“Goodbye my friends it’s hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky. Now that the spring is in the air, little children everywhere. When you see them, I’ll be there. We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun. But the wine and the song, like the seasons have all gone”. Such a dark song back in the mid-70’s when this much loved classic came out. And who doesn’t know this song right?, easy to sing along to, with very simple lyrics on looking back over your life as you realize the end is drawing near. Well, it was on a Thursday, July 6th, 2017, when I was hit with the news that I might want to start singing this song myself. But first, let’s go back two months prior, on an early May morning when shaving, I noticed a lump on my neck. Huh, that’s weird, must be an ingrown hair I thought? A few days later, I started to feel ill at a live broadcast at one of my clients place of business. I excused myself, went out to the truck and laid down til the end of the show. I felt so bad, that I actually bailed out of playing golf that afternoon with another client of mine and all the guys from the show. That next day, I saw my family doctor for an examination. Looking back now, I imagine he might have had an idea what the cause of it was. Because he had me drive straight to the local hospital to get scanned. The results were somewhat inconclusive and I actually started feeling better. So much so that I traveled to our nation’s capital for our annual guys’ trip just a few weeks later. Everything was back to normal, the bump on my neck was just a bump in the road right?
Now what was it that I was telling you on an earlier blog?, about how life balances out? light vs. dark, good vs. evil, yin vs. yang? Well fair warning – here comes the dark, the evil, the yang. After a couple of scans, my ENT specialist scheduled me for a biopsy, you know just to make sure that everything’s good. When I woke up from that procedure (still groggy and somewhat out of it of course), I did notice that the doctor wasn’t anywhere around. So I thought “oh, that’s a good sign right?, nothing to worry about, where’s my clothes?, let’s get out of here!”. But first I suppose I need to ask the woman that I loved more than anything in the world “so what did they say?”. She looked at me and matter-of-factly responded with “you’ve got cancer”. Looking back, I think I might have even chuckled?, of course she wasn’t serious, that’s funny. I’m fine, seriously where’s my clothes, it’s a holiday weekend, let’s roll. I soon would find out that not only was she not joking, and that I did in fact have cancer, but also they said it was in my throat, that I would need surgery to dissect my neck wide open so that they could remove up to nine lymph nodes, followed by several rounds of chemo treatment, and the most brutal part of it all, six consecutive weeks of daily radiation thru my neck. And oh yea, my cancer is somewhere between a stage 3 to 4, and that after the first two weeks of radiation, I would no longer be able to eat, drink or even simply swallow. But hey, it’s survivable they said.
Now while I would never recommend for anyone to go thru something this harrowing, and I never, ever want to revisit this as well, in a very strange way it was a positive experience. I learned something about me along the way. How fleeting our lives really are, how much love you do actually have for the people around you, and of course as they say (and yes I know that it’s cliché) it really does make you appreciate the small things in life. And another thing I knew that I needed to correct as soon as possible before the grim reaper came for me, I didn’t have anything down on paper for that inevitable event when it does come (and it will come, nobody gets out of here alive as they say). My daughters had no way of knowing what I would have liked for my services, no knowledge of any of my banking passwords, life insurance, or how to get into my savings for them when that day does come. So I wrote everything down on paper, including my very own eulogy that I wrote for the services along with the music that I wanted to be played. And oh yea, even though there’s humor in it (of course there is, it’s me we’re talking about here), there will be some tears shed. Doing all that was in a way, very therapeutic for me. And I would recommend taking those same exact steps to anyone I know, no matter how healthy you may be.
So okay Lord, or whatever entity there may be that is out there waiting for me to draw my last breath. I’m ready, I’ve taken care of everything that I can think of. I’ve had a great life, raised two beautiful daughters that are the love of my life that I certainly didn’t deserve, a great job and career that I never deserved, dear lifetime friends and of course a woman that certainly deserves far better than me (and of course as you know by now, she took that advice to heart a few years later). Come get me, I’m ready to check out!
“Not so fast” he said, or she said, or it said. “There’s still things to do, accomplishments to still be made, heartache to survive, and yes, believe it or not, love to still be made”. So basically more joy, more fun, and more seasons in the sun.