Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters

by Lt Col Mark Weber

  This had to be done, too. “We’re all going to get through this together as a team.”

  We continued, discussing the healthy things you could do, like talking to your school counselor, or swimming or playing to occupy your mind and your energies. We also discussed the unhealthy things you should avoid when dealing with your emotions and how vulnerable those emotions would make you feel.

  For example, your anger, fear, or sadness about the cancer may lead you to conclude that nothing matters anymore, and things you’ve never considered before—smoking, drinking alcohol, telling an adult to shut up, or taking your anger out on friends—suddenly seem okay.

  I’m sure you remember that I took the opportunity, as I usually did with the subject of emotions, to use my Yoda voice from Star Wars: “Anger, fear, aggression—the dark side of the Force, they are. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. Consume you, it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.”

  You all smiled dismissively, as if this was not the time to joke. “Stop it now, Dad, that’s not real,” was the reply you gave me, but I know you all love and relate to Star Wars. This was your language, and I wanted to lighten the mood a bit.

  Even so, I was dead serious about the reference. “Guys,” I said, “I know Star Wars isn’t real, but it is a story written by real people who understand emotions. What they wrote for Yoda about Anakin Skywalker is true, and his warning applies to all of us.”

  I then shared the story of my younger cousins, Michael and Katie Bryant. You knew Michael was a doctor who was helping me navigate the medical hurdles following my diagnosis. I explained that when Michael was seven years old, his dad was killed—horrifically and instantly—in a head-on collision with a semi tractor-trailer. He didn’t get a chance to say or do anything with his dad after that terrible accident.

  What did Michael choose to do with his emotion and energy? He became a doctor. And his little sister became a lawyer.

  Part of me desperately wanted to shield you from the pain and suffering. I decided against it, because I don’t think you need a shield. In fact, I think kids are more adaptable and resilient than most adults.

  Pain and suffering are inevitable in this life, and shielding you from it won’t help when you’re on your own. What you need more than anything is a shepherd, and that’s what Kristin and I have tried to be for you.

  My goal since the diagnosis is no different than it was before: to help you think about how to navigate the hardships you’re certain to face in life, not how to avoid them.

  * * *

  I doubt my grandparents would say they wanted to face the difficulty and challenge of life during the Great Depression and World War II, as MacArthur implies we ought to do. They had little choice about “paths of comfort.”

  You, however, are likely to face a different world and life circumstances than they did, which means you will have far more choices when it comes to comfort or difficulty—just as I did before you. What my grandparents taught me through their lack of choice about facing difficulty was that there would be virtue in my choice to face difficulty.

  Marie Lanoux married my grandpa, Mathew Garofalo, in 1947, when they were both thirty-one years old. Despite a relatively late start, she bore fifteen children over the next fifteen years—with a set of twins for good measure. The doctor delivered Marco for free, because he made a dozen.

  In 1981, when she was sixty-three and her youngest was just graduating from high school, she suffered a stroke and spent the next seventeen years half-paralyzed and in a wheelchair. I was nine years old at the time, and those years remain for me an unparalleled example of how to face a no-choice hardship with dignity and grace.

  Every week, my mom drove the two miles to Grandma’s house to visit and help for at least a few hours. I loved coming along to help make Grandma her oatmeal and poached egg or ride my bike to Cassetta’s Deli to get sandwiches for lunch.

  I was also a chatty kid, so a visit from me always included a fair amount of friendly conversation about nothing in particular. The only time I heard her raise her voice was to plead for one of her adult children to come downstairs and take her to the bathroom. This observation was more than casual for me at age eleven. What would it be like to have to rely on someone to take me to the bathroom?

  When I was fourteen years old, I started asking if I could help more—and not just with the dishes or the meals. I wanted to be able to take care of that bathroom request as soon as she had it. Doing so was no easy task. Grandma weighed at least 160 pounds, and she wasn’t able to pull down her own undergarments. I can’t think of a more humbling task for a fourteen-year-old boy and his sixty-seven-year-old grandma, but she showed no shame, so neither did I. The task needed to be done.

  I helped make meals, did laundry, cleaned dishes, vacuumed, mopped the kitchen floor, and grocery shopped. When I got older and could drive, I visited her during day trips to the local nursing home. We painted ceramics and played cards, bingo, and cribbage with her friends. She loved showing me off to the other residents, and I enjoyed receiving unbounded appreciation from someone who wanted and needed my small dose of help so badly.

  As aware as I thought I was of Grandma’s condition at the time, I can look back and see that I was clueless. She took enough medication to choke a horse. Her feet were horribly swollen. And her recliner was a virtual prison when she was alone.

  If she ever voiced a complaint, I don’t remember hearing it.

  But I do not consider it noble that she suffered in silence; I consider it noble that she focused her actions and thoughts on life, which helped her cope with the suffering.

  When I was in my mid-twenties and could better grasp the profound difficulty of her situation, I said to her, “For fifteen years, I’ve seen you live your life in that recliner or in your wheelchair. I can tell that you suffer. What keeps you going every day?” She didn’t smile or say a word. She just raised her good arm and pointed to the walls all around her, indicating the more than two hundred photos that covered every square inch of space in the small living room: all her children, every wedding, more than thirty grandchildren and some of their wedding photos, and then great-grandchildren as well.

  A path of comfort was not an option for her, but she defined what it meant to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge.

  * * *

  If my grandma taught me compassion, endurance, and patience, Grandpa Mathew Garofalo must have taught me the value of unbridled passion and the idea that challenge could be fun (albeit in a very odd way).

  Mat was a tall, thin, tireless, remarkably loud, and foul-mouthed automobile mechanic who ran his own repair shop out of his two-car home garage well into his eighties.

  He was drafted for World War II, but he saw no honor in the task—then or later. He believed his greatest triumph of the war was that his family convinced the War Department to send him home to Minnesota to take care of his Italian-speaking parents shortly after being drafted. Even in hindsight, he didn’t think a world war held as much sway as taking care of his family. And it seemed his harshest words were saved for those who didn’t see it the same way, which did not help me when I joined the army.

  Despite his deep conviction about family, he had a strange way of expressing affection. “I should have had pigs,” he was fond of telling his kids in later years. “At least I could eat them.” His temper—our family prefers the word passion—was legendary. On two separate occasions, he entered his home in a tirade and smashed his entire dining room set to pieces for reasons known only to him.

  Passion, I guess.

  Mat’s personality was so consistent and predictable that he was virtually a Disney character (PG-13, at best). The only time he made an appearance inside the house was during mealtime. Otherwise he was in the garage or in the basement working. “You don’t work, you don’t eat,” he was fond of saying.

  His “office” was the basement, a cavernous and damp dungeon filled wall to wall and floor to ceiling with car
parts, tools, brass fittings, and barrels of footwear from the junkyard. A single winding goat path spanned the fifty-foot length of the room. In a tiny unfinished corner, there was a rudimentary shower stall that looked as if it had been imported from a third-world mud hut. He would request things from upstairs by banging on a pipe with a wrench and shouting his demands.

  He blacktopped his thirty-by-forty-foot backyard, reasoning it would not require mowing (despite his abundance of free labor). By the time the Weber boys came along, his backyard consisted of nothing but stacks of tires and a massive doghouse for his German wolfhound, Igor.

  Mat’s “lectures” were always a show, too. No matter what the topic, he included at least one curse word and repeated his explanations at least twice. Since he always talked this way, we just accepted it. To me, it sounded like poetry. Any common annoyance could set him off.

  A normal rant might include something like, “Johnny doesn’t listen. Nope. Can’t listen. Doesn’t know how to listen. Wouldn’t know how to listen if his life depended on it. If his life depended on listening, he would be dead.” All at maximum volume and directed at no one person in particular.

  In fact, the offending party was usually long gone by the time he got rolling.

  With fifteen kids under the same roof, he took on the disciplinary style of a quirky prison camp captain. He integrated his work and his family life by using a fan belt for whippings. Lining up his young offenders, he would graciously ask, “Do you want a Chevy, Ford, or Pontiac?”

  Mat’s physical appearance was deceiving. Even in his sixties, he moved like a tall version of Yoda—slightly hunched over and methodical in his movements, but lightning fast in a dustup with one of his teenage boys. He was known to chase one or more of them in the back alley or out into the neighborhood to carry out his judgment.

  The earliest memories I can recall from when my brothers and I visited involve him yelling in a deep voice from the garage, “Oh boy, here we go. Here we gooo! Open a keg of nails. Nail everything down!” He did this without even pulling his head from under the hood. Again, he didn’t sound angry, but he never sounded happy either. We never knew exactly how he felt or quite what he meant, but his ranting always made us smile.

  Conversations with Grandpa Garofalo would be about one of two subjects—cars or sex. I’m sure we talked about other things, but I can’t remember what. Examples? He spoke of women he’d known before marriage as “conquests,” using Italian words for his manhood or for sexual acts. One routine sex reference was known simply as “box of bananas,” a throwback to the days when he’d come home for lunch and throw a box of bananas on the kitchen table to keep all the kids busy while he spent some private time with Grandma.

  He lived until age ninety-two, and during his final years I was stationed in Minnesota. He was the only grandparent I personally watched waste away, and his struggle less than two years before my cancer fight provided a timely example.

  When I laid him down on the floor to perform some range-of-motion exercises with his legs, he casually told me something that illustrated how he was going to face the end of his life. With fire and conviction, he said, “There’s only one thing I want to do when I’m in this position.”

  During his eulogy, the church erupted in gasps and laughter when I pointed out that Saint Peter is likely still wondering who threw a box of bananas up on the lectern while running past him at a sprint.

  * * *

  Grandma Marie Weber—my favorite grandparent as a young boy—had a deep impact on me for completely different reasons than those of my other grandparents. She died at age sixty-seven of a heart attack, on a Sunday morning just before Easter Mass.

  Life doesn’t get much more ironic or devastating for a twelve-year-old Catholic boy.

  We found out much later in life that she suffered from bipolar disorder—really high highs and really low lows. Beyond a few notable examples involving a flying coffee cup (with coffee in it) and some cursing episodes, all I remembered was a sweet old woman whom I loved more than anyone else in my life.

  The day Grandma Weber died was deeply spiritual for me. Her loss made no sense at all. I asked a lot of questions of God. Why Easter Sunday of all days? Was this a punishment? Were we, or was I, not faithful enough?

  I was a young boy who firmly believed what I was taught—that God could fix anything if I prayed hard enough. When she died, I knew that life, as beautiful as it could sometimes be, didn’t work that way.

  * * *

  Grandpa Francis Weber’s story is also one of dramatic difficulty and challenge. Franny, as we called him, was a cocky and handsome bachelor all through his twenties, and I could tell from our many conversations he thought he lived too fast and loose with alcohol and women (though he never shared any details). At around age thirty, when the idea of family was still a distant thought, he was involved in a bizarre construction accident that nearly killed him.

  Franny was a carpenter, but he worked most of the trades, including masonry. The work that nearly ended his life involved tuck-pointing damaged brick on a commercial building. Back then, masons used a rudimentary scaffolding system that involved pulleys, boatswain chairs, wooden wedges, and planks.

  His descriptions and rough drawings of these setups appeared to me like an archaeological dig site in an Indiana Jones movie. It was hard to imagine using such a thing, but those were Spartan times, and this was long before the existence of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. If we didn’t have an actual picture of him standing on such a contraption suspended eight stories in the air, we wouldn’t have believed it was possible.

  For reasons Franny couldn’t explain, his partner and boss that day pulled a support wedge that triggered a collapse of the system beneath their feet. He said his fingertips just brushed the edge of a safety rope as he slid off the plank and plunged eighty-four feet to the ground below into a massive pile of brick, mortar, and wooden planks. He landed on top of his boss, who died at the site.

  He broke nearly every bone in his body, including his legs and hips. The impact popped one of his eyeballs out of the socket and left one of his ears dangling from the side of his head. He was so badly injured that the hospital staff didn’t know what to do with him.

  When he regained consciousness, he was on a gurney in the hallway of the hospital with no one around. He told us he figured no one expected him to survive his wounds, so they just set him aside to die; after all, this was a Depression-era hospital in the 1930s.

  He spent three months in a full-body cast, and the injuries he sustained would plague him for the rest of his life. His wrist remained disfigured, and his torso looked as if it had been reattached to his body off-center.

  When I was an adolescent, this unbelievable story seemed to be the great catastrophe of Franny’s life. As a man, however, I saw something very different: he spent fourteen years suffering from depression after Grandma died, and it got worse as he got older. Though he was physically able until he died at ninety-one, my family had to goad him to take showers, change his clothes, care for his dog, and avoid eating spoiled food.

  All through my early twenties, I tried to speak to him about what plagued his mind. “Guilt,” he would say. He gave hints of regrets from his youth or his or Grandma’s transgressions later in life, but he refused to say more. He just cried.

  Now, I don’t want to leave you with the picture of a pathetic, sad old man. Franny remained an incredibly spirited character who had the most unique ways of making us laugh. When he passed gas, he would either say, “Excuse me, I thought I was in Kokomo,” or he would call out to an invisible cat, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” If we ever replied “Huh?” to a question, he replied back with, “Kick a pig in the hind end, ya get ‘Huh.’ ”

  Whether it was inescapable or self-perpetuated, what I want you to know is that Grandpa Weber’s psychological difficulty and challenge plagued him as much or more than his big fall.

  * * *

  I suffered pain
of my own as a child.

  Physically, every kid has issues of one sort or another. Looking back, I see a kid who may have been an example in the extreme: tonsillitis at age two, fourteen years of recurrent ear infections with four corrective surgeries, two broken wrists, two sets of dental braces, and eyeglasses at age ten. Each of these troubles is common for children, but I never have seen a kid with all of them.

  I was also accident-prone, and probably not the right kid to put in the top bunk of a bed. Three times I rolled out, breaking my wrist on one occasion and losing a tooth on another. (Oh, there were safety rails back then, but I didn’t think I needed those.)

  But the ear problems, those were difficult enough to be formative. Every year, I managed to get lake water trapped behind my eardrum, which caused an infection and immense pressure on the middle ear. Those tiny bones are so sensitive, I could feel a stinging pain with each heartbeat until the fluids drained and the infection was gone.

  Although most kids are given antibiotics or ear drops to clear up infections, those solutions were not used or didn’t work for me. My doctor didn’t like using antibiotics (he thought they were overused), and the ear drops were useless. Four times between the age of five and sixteen, a surgeon cut a small hole in my eardrum and inserted a small plastic tube, which allowed the fluids to drain.

  At least two weeks of every summer were spent writhing in pain or feverishly pumping my ears with my thumb. Evenings were a sleepless nightmare. No one complained about my crying, but I remember moving to different parts of the house so I wouldn’t disturb anyone.

  I never did dwell on how these experiences may have affected me as an adult, and still don’t. As with my grandparents, there was no choice about a path of comfort, but perhaps I learned more than I realized about facing the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge.

  * * *

  During my freshman year in high school, I experienced pain—at school and at home—that I would have traded for all the ear infections in the world.