Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  He was still planning to say that. But he was a long way from savoring what would come after that. At some point that night, he was going to have to tell his parents that he was dying.

  13

  It Can’t Be True

  WHEN MARSHA AND BRUCE KISSED each other goodbye in the Minneapolis airport on the morning of January 18, it was the first time they had been apart—other than for short periods while Bruce was undergoing tests at the clinic—in four days. The three days since the diagnosis were still a blur to both of them. Marsha had made one more phone call, the one she had promised to Greg Rita, before they left. They had told no one else. Brian had promised not to tell anyone else in the family until Bruce could get back to Florida and tell his parents.

  As they boarded their flights that morning, Bruce and Marsha each had a chance to think, for the first time, about what had just happened to them. Marsha had forced herself to remain calm and strong most of the time since Wednesday afternoon. She knew that anytime she started crying, Bruce was going to cry, so she tried not to except when he cried and she had to comfort him. Bruce had said to her on that first night that if she didn’t want to go through with the wedding, especially knowing how her “uncle” had died, he would understand completely. She had told him very firmly not to think or talk that way.

  But now, as the plane left Minneapolis and banked away from the airport and began climbing, she heard the calm voice of the pilot telling the passengers that if they looked out from the left side they could see the famed Mayo Clinic below them. Against her better judgment, Marsha looked down and there it was. She recognized the sprawling Mayo campus, could even pick out the buildings they had been in the past few days.

  “That was when I lost it,” she said. “Completely lost it.”

  Once she started to cry, she couldn’t stop. A flight attendant brought her some tissues and sat down in the empty seat next to her to try to comfort her. Marsha was grateful and kept apologizing for not being able to stop crying. “But I just couldn’t stop,” she said.

  It was then, for the first time, that she thought about what lay ahead. She had her children to consider. They hadn’t even met Bruce yet, and now they would be meeting him and finding out he had a fatal disease almost at once. As a devout Christian, Marsha believed that she and Brice and Avery would see Bruce again even if he did die young, and she took some comfort in that. On Wednesday she had urged Bruce to revisit his Christianity and his faith, and he had told her that he would do so. But the specter of going through the months and, she hoped, years ahead was frightening. She cried most of the way to Dallas.

  Bruce’s plane was late leaving Minneapolis for Cincinnati. As he sat by the window and watched the plane being deiced, he looked around at the blank faces of the other passengers. “The thought occurred to me,” he said later, “that I was probably the only person on the plane who really didn’t care one way or the other if the plane crashed. I was thinking about telling my parents and my sisters, and about Marsha and her kids. Everything was so bleak. I wanted to care, but at that moment it was tough.”

  Marsha got to Jacksonville before Bruce and was waiting for him when he got off the plane. “I had dealt with all these thoughts and fears all day long,” she said. “But when I saw him come off the plane with his carry-on bag slung over his shoulder, giving me that smile of his when he saw me, I just said to myself, ‘No way am I leaving him now. I love him and I’m going to be with him every minute I can.’ Once I made that decision, right then and there I started to feel better.”

  Bruce wasn’t feeling good about anything—except being out of snowy Minnesota and back in the warmth of Florida—as they drove down I-95 to Vero Beach. “All I could think,” he said, “was that I was about to break my parents’ hearts.”

  There was one consolation awaiting Bruce when they arrived at his parents’ condo. Waiting for them, in addition to Jay and Natalie, was Bruce’s aunt Joan, someone he had been very close to since boyhood. Joan Walsh is Jay’s older sister. Knowing how heartbreaking the news would be for his parents, Brian had made a unilateral decision to call her and tell her what had happened so she could be there to help soften the blow in any way possible.

  There was probably no one in the family Brian could have called who would have been more of a comforting presence than his aunt Joan. Even when Bruce was a boy, Joan had been his number one defender in the family. She was about as different from Jay, her younger brother, as a sibling could be. Jay was careful—belt-and-suspenders—Joan was bold, a traveler, an experimenter, always looking for a new adventure. Jay was a conservative Republican; Joan a liberal Democrat. Jay saw his oldest son as troubled; Joan saw him as charming—the same sort of rebel that she had always been. “I always thought he was special,” she said. “I’m glad that Jay and Natalie came to see what I always saw in him—even if it wasn’t until he was an adult.”

  When Joan hugged Bruce coming in the door, she whispered, “Brian called,” and Bruce knew that she knew. Brian was right. Knowing Aunt Joan would be there to lend another shoulder allowed Bruce a small sense of relief. Bruce introduced Marsha to his parents as their future daughter-in-law, just as he had planned before the trip to Minnesota. They were thrilled and not all that surprised. “When Bruce brought the book home at Thanksgiving and showed it to us, it was pretty clear something serious was going on,” Jay Edwards said. “When he had called to say he was going to bring her down to meet us, we figured something was up.”

  Dinner was a happy time, Marsha and the three elder Edwardses getting acquainted. The only problem was the salmon Natalie made. She had called Bruce’s house several times to ask what Marsha would like for dinner, but Bruce hadn’t been checking messages. She made salmon, not knowing that Marsha was allergic to fish. Marsha didn’t have the heart not to eat, so she ate little bites and hoped it wouldn’t affect her too badly. Seeing his parents enjoying Marsha during dinner was almost more than Bruce could bear. “I knew what I was about to do to them,” he said. “I had to keep myself from starting to cry before I told them.”

  Finally, as everyone was finishing dessert, Bruce took a deep breath and decided it was time to get it over with. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said with all eyes at the table on him. “You may have noticed that I’ve had some problems with my speech lately. Well, this week I went up to the Mayo Clinic to have some tests done to find out what was wrong.” He paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and then let it out. “They said I have ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  The gasp from both his parents was audible. Bruce could not remember ever seeing his father cry. Now, like Natalie, he was crying inconsolably. Joan and Marsha both went into action, Joan with an arm around her younger brother, letting him cry on her shoulder. Bruce heard himself saying, “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this.”

  When his parents began to regain their composure, he filled them in on the details, none of which really mattered. “We both knew exactly what ALS was and what it means to have the disease,” Jay Edwards said. “I kept trying to get hold of myself, but every time I thought about my son . . .”

  His voice trailed off, remembering that night.

  Natalie couldn’t help but wonder if her own Parkinson’s disease was somehow connected to the ALS, since both are neurological disorders. There was no evidence of that, but it bothered her nonetheless to think that it was even possible.

  Later in the evening, Jay pulled Marsha aside. “I just want you to know that none of us here will think any less of you at all if you feel you can’t go through with this marriage,” he said. “You shouldn’t feel guilty if you have second thoughts.”

  Marsha explained to him that any second thoughts were already behind her. “I’ve let him walk out of my life in the past,” she said. “I’m not letting it happen again.”

  Jay Edwards decided right then and there that he loved this woman he had known for only a few hours. He also told Bruce that even though he and Natalie had said ear
lier the couple would be expected to stay in separate bedrooms when they came to visit—they were not, after all, married—that as far as they were concerned Marsha and Bruce could stay together that night. “It was the only good news of the entire week,” Bruce said.

  Brian had been instructed to break the news to his sisters after Bruce had told his parents. Chris was in New Orleans with John, celebrating her fiftieth birthday, Gwyn was home in Boston. Brian had decided to hold off until Monday, in part because he was dreading his assignment but also because he saw no need to ruin their weekends, especially Chris’s birthday weekend.

  Bruce and Marsha were en route home the next morning when Bruce’s cell phone rang. It was Bill Leahey, calling to give Bruce a hard time about that afternoon’s Eagles-Tampa Bay Buccaneers game. The winner would go to the Super Bowl, a place the Eagles had not been since 1981. Bruce had been trying hard to focus on the game, which would be played in Philadelphia, looking forward to it as an escape from the reality he was dealing with now. Leahey was surprised when a woman answered Bruce’s phone.

  “I’m sorry,” Leahey said. “Maybe I dialed wrong. I was trying to get Bruce Edwards.”

  Marsha quickly showed Bruce the phone number that had popped up on the cell’s screen and he told her who it was. “Is this Billy Leahey?” she said, having heard enough stories from Bruce about his pal to feel as if she knew him.

  “Yes,” Leahey said, now completely mystified.

  “Hi Billy,” Marsha said. “My name is Marsha Moore and I’m a very close friend of Bruce’s.”

  Leahey knew right away who she was, because he had called to invite Bruce to spend Christmas in New Jersey with his family and Bruce had said he was staying in Florida and was expecting a friend—clearly a female friend—to visit right after Christmas. He had heard reports from the caddying grapevine about an old girlfriend coming back into Bruce’s life. Clearly that was who he was talking to now.

  “I was standing by the window, talking on my cell phone, looking out at the lake behind our yard,” he said. “It was a pretty day for January, and I was really looking forward to busting Bruce’s chops about his Eagles, because I knew how much the game meant to him.”

  Bill and Marsha small-talked briefly, then Bill heard Bruce talking in the background. “Bill,” Marsha said. “There’s something Bruce wants me to tell you. We’re engaged and we’re going to get married.”

  Leahey suppressed both a laugh and the comment that ran through his mind at that moment. “What I almost said was, ‘Marsha, I know Bruce pretty well, and I don’t think he’s dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.’ I didn’t, though. I just said, ‘Congratulations, that’s great.’”

  Marsha thanked him, then paused and went on. “There’s something else I have to tell you. Bruce and I were at the Mayo Clinic this week. He had some tests done and . . . he’s been diagnosed with ALS.”

  Leahey found himself staring at his phone in disbelief. It had to be that he somehow hadn’t heard right. “It was impossible,” he said. “Not Bruce. Not my buddy. It couldn’t be true.”

  He was fighting tears by the time Bruce came on the phone. “I need you to do something for me,” he said.

  “Anything.”

  “Call Gary [Crandall] and Drew [Micelli]. Marsha and I have already had to tell Tom and Hilary and my parents and Brian and Greg [Rita].”

  Leahey understood. He promised to make the calls. “Anything I can do, anything at all?”

  “Yeah,” Bruce said. “Pray. Pray that the Eagles win today.”

  Leahey hung up the phone, sat down on his couch, and cried. Then he prayed. But not for the Eagles.

  There were others who had to be told. Greg Rita and Mike Rich were coming to the house that afternoon to watch the football game. Greg already knew and had promised not to tell Mike. Before the game began, Marsha took him into a bedroom and told him. Each new set of tears, whether from his family or his friends, reminded Bruce that the pain involved in this disease wouldn’t be his alone. They watched the game quietly, in large part because the Eagles, heavily favored, were beaten soundly. Bruce had desperately hoped that the game would give him a release, give him something to feel joyful about. Instead it was just another reminder of how awful he felt.

  In Boston, Len Dieterle was also watching the game. Gwyn, who didn’t care that much if the Eagles won, went into the kitchen to make her weekly phone call to her parents. “It’s not anything written in stone,” she said. “But most Sunday nights I give them a call.”

  The moment she heard her father’s voice on the phone—“I mean on the word ‘hello,’” she said—she knew something was very wrong. Her first thought was about her mother.

  “Dad,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  Jay Edwards was stunned. He had thought Brian would have called already to give Gwyn the news. “Brian didn’t call?” he asked.

  No, Brian hadn’t called. What was it? As with Marsha and Bruce, Jay Edwards had no way to deliver the news that wasn’t going to be stunning.

  “Bruce has ALS,” he said.

  Gwyn isn’t exactly certain what happened next. She knows she dropped the phone, cutting her father off. The room began to spin and she thought she might faint. She heard the phone ringing and picked it up. It was Jay. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I think so,” she said, not really sure.

  After he had given her the details, Gwyn half walked, half stumbled into the room where Lenny was watching the end of the game. “My first thought was that something had happened to Jay,” he said. “We’ve worried all these years about Natalie [who was diagnosed more than fifteen years ago with a very mild form of Parkinson’s disease], and I thought Jay had had a heart attack. When she told me it was Bruce and ALS, I had no idea what to say.”

  John Cutcher, Chris’s husband, was put in an even worse position. Concerned that Chris would somehow hear in the kind of unplanned, sudden way that Gwyn had, Jay called John’s cell phone in New Orleans. John and Chris were having dinner in a small restaurant, celebrating her birthday, when John saw Jay’s phone number pop up on his cell. Thinking Jay and Natalie were calling to say happy birthday to their daughter, he answered the phone.

  “John, I have to tell you something and you have to promise me not to gasp and that you won’t tell Chris tonight,” Jay said. John was baffled, but agreed. Chris, expecting to be handed the phone for birthday greetings, sat looking at him, confused. Jay gave John the news. In spite of the warning, John couldn’t help himself. “Oh my God,” he said. “That’s awful.” Jay talked for a few more seconds while John recovered, looking at Chris and nodding. Then he hung up.

  “What was that about?” Chris demanded. “What’s awful? Why didn’t you let me talk to him?”

  “Oh, the Eagles are losing,” John said. “Jay was upset about it. He said he wanted to go back and watch the end and to wish you a happy birthday and they’d try to call you later.”

  “I never should have bought the story,” Chris said later. “For one thing, John could care less about sports, and the ‘Oh my God’ was clearly genuine. But we were drinking wine and having a good time and I had no reason to be suspicious, so I bought it. Looking back, I shouldn’t have, but I’m glad I did.”

  The next day, when they got back to their home in Annapolis, John quietly sat down with Chris and told her the news. “When he said Bruce was very sick, my first thought, to be honest, was AIDS,” she said. “All those years on the road, being single most of that time. Gwyn and I had worried about it at times. When he said ALS, I found myself wishing it was AIDS, because these days at least there’s some hope there.”

  Telling his family and closest friends was a step Bruce knew had to be taken. He had prepared himself for it almost from the night of the diagnosis. He knew that the inevitable next step was the word getting out on the tour and then to the media and the public. He dreaded dealing with all of that, but he knew it was unavoidable. The regular tour had been in Hawaii the
week he was diagnosed and would be in Phoenix the next week. The Senior Tour—newly renamed the Champions Tour in a marketing ploy by the PGA Tour—would begin the week after that in Hawaii with the MasterCard Championship, the seniors version of the Tournament of Champions. Watson had qualified for the event with his victory in Oklahoma City. Bruce was planning to caddy in Hawaii and take Marsha with him. He knew that by then the word would be out.

  Actually it was out sooner than that. Once it was on the caddy grapevine, the news spread through Phoenix like wildfire. Bruce’s phone began ringing off the hook. Most of the time he screened the calls and simply listened to the messages. They were all heartfelt. Caddying buddies, players, equipment reps. Someone in the media was bound to hear the news quickly. Someone did, Melanie Hauser, a longtime golf writer who had written for years for the Houston Post and as a freelancer after that paper folded. When she initially heard about the diagnosis, she called Watson to ask him if it was true.

  Watson knew Hauser well and knew she would handle the story sensitively. So he confirmed it for her, not realizing that she would write the story almost immediately and post it on PGATour.com, the tour’s website. As luck would have it, Bruce wanted to check something on his upcoming schedule on the website later that day. “I think I was double-checking the dates of the tournament in Naples,” he said. “I clicked onto PGATour.com and there was this huge headline, WATSON’S CADDY EDWARDS DIAGNOSED WITH ALS. It rocked me, just seeing it that way in a headline. I saw Tom quoted in the story, so I knew what had happened. He was trying to help me by being my spokesman, I understood that, and he knew it wasn’t going to stay secret anyway. He felt badly that he hadn’t been able to reach me before I saw it, but again, there’s no easy way to do something like that. He made it easier for me, because he did all the talking and explaining.”