minutes a day and more than an hour and a half per week!
Relax, they tell you in the newspapers and on t.v. It will all be completed in June of 2010.
Wait a minute, I think. I’m terminal. That essentially means for the rest of my life.
Helloooooooo.
I had a similar reaction at the end of 2007. It was just after I’d learned about cancer spreading to my liver when the City of Norman began advertising the beginning of a little road project around 36th Street and Main, by the mall. I happen to live a few streets away.
Shortly thereafter, you could hardly get out of our neighborhood, and the intersection at the mall was an absolute nightmare. Sometimes you weren’t allowed to turn left. Sometimes you weren’t allowed to turn right. Sometimes the traffic was backed up for a half mile. And all the time people were grumpy.
You mean I’m going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life? I thought a week or two into it. It didn’t seem fair. They hadn’t even asked.
The project was supposed to take a year, I believe, but that “goal” is already long gone. Meanwhile, I almost got creamed by a car yesterday while trying to turn out of my neighborhood. No matter how many ditches they dig or lanes they shut down or orange cones they put up, some people still refuse to believe there’s cause to slow down.
It’s a continuing nuisance, living on a different time table than the rest of the world. I feel like my voice isn’t being heard, that I’m in some minority with no political pull whatsoever, like the legislator who opposes legislative pay raises.
This messed-up time table happens to me all the time. I opened the mail a couple of weeks ago and found a $300 bill from the Oklahoma Bar Association. My yearly bar dues (I know what you’re thinking, but these are yearly “fees,” a/k/a taxes, that I must pay to keep my attorney’s license current) were supposed to be paid by mid February or I would be fined.
And I’m thinking, I wonder if these could be prorated, so I could pay them month-to-month?
The Week in Review
It’s been a tough week.
Not just for me, but for a lot of people I know.
As last week began, I had just completed a series of tributes to some special people in my life who had died. I loved writing the tributes, because I loved the people about whom I was writing.
But I won’t kid you. It was grueling work, mostly because of the raw emotions involved. I cried at some point while writing each tribute–relax, it’s what I do–and I heard from many people who cried too, after the tributes were published. Old memories had been stirred up, along with the pain attached thereto.
I’d decided it was high time for some levity. I mean, I’ve heard from plenty of people who’ve said my blog is ”difficult” for them because “it’s too sad.” So I try to stay balanced, to the extent that I can.
Along that line, I had several “lighter” entries planned, stuff designed to keep readers from doing the Monty Python thing. (You know, “run away!”)
I was just about to publish an entry I’d completed a bit earlier, a sort of bio entry about my life. The bio was to run in conjunction with Ken Raymond’s “chapter two” newspaper story. Thereafter, I would start work on the lighter topics.
I was about to post the bio on my blog last Monday when tragedy struck. A 44 year old mother and friend of my family had a sudden heart attack, possibly the result of a blood clot. She was fighting for her life.
It felt silly and insensitive to start work on the lighter material while my friend and her family were in limbo. Besides, I wasn’t exactly in a funny mood, to put it mildly. So I decided to hold off.
She died on Monday night.
So the next day, after posting the bio entry, which itself seemed wholly unimportant, I ditched my plans to work on the lighter entries. Instead, I spent the rest of the week writing and thinking about our friend who had died. I tried to keep it tasteful and brief, knowing her family had not asked to be thrust into a spotlight.
Although the tragedy was ”not about me,” it had so many haunting parallels. A person dies in her middle forties. Kids left behind, still in high school. Grieving parents. Siblings trying their best to find their way.
For me, attending the funeral was something akin to Huckleberry Finn hiding in the back and watching his. I mean I saw many of my own friends there. I watched people I love struggling through their grief. And I felt the awful permanence of it all.
Like I said, it was a tough week.
But a new week dawns, and I will now turn to some of my lighter entries. Not because I’ve moved on, mind you.
No, it’s because we could probably all use a little humor right now.
The Search for Closure
In the aftermath of Sherri Little’s funeral last Thursday, I continue thinking of the Littles, the Tiedemans (Sherri’s twin sister is Kerri Tiedeman), the Dickeys (Sherri’s younger sister is Tracee Dickey) and the rest of their family.
I’m reminded of what it was like after my sister died. A week or so after the funeral, somebody came up to me all bright and cheery and asked, “Hey, how are you?” Not in the sense of how was I doing through all the tragedy, but in the “hi, how are you” way people great each other. This person obviously hadn’t been to the funeral and had forgotten all about my sister’s death.
That hurt.
After a month or so, others who had been to the funeral began doing the same thing. “Hey man, how’s it going?” they’d say, all rosy and chipper.
They’d moved on, you see. They weren’t as close to Karyn as I was. She wasn’t an everyday part of their life.
As time went on, only a handful of us, those who known Karyn for years and were still hurting, remained. I learned this while talking to LeAnn one day, perhaps three or four months after the funeral.
“Is there ever a time when she’s not right there, right there on your mind?” I asked.
“Honestly Jim,” she said. “I don’t think about her that much anymore.”
LeAnn hadn’t grown up with Karyn. She’d never lived with her or gone on vacation with her. She only saw Karyn a couple of times a year, during the holidays.
This is the way it is with death. The initial shock may impact thousands. The aftershocks may affect a hundred or so. But for a dozen, maybe only a handful, an entire way of life has crumbled and has to be slowly rebuilt.
Sometimes, during a funeral or on TV after some tragedy has occurred, someone will speak of “finding closure,” “healing,” or “moving on.” I’m always bothered when this occurs in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, when families are still in shock over the events.
We all want to heal, of course. But for those closest to the person who has died, the thought of “closure” or “moving on” can seem offensive, nonsensical, or ridiculous. We might even feel guilty about it. We wonder what it would say about our loved one if we were “over it” in a week.
And guilt has another side too. Some might actually pretend to be over it, because they think they should be or that’s what those close to them expect. Meanwhile, they’re still hurting deeply inside.
Closure, or more appropriately acceptance, will take differing amounts of time for different people. For some it may take more than a year before anything close to acceptance comes our way.
For those of you who know someone affected by a sudden tragic death, here are two things you can ask. First, what can I do for this person today? And, second, what can I do for them in a few weeks, after the rest of the world has inevitably moved on?
Yesterday’s Funeral
It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.
John Little, a senior at Norman North High School, had lost his mother Sherri only three days earlier. Sherri died unexpectedly last Monday, a victim, I’m told, of what appears to be a blood clot that found its way to her heart.
The grieving family had to make the necessary arrangements, including plans for the funeral. Difficult decisions had to be made. Who will lead? Who will sing? Who will pray? Who will speak?
While discussing possible eulogies, someone asked Sherri’s husband Brad whether anyone in the family would speak. “No,” Brad said, thinking perhaps that the task would be beyond difficult.
But John said he wanted to speak. He had some things he wanted to say, needed to say. Like most teenagers, he’d never expected his mom would be here one day, gone the next. Like most teenagers, especially teenage males, he probably kept a lot of things inside.
It’s hard for most of us to grasp how tenuous life is. But for teenagers, living in the day to day craziness that is high school, it’s practically impossible. But John knew it now. He felt it. And he wanted to speak.
So on Thursday afternoon, February 19, 2009, before hundreds at his mother’s funeral, John Little, accompanied by his father Brad and his sisters Courtney and Katie, took the stage. And he delivered a beautiful eulogy, telling the heartsick crowd what an outstanding person his mother was and how much he’d loved her.
I can’t lie to you. It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever watched. But it was also one of the bravest and most memorable moments I can recall.
I don’t know John all that well. But I knew his mom. And I know she loved him and was proud of him. Just like we all were yesterday afternoon.
