Justin turned to me. “Do you think we could take a quick walk around the block just to talk about some stuff?”
“Sure,” I answered. “I’ll just grab Daisy. She could use a walk.” I put on my coat and clipped the leash to Daisy’s collar. I figured he wanted to get an update on how Zach was feeling, emotionally and physically. I’d shared with him the night before that Zach had been feeling down and a little anxious about all the demands on his time and that I was concerned the week would prove to be too much.
“Could I take the tags off her collar?” Justin asked. “The noise will get picked up by the sound equipment.”
“Of course,” I said as I saw Jordan, the sound guy, pick up one of those huge, fuzzy microphones and Emerson and Kieran grab their cameras. So, we are jumping right in, I thought to myself.
As we walked down the street, Jordan held the microphone just above Justin’s and my head while Emerson ran backward in the snow and ice, his camera trained on us, and Kieran ran alongside.
“So, how is Zach?” Justin asked.
“It’s been a rough couple of days. He’s just really started to get physically tired, and I think the pressure of having people expecting so much from him is weighing heavy. He told me the other night that he’s looking forward to things settling down a bit. He just seems kind of down lately,” I said, trying desperately to ignore the men running with cameras around us.
“We’re really hoping to help with that while we’re here,” Justin said.
How are you going to do that when this is the farthest thing from settling down? I wondered.
“Remember that car we talked about? The Nissan GT-R that Zach loves?” he asked.
Of course I remembered. He mentioned it every time we drove down Highway 94 on our way home from the hospital. A couple of weeks earlier, Justin had asked me if there was anything they could do for Zach that I thought he would go nuts for. “Get him a Nissan GT-R,” I told him.
Justin called about a week before they flew into town and told me he’d tried, but there simply wasn’t a Nissan GT-R to be found in Minnesota or the surrounding states. He was bummed, and so was I; I knew Zach would have loved it.
“Well,” Justin said with a glint in his eye as we continued down the block, snow crunching under our feet, “we brought a little surprise.” He pointed up ahead.
There, parked a half block ahead around the corner, was a gorgeous, shiny and new, navy blue Nissan GT-R! My mouth dropped, and I could hardly breathe.
“You . . . No . . . Oh . . . my . . . gosh! What did . . . How . . . How did you get it?” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Zach was going to love this!
“The folks at Nissan heard Zach’s story, and they had it shipped up from Nashville for him. They even put special snow tires on it and everything. He can drive it all week.” He laughed at my excitement and was obviously thrilled he’d pulled off such a huge surprise. Now all the cameras made sense.
“I can’t wait for Zach to see it,” I said. “He’s going to love it. Absolutely. Love. It.”
We decided the best way to deliver the car to Zach was to have Rob, who was on his way home from work, drive it into the driveway. The camera crew was stationed in the front room of the house, and I had Zach ready near the window. When I saw Rob pull in, I walked over near Zach.
“So, we have a little, tiny surprise for you,” I said.
He gave me an incredulous look and said, “I don’t like surprises.”
“Oh, I think you’re gonna like this one,” I said as I pointed out the window.
Grace saw it first and gasped as Zach stood from the couch and looked out the window.
“Holy crap,” he exclaimed. “Are you serious?!”
“You get to drive it for a week,” I said.
He laughed with excitement at the prospect. Not many days earlier he had told me he would give anything just to sit in one. To have the opportunity to drive one was beyond anything he could have dreamed.
Grace knew he loved that car, and they were in the habit of going out and driving around together, especially when they were both bored and needed to get out of the house, so, “You’re driving me places,” was the first thing to come out of her mouth. She was just as excited as Zach was.
Rob, Zach, and Grace all got their coats on, ran outside, and jumped in the car. The crew scrambled to get their gear and follow.
It was a good start to a week that would hold more surprises. Not all of them for just Zach.
IT WAS WEDNESDAY MORNING. THE CREW HAD SPENT THE PREVIOUS day following Zach around at school to get video footage and a sense of what his life was like. But this day would be spent doing individual interviews. Rob went to work and the kids went to school, so I would be the first to be interviewed.
By then I’d had enough time with Justin and the crew to know that they genuinely wanted to hear our story. For them, this visit was not just a job, but more of a pilgrimage. Justin told me in one of our first conversations that he had always been fascinated by the wisdom of the dying. He was inspired by their unique joy that came from the clarity they had about what is truly important in life. He wanted to use their wisdom to show the rest of us how to really live.
As the crew transformed our living room into a set, I spent a few minutes alone in my bedroom. I was nervous. I had been interviewed several times by then, but this would be different. This interview would go deeper than any of the others, and it had the potential to change lives. I spent my time sitting quietly on the bed with my head in my hands in prayer.
This is Yours, I prayed. Whatever is accomplished here, today, is for Your glory. I pray only that You bless it and that You give me the words that need to be said for those who need to hear them. And with that, I laid my anxiety down at Christ’s feet and went down for a life-changing interview.
Downstairs I found Daisy lounging in the interview chair in the middle of the room. She was quite content to sit while the crew arranged lights around the room and even outside on the sidewalk that shined in the window. They had set a camera track up in front of the interview chair, along with two other cameras on stands.
I could feel the anxiety well up inside me again. The chair with all the lights trained on it reminded me of an interrogation room. “Remember, this is Yours,” I whispered to God under my breath. “Give me the grace to do it well.”
I took my seat; Daisy nestled beside me. And we talked. For the next two hours, these eight men, from five different faith backgrounds (Baha’i, Muslim, agnostic, Judaism, and Catholic), and I spoke about the innermost truths of the human heart.
We spoke of love and peace. We spoke of surrender and gain. And we spoke of life, death, and loss. There was no judgment. No agenda. Just a genuine desire to seek and hear truth. To understand how a person could love so deeply that the only thing to do is to let go. To learn how the purest joy in life can come through the most intense and messy suffering. And to understand that peace through the most violent of storms is the most profound of all miracles.
After the last question was answered and the cameras had been turned off, I felt like I had been on a retreat. These men had come to my home to take something away, but they had also brought something: an opportunity for my family and me to speak of things that we couldn’t on our own. Things that had been bottled up just waiting for someone to ask for them to be released. I felt refreshed and at peace.
I looked through my tears and saw eight men looking back at me with their own tear-filled eyes. We all knew that something profound and beautiful had happened and that we had been brought together for a reason. We needed one another.
Twenty-Nine
ZACH CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL NOT LONG AFTER MY INTERVIEW ended. The rest of the family members and a few of Zach’s friends would be interviewed after dinner. While the interviews were going on in the living room, the rest of us needed to be extremely quiet and tucked in the family room at the back of the house. By seven o’clock that evening, we were all exhausted. A
bout that time, Alli trudged through the knee-high snow across the backyard and walked in the back door. Sam had called her an hour earlier frantically asking where she was.
“I don’t want to do this alone,” he said on the phone. He had concerns about the intrusion into our family life and was reluctant to bare his soul to people he had just met. He and Alli are both introverts, and talking about such a personal thing as their dying brother seemed too personal and even exploitive.
Alli told Sam she was on her way and that they would talk about it when she got home. They’d become close through the ordeal, commiserating with each other.
I put a finger to my lips indicating she would need to be quiet as she shut the door and knocked snow off her feet onto the tile floor.
“What’s with all the huge lights on the front sidewalk?” she asked, looking a little annoyed. Our yard and house were so lit up it looked like it was midday rather than evening. We were drawing some attention in the neighborhood; cars would slow to a crawl as they drove by.
“I guess that’s how they do it,” I whispered with a shrug. “How was your day?”
“Busy,” she answered brusquely. “There was all sorts of drama with the magazine today, and our deadline is tomorrow. I’m the editor, so it all falls on me if things don’t get done. Not to mention I have a huge paper due tomorrow in my American lit class.” She looked through the French doors to where the crew was set up in the living room. “Am I going to be able to get to my room soon?” She was exhausted and wanted some peace and some time to Skype with Collin, but her home had been overrun by strangers and turned into a beehive of activity. She was near her breaking point.
“They should be wrapping up in a few minutes, then you can go down to your room. Have you decided if you want to do an interview?” I asked cautiously as she removed her jacket and tossed it on a pile of coats by the flickering fireplace. I didn’t want to pressure her, especially at the end of such a hard day. But she was a huge part of Zach’s life, and I wanted her to be part of the story we were trying to tell.
“I just don’t get why we have to sit down with strangers and pour out our feelings when we don’t even do that with each other,” she said as she plopped down on the couch next to me. “Why would I want to talk to these people who have no idea what we are really going through, people who have their own agenda? I just feel like instead of turning outward and telling our story to the world, we should be turning inward and focusing on us—on our relationships.”
“But, Alli, the rest of us have been here working on this thing together. We have a story to tell as a family. I just don’t see this project as something that is distracting our attention from each other; I see it as something that can bring us closer together,” I responded.
I knew she was dealing with a lot of stress with school and her internship, but more than that, she was struggling with the conflict of emotions she felt when she thought about her upcoming wedding. Her wedding and Zach’s death were two dots on the horizon; one would be a time of joy, the other a time of utter sadness. Somehow, she had to walk the road to both points without breaking. It sometimes turned into a nasty cycle of joyful anticipation followed by the intense guilt of knowing what Zach would have to go through between now and then.
She craved our old lives, how it used to be before cancer and cameras, when a big event like a wedding would have had our undivided attention. She longed for those days when it was just the six of us around the dinner table each night sharing a meal and the day’s adventures with one another. She had given up an opportunity to study in Rome for a semester so that she could stay home with her family and dying brother, but now he seemed more interested in hanging out with strangers than his own family. She simply could not see how any of this media stuff would benefit the family.
“Sam isn’t so sure he wants to do this either. He called me a little bit ago wondering when I’d be home. So I’m not the only one who isn’t thrilled about this,” she said. “And it’s not like I hate the crew or anything. I’ve had a chance to talk with them, and they seem pretty cool. I just want to be focusing on other things right now, and I don’t get what our ‘message’ is, Mom. I mean, really, we haven’t been through the worst of it yet. How do we really know what our message will be?”
I empathized with her desire to focus on family life. The week wasn’t even half over, and I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to have a quiet house with just my family. But it seemed obvious to me that God had something big planned. That He was using Zach and our family for some purpose that I wasn’t entirely sure of yet. Alli wasn’t convinced and saw the intrusion as wasted time. As we sat in the room together at odds with each other, I decided the best thing to do was to step back and let God do His thing.
It’s Yours, I prayed. If You want her, You work it out with her.
Alli and Sam were a huge part of Zach’s life, and I desperately wanted them to be part of the project. But I wasn’t driving this thing. It wasn’t in my hands.
“Sam is in his room. After they wrap up Grace’s interview, why don’t you go up there and talk about what you want to do? Neither one of you has to do the interview; it’s completely up to you.”
Alli was pulling her computer out of her bag to start working on her lit paper when Grace busted through the door.
“I totally nailed that interview,” she exclaimed with the excitement of a girl who had just conquered a hidden fear. “I had every single one of those guys crying! They were all in tears!”
She stood before me with a hand on her hip, still in her basketball uniform with her long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her face beamed with pride, her big green eyes shining and a huge grin on her face. I had been nervous about sending her down for the interview. Grace wasn’t much of a talker when it came to her emotions. Depending on her mood, she could get a little edgy when people asked personal questions. And these would be the ultimate personal questions. But she’d obviously decided this was her deal, and it was on her terms. She was tough enough to let people in, and I was so proud of her.
Justin joined us in the family room. “Oh my gosh. Grace was awesome!” I could see he’d been crying.
“I heard.” I chuckled as I looked to where Grace stood with a smile still shining on her face. “Who do you want next?”
“I think we’ll do Sammy and Mitch next, then we’ll do Sam and Alli, if they’re up for it.”
“I’ll talk to Sam about it,” Alli said as she got up and walked into the kitchen.
I went up to Sam’s room and knocked on the door.
“Sam, you and Alli are up in about an hour if you want to do the interview,” I called through the closed door. He opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
“Is Alli home?” he asked.
“Yeah, she’s grabbing a bite to eat.”
He came down to the kitchen where Alli was seated at the counter. The crew was scurrying between the living room and family room on the lower level as they moved the set and lights.
“Are you going to do it?” Sam asked Alli.
“I guess so. I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but since we’re doing this thing, I suppose I should be part of it.”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it too. I guess I’ll do it. To me, it’s not so much about the crew and what they want. I’m doing it for Zach, and I think that’s what we should focus on,” Sam responded. He had a hard time watching his brother battle cancer, and his way of dealing with it was to avoid thinking about it. This interview would be a huge sacrifice for him. He was stepping forward to lay himself open and raw.
Justin walked into the room. “So, what are you guys thinking? Do you want to do the interview?”
“Sam?” Alli turned to him.
“Yeah. We’ll do it.”
“If it would be easier for you two, we can interview you together.”
Sam and Alli looked at each other and nodded in agreement. They would do it together.
“I
’m going to be totally honest, no matter what,” Alli said to me as she headed down the stairs to her bedroom. “It’s our story.”
“The more honest you are, the better. People need to hear it,” I replied. She was right. People needed to hear it like it was.
It was close to nine o’clock when Sammy and Mitch wrapped up their interviews. Alli and Sam took their places on the couch. Both were fighting their own internal battles, neither one wanting to be there. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched as they got settled and listened as the crew offered cordial banter to put them at ease. As the door closed, I offered up a prayer.
Lord, this is Yours. Do with it what You like, but please bring our family together. We need to be together.
About an hour later, Alli and Sam came back upstairs.
“How did it go?” I asked cautiously.
“It went well,” Sam said. He was upbeat. “It actually went better than I thought it would.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully and nodded his head. “Yeah. It was good.” He bounded up the steps to his bedroom and shut the door.
I turned to Alli. “Well? Was it horrible?”
“No, it wasn’t horrible,” she said. “They asked some leading questions, and a couple that I thought were inappropriate, but it wasn’t horrible.” She picked up her backpack from the family room floor. “I thought I was going to have to do most of the talking, but Sam really surprised me. He poured his heart out. It’s the most I’ve seen him cry since this whole thing started.” I could see she’d been crying too. Her tone had softened, and she seemed more thoughtful. “I’m glad we got to do the interview together; it kind of opened some stuff up for us.” She turned to go downstairs to her bedroom. “I’ve got to work on some stuff, and I want to Skype Collin before I go to bed.”
I was relieved and grateful that Sam’s and Alli’s anxieties over the project had lessened.
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