When Your Birthday is More Than You Becoming One Year Older
A day that I will always be able to share with my father.
This was an article that I wrote last year but did not share on Substack. This article still is relevant to me as today is my birthday and it’s always a day of reflection to me.
I look at birthdays as a New Year more than I look at New Years as the New Year. It’s an opportunity to look back on what you did in the last year and see if you want anything to be different. It’s also an opportunity to celebrate what you did do which I think is even more important. Hope you enjoy this old read.
About 16 years ago, my father, Marc, was facing a small-cell lung cancer diagnosis that had metastasized to his liver, bones, throat, and brain. Doctors told him that most patients in his condition usually survive about eight weeks. But my father wasn’t most patients.
Instead of accepting his fate, he made it his mission to do whatever it took to stay alive for as long as possible.
I remember when I was a kid, I was asking him some theoretical questions. Some of them were like what he would do if he was paralyzed from the neck down or had some debilitating disease where he was essentially trapped motionless in his body. He replied to me, “as long as I can watch you grow up, I would want to be here under any circumstance that I would face.”
A different kind of moment came, but he didn’t flinch. The first thing he told me upon his diagnosis was, “Drew, remember how I was complaining about some back pain? Well, they found a tumor, it is cancerous. I am going to do whatever it takes to fight this, and I plan to still be your coach this season.”
My dad wasn’t an ordinary dad to my friends and classmates. He was my high school running backs coach.
His first rounds of chemotherapy started in May 2008. The doctors were going to give him everything they had. He began treatments that would begin with three days the first week, then three weeks off. This cadence would continue for six months.
The doctors warned him that the treatments may bring him to his knees.
Talk Of Death Is Not Allowed
The chemotherapy did to him what chemotherapy does to most people. He lost his hair, appetite, and about 30 percent of his body weight.
After the initial parts of treatments, his body began to stabilize. He seemed to be responding well to the therapy. It looked like he was going to extend his lease on life.
“I don’t want to talk about dying. This is about living and you guys reaching your goals,” my father told me. “I want you to keep going about your life as you normally would. There’s nothing you can do right now, and it’s outside your control.”
When we are faced with a stressful situation, the one thing we want is control. Control is not always obtainable. The best thing we can do is focus on what’s ahead. When we focus on the things we cannot control, that is when life can truly start to unravel.
Every moment of our life is precious and we often waste it. We take every day for granted until those days become a number that we can wrap our heads around. We procrastinate, living as if the lease is never going to run out. The truth is, all our leases will eventually are run out.
The Season I Didn’t Want To End
Gearing up for the hot summer weather, my father wore a sun hat, long-sleeved fishing shirt, and pants to keep the sun off his body during the 90-degree summer in Illinois. The outfit looked similar to a beekeepers outfit.
I had buzzed my head before our first double (two practices in one day), and when I arrived, most of the team had already buzzed their heads to support my dad.
Our team was good this season. We had 20 starting seniors and had made it to the quarterfinals the prior year. Our expectation this year was to win state. We had the best running back in the state on our team, and I was the lead blocker for him at fullback. I wore the number 33, the same number as my father.
Towards the end of the season, my dad had to take a break from chemotherapy in lieu of radiation treatments. His bones were starting to weaken, so he had an osteoporosis medication stacked on as well.
The doctor told my dad that he needed to have his affairs in order. My dad replied that he was planning to take my brother and me on a fishing trip that summer.
We finished the regular season 9–0 and won the semi-final game on a 25 degree frozen field.
The State Game
The Illinois Football State Championships were played at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. My dad’s alma mater. He grew up in the town of Danville which is nearby, so it was a bit of a homecoming for him.
I wanted us to win the state game for our school and our town, but it would have meant even more to win it for him.
At halftime we were up 7–6 but, the game was far from over. The school we were playing, East St. Louis, was one of the fastest teams in the state. They could score points faster than anyone.
Eventually, we found ourselves down 33–14 with about six minutes left in the game.
The belief I had in my father had transferred into me believing in our team. I believed we could make a comeback but it wasn’t realistic. Our team’s strength the entire season was our running game and ball control. We weren’t a team that was built to come from behind.
At that moment, I learned that looking at the positives in life isn’t about having delusional optimism. Looking at the positives in life is when you become an alchemist and turn the worst of situations into something you learn and grow from to make yourself a better person in the future.
Seasons End
Denial can be a powerful thing. Especially when it’s reinforced to you. It took me a while to understand that my father was eventually going to die. He was given a few months but seemed able to keep surviving. Why would I think he was going to die?
I was about to go pick up an order of French fries from a restaurant that was near our house. My dad walked out into the kitchen after a nap wearing one of the shirts that were snug on me — but looked like an XXXL on him.
Holding it together, I grabbed the keys to the car and drove out to the restaurant. I turned off the car sat there for a moment and started to tear up. The reality I had denied for months was finally undeniable. He wasn’t going to make it.
In February 2009, the doctors told him that he could no longer do chemotherapy. If he continued, it was going to kill him before the cancer did. Hospice came in to make him comfortable for his final days. I can’t imagine what he must have been going through. Sitting at home, waiting to die, knowing that the number of days you have is in the double digits.
He never brought that up once. During those last days, he was present and never showed a depressed mood. What he was feeling underneath, I will never know.
My birthday was approaching. March 5th. My mother had brought our town’s priest in to talk to the family. I asked him, “What if my dad dies on my birthday?”
He said, “Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing?” I looked back at him, confused. “The same day that your father passes on from this life can be the same day that you were born into this life. It will be a day that you and him will get to share forever.”
I had never thought of it that way before, and it was a perspective that my dad would have wanted me to have.
March 5th approached. He was on death’s door, but he was holding on. He was no longer able to speak due to the tumors that had grown on his vocal cords; he was incapacitated. Something told me that he could hear us.
He knew it was my birthday, and he didn’t want to die then. He needed my permission.
We played his favorite song, What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. Years before his diagnosis, he had told me that he wanted this song to be played at his funeral.
I gathered my family around him, and we told him that it was okay to go. About a minute later, he took his final breath.
Some Things That You Cannot Explain
In the summer after my father died, a family friend wanted to pay it forward and take me and my brother, John, on a fishing trip in Canada.
I’m not sure if he knew my father wanted to take us on a fishing trip that summer, but if he didn’t, that is one odd coincidence. At the time, I didn’t know that my dad wanted to do this. But my uncle forwarded an email when I was doing research for my father’s story.
John and I brought some of his ashes to put into the Canadian lake. The sun was low on the horizon, beaming across the glassy water. John turned off the boat and opened the bag of ashes and dumped them into the lake. They sank like heavy sand to the bottom.
Within a few moments, we started to hear a loon wailing and then another. Dozens of loons wailed together.
At that moment, I felt like he was there with us. He was somewhere that can’t be explained, but felt in moments like that one.
15 Years Later (Now 16 Years Later)
I wrote this article on my birthday, March 5th, 2024. It was my 33rd birthday. The same number that both my father and I wore.
Every year, on my birthday, I have a life audit. Am I upholding the values instilled in me by my father? As I’ve been writing a book about my father, I seem to more deeply understand now what happened then. Unexpected tragedy can strike you at any time. It happens to people every day. What matters is how you handle it and make sure you mitigate the risk of those things happening to you.
You’re probably wondering if my dad was a smoker.
The answer is yes. He was a smoker. When I was younger, I expressed my concerns it might have on his health. His answer was always something like, “I don’t plan to live to be 80 years old, but I think I’ll make it to 70.”
He was 55 years old when he passed away. If there is anyone younger reading this, my father started smoking when he was in college at about 21 years old.
You cannot barter with death and choose your expiration date. You can make changes to make sure that you are in the best state you can be in given whatever circumstances you have.
It’s not easy. Each day flows by like a grain of sand in a slow-moving hourglass. We think we can put off changes to tomorrow, but tomorrow may never become today.
If you want to make a change in life, don’t do it only for yourself. Do it for the person you haven’t met. Do it to be ready for all the opportunities that may come to you so you won’t miss them. If you make that change, you’ll find that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities can happen more than once.
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