Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived

By Laurence Shames and Peter Barton

Live as though you’ll live forever.

And be prepared to die tomorrow.

-The Talmud

I can’t remember a book that has cut to my core like this one. Maybe it’s the fact of being in the prime of my life with two beautiful kids and a wife I adore and having to think how fragile this all is. Reading this book has changed me, made me more understanding, and present with those I love. These notes won’t scratch the surface of it’s content and I hope you read the full book.

Key Themes

Optimism, zest for life, intensity, authenticity, love for family

Why I chose to write this book:

The main reason for this was Peter himself. The man was utterly compelling. He was brilliant; he was brash; he’d lived his life with pagan zest, and, even at the nadir of his sickness, he was incapable of feeling sorry for himself. As he grew more ill, he also grew more open.
His love for his family was almost frighteningly intense.
Zelig-like, he invented himself again and again, entered each new stage of life with a persona that seemed to suit it perfectly, and thus participated in his times more wholeheartedly than most of us dared.
And conquering the business world with a sort of karmic wild-man irreverence–which is to say, by being entirely himself. And retiring at forty-six, with plenty of dough and a household full of love.

Hungry for experience, avid for life, Peter showed us what was possible.

Some people are born to lead and destined to teach. Peter Barton, I think, was one of these. He would have preferred, God knows, a longer life; but when he knew that he was dying–dying in the vanguard of his generation–he seemed to feel a responsibility to make his death of use. He set himself a final goal: to die well, with gratitude rather than complaint, with dignity and grace, with a highly personal faith that could coexist with reason.

He battled horrific pain to preserve his clarity, so that he might send back honest dispatches from the frontier he was approaching.
Peter made me look at things I didn’t know I had the nerve to look at.
His rollicking, high-stakes life cast a strangely reassuring light on the smaller, quieter choices I had made.
Studying the courage and the undaunted curiosity with which he moved toward death, I grew at least a little less afraid of my own mortality.

Whatever I did, I gritted out. I valued nonchalance, and I tried not to let the effort show, but the fact is that I worked my butt off.

Faked confidence when I didn’t really feel it. Contended at every stage with my own insecurities and fear of failure. I wouldn’t-and couldn’t–have had it any other way.
This is who I am, and it’s way too late to start apologizing. I’ve always been a striver who sometimes tried too hard, was at moments too feisty and too stubborn for my own good. I’m still stubborn, frankly. Stubbornness is one of the things that keeps my life feeling like my own.

Growing Up

We were born into a time of prosperity and peace. The world seemed safe and was ours to explore. No one talked about limits and boundaries. No one ever used the word impossible.
We were encouraged to pursue our dreams, in a world that only got better.

Perhaps the luckiest part of all was that we were the generation that wasn’t rushed and bullied into becoming grown-ups too soon. We could knock around without guilt or undue anxiety. We could take the time- in the parlance of the day–to find ourselves. That phrase, I realize, has become one of ridicule, away of deriding the navel-gazing of the sixties and seventies. But maybe it’s time to reexamine that.

What’s unworthy about working to understand who you truly are and what you really want from life? What better use can a person make of his youth?

Anyway, we had the luxury of believing that, eventually, there would be a career, a track–but in the meantime there were a lot of excellent detours. I took my share of them, from the slightly crazy to the somewhat reckless, and sucked the marrow out of every one.

But while I was busily goofing off, something mysterious and amazing was happening-something I didn’t even realize at the time. Gradually, on my own schedule and no one else’s, I was becoming ready. Ready to be a responsible adult. Ready to be a husband. Ready to be a father. Ready to work–and to do so not in the drab spirit of trading time for money, but with the joyful ambition of creating something, participating in an enterprise I could be proud of.

No streak lasts forever. There’s always a bad break eventually. For me, that bad break was cancer.
I never lost my will to fight, but I could feel my body gradually losing its ability to rally, to recover from each new assaults.
I prefer to think that I am facing facts while waiting for a miracle.
My disease has been good for me in a certain sense. It has made me more accepting, gentler. Earlier in my life I might have been ashamed of this, seeing it as a sign of weakness. Now I’m proud of it. It means I’m growing unafraid. Unafraid to admit there are things I can’t explain and will never understand. Unafraid to acknowledge that I can no longer control my destiny with street smarts and good thinking. Unafraid of the unknown place I’m moving toward.

“I began to think of him as not just an interesting person but an extraordinary one. Another thought occurred to me as well: I wondered if perhaps everyone, facing death, became extraordinary; if maybe each of us had untapped reserves of nerve and strength that might prove surprising, even glorious, at the end.”

Peter made me understand that, just as every life begins at a particular moment, so does every death. There is a heartbeat when the process starts, when a person makes the first dreaded stumble from health to sickness. An array of consequences fans out from that moment-physical, practical, emotional. Everything comes due for reconsideration. Time itself deforms. The process is as complicated as life itself; it becomes, in fact, a sort of second life, running parallel to the life that one has lived so far…
What is spiritually if not an ultimate willingness to reach deep? Peter at the keyboard was reaching deeper than anyone I’ve ever seen- reaching straight past illness, past debility and death to joy and peace. (In the middle of the disease Peter was so weak and frail but sat down at the piano to unleash an onslaught of music that came from another place)
Peter shot me a smile I can only describe as otherworldly.

Kids are always soaring.

For them, there’s no boundary between the down-to-earth and the heavenly. Mud is a miracle. Snow is pure chilled joy. A pile of leaves is a sacred altar.

Why do we lose that feeling, that sense of wonder, for so much of our lives?

The approach of death has made me realize that there are no unimportant details in life….

I’ve come to feel that the big things in life are best understood by way of small things. Ignore the small ones, and the big ones just seem like fancy words, slogans without the truth of something you really know, and really feel.
Just because something’s bad for us, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful on its own terms. Nature is full of gorgeous and deadly things.
A kid could only admire Mickey Mantle; he could be Bobby Richardson.

And this, unfortunately, brings me to one of the most excruciating incidents of my childhood–one of those awful moments, totally trivial in itself, that you literally spend your whole life getting over. I tell this story as a plea to parents, coaches, teachers: For God’s sake, be careful what you say when a child messes up!

That’s how tender kids are.

Cancer & Kids

Almost from the first moment I learned that I have cancer, my wife, Laura, and I are haunted by this question: How will we tell the children?
How can we be honest with them without scaring them into nightmares? How can we prepare them for what might happen, without making them sadder than we can bear to see?
In December 1998, our daughter, Kate, are eleven. Our boys, Jeff and Chris, are nine and almost seven. How much can they understand? How much do they need to know?
We live with these questions for more than a year. In some ways, I think, it’s a much harder year for Laura than for me. All I have to worry about is the possibility of dying. She has to think about the far more complicated task of carrying on, taking care of everyone. Being a mother to children. (if the thought of this doesn’t rip you up inside I don’t know what will)
My hope is that someday, in the safety of past tense, we’ll tell our children, Dad had cancer, but now he is fine. And I’ll tell my wife, it’s okay, now. I’ll stay with you forever. In the meantime, though, I am living in doctor hell.

One of the insidious things about cancer is that, even as it’s leeching onto your body, its subsumming your identity as well. In the eyes of others, you become the disease. People look at you and see cancer.

Thinking about it now, I realize that in giving me that bass (Peter’s favorite moment as a child) he was saying, It’s okay, Pete, Be who you are. My father died a few months later. (This was a story of Peter receiving a Bass guitar from his father that still impacts him almost 40 years later.
Before cancer I didn’t reflect. I was too busy doing. My energies went toward piling up experience, not toward finding meaning.
I realize now that reflection is hard and active work. It calls for feats of memory and leaps of intuition. It takes imagination and guesswork, and the humbling acceptance that there are things, even about oneself, that one will never understand. Cancer is what brought me to that acceptance.
Looking back, it’s clear to me that my father’s death was one of the most pivotal events of my own life–maybe the most pivotal. It was my father’s early passing that persuaded me to live as if my life was an extended two-minute drill with no timeouts, to cram a full span’s worth of living into fifty years or even less.
Equally, though, my father’s death brought my childhood to a cruelly sudden end.
So I say this to Kate and Jeff and Chris: I’ve tried to be as present as I could for as long as I could. Forgive me that I couldn’t be here longer. God knows that one of my very few regrets is that I won’t be around to see more of your lives unfold.
Not that I kid myself that anyone is ever totally ready for the death of a family member. Death, by its nature, is always abrupt. However gradual the process leading up to it, there comes a single moment when life ends. That moment can’t be other than shocking. That’s just how it is.
To my boys, I say this: Don’t let anyone tell you that you’ve suddenly become little men, just because your dad is gone. You’re still kids. Enjoy it. Goof off. Someday you’ll realize you’ve become grown-ups, and you’ll be proud of that. But let it happen on your own time, not anybody else’s.
But I do believe that souls are reunited there. So I’ll wait for you at the end of the jetway. I’ll chill champagne for the moment you rejoin me.

But there’s no hurry. Love your life. Take your time.

It’s funny in a way. In life, I’ve been the world’s most in-a-hurry person. Death, I think, will teach me patience. Better late than never.

I’m thinking to myself: You think that’s a problem? You’re letting someone like that make you unhappy? Buddy, you don’t know what a problem is. (His thoughts at a cocktail party filled with people complaining about “problems” like long lines at the grocery store.

Arrogance of Health

At the same time, I begin to notice certain things I’d never paid attention to before-because they hadn’t applied to me. I came to understand that many people go through life just not feeling well. Chronic pain. Subtle and progressive maladies. Illnesses both physical and psychological that siphon off energy and strength.
I’ve come to realize that, up until now, I’ve been guilty of the arrogance of health.
I’ve been impatient with people who didn’t move as fast as I did, dismissive of people who couldn’t do what I found easy. Now I understand that many of the things I took for granted are, for many people, monumental struggles. Simple things like climbing stairs, putting on clothes, even digesting food-for many people these acts require a kind of quiet heroism.
My compassion increases. I’ve always loved my family and my friends, but now I feel a warmth, even toward strangers, that wasn’t there before.
Along with this, something even better happens. I feel an ever-increasing appreciation of human dignity. Forced to recognize that I, too, am fragile, I look more closely than I ever have at the troubles people go through-how patient they are in their suffering, how bravely they confront their burdens, how untiringly they support their loved ones. Everywhere I look, I see examples of courage and acceptance. I am ever prouder to be human.

CARPE DIEM. SEIZE THE DAY, BOYS!

MAKE YOUR LIVES EXTRAORDINARY.

– Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society

Every breath smelled of promise as yet unfulfilled.

And I discovered something that took me totally and utterly by surprise: The experience of seeing death up close had made my life better. I found that I was calmer, less easily distressed by unessential things. My life grew both sparser and richer. There were fewer things I cared about, but those I valued seemed more precious than ever. I had a more vivid appreciation of health and time; among human virtues I now gave a higher rank to kindness. And, at least to some degree, I was less controlled and driven by a fear I’d tried to keep a secret from myself.
There is nothing more humbling than an awareness of death. Death is the opponent that every single one of us will lose to. It’s not a pretty fact, but once you get it through your head you begin to live more honestly.

I had a clean one-year exam.

After it, I took my wife in my arms and cried for joy. I don’t think I realized quite how frightened I’d been all year. Now it all poured out of me.

I don’t consider myself a nostalgic person. In fact I’ve always had a certain horror of nostalgia. I’ve always looked ahead, not back. I’ve always felt that there are few sadder things in life than peaking too soon, then wasting decades in reliving the supposed glory years of youth. Even now, as my body is failing and I’m dying, I continue to believe there will be moments–alone with my thoughts, or talking with a friend, or in the company of my wife and kids- that will be richer and more meaningful than anything that has gone before. I really believe that.
Whether you read the ancient Greeks, or the Zen masters, or the New Testament, everybody seems to agree that the soul is imprisoned by the body, and that only death can set it free. The body, at best, is an encumbrance and a nuisance; at worst, it’s a sink of depravity and a beastly obstacle to salvation.

One day, when my body was wrecked and my head ached and my spirits were at their lowest, I said to my wife: “I just don’t see the point.”

Now, my wife Laura is as supportive and kind as a person could possibly be. I’m in awe of her gentleness. But in that moment she was something other than tender; she was absolutely fierce.

Fierce on my behalf and, I think, on her own. She still had the determination that I was having such a hard time mustering. She still saw value in the struggle. She wasn’t about to let me wallow. She already had enough burdens; she didn’t want to cater to someone who had given up.

“So find one!” she declared.

Finding the point became the point. That was the realm in which I still had everything to gain.

A problem that can be fixed by money… is not a problem. It’s an inconvenience, maybe.

The person who compromises his health in the name of making money is cutting himself a really lousy deal.

Holding On

My frame of mind was something I could still control. Doing so would be a sort of victory I was not accustomed to valuing a totally inward, private victory, but a legitimate accomplishment nevertheless. I resolved to control my own discomforts, to rise above them if I possibly could. In so doing, I came to understand the deep truth that, while pain may be unavoidable, suffering is largely optional.
Maybe a Zen master can actually conquer pain. Unfortunately, that’s way beyond me. When I hurt, I hurt. But it’s the attitude toward the pain that makes all the difference. Pain can make you thoroughly miserable, or pain can just be pain. The trick, I’ve realized, is to confine it to the body and not let it infect the mind.

There’s a next level where the soul can go, and the body can’t.

Bodily pain would be the body’s problem. I’d concentrate on learning how to keep my mind unclouded, my soul free to soar.

Risk

IF I HAVE ANYTHING AT ALL to teach about life, it probably comes down to these two simple but far-reaching notions: Recognizing the difference between a dumb risk and a smart one, and understanding when you need to change direction, and having the guts to do it.
So many of the big decisions that define a life-whether in business, or in starting a family, or even in facing a terminal disease come down to managing these two ideas.

Thus, by increments so exquisitely gradual that they might have passed unnoticed, I could have ended up being totally untrue to myself and living a life I hated. Twenty years later, I might have had a closet full of suits, a passport full of visas, and an irreparable feeling that I’d really blown it.

But if I had to take that whole bundle of experience and distill it down to one key point, what I’d say is this: The time spent in the Green Truck was the closest I’d come to living entirely in the present. I didn’t plan. I didn’t worry. I had no particular destination beyond the place I’d park that night. I was aimless, and proud of it. I lived with the intensity of here. I enjoyed the excitement and serenity of now. This was a privilege whose full value I’m not sure I recognized at the time.
I did recognize it, though, when, after several bustling and achieving decades- decades dedicated to the building of a future I finally felt the freedom once again of being entirely rooted in the here and now. That happened when I accepted the fact that I was dying.

No future.

If that notion is surreal and terrifying, it is also vastly liberating. I’d be leaving soon; things that happened no longer mattered very much to me. Consequences? Don’t expect a dying person to worry too damn much about consequences. Parking tickets? Throw ’em away! Today’s business headlines? Who cares?
My family, of course, had a future, and making provision for them was a sacred and joyful obligation. Beyond that, I was home free. I had nothing but the present, and I resolved to make the most of it.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t have a bad day for the rest of my life. If someone was wasting my time, I’d excuse myself and walk away. If a situation bothered me or refused to get resolved, I’d shrug and move on. I’d squander no energy on petty annoyances, poison no minutes with useless regret.

I’d play music at any hour of the day or night. I’d make a point of noticing the smell of the air, the shifting light on the mountains.

In recent months, on more than one occasion, one of my kids has walked into my study, and said, “Hi, Dad. What’re you smiling about?” The funny part is that I haven’t been able to tell them. I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking, or even if I’d been thinking anything at all. Had I been reminiscing? Fantasizing? Watching a hawk land in a tree above the pond? Or just sitting there, inhabiting a moment, basking in the pleasure of the present? All I can say for sure is that I was oddly, simply happy.

The readiness is all. – Shakespeare, Hamlet

PETER IS DETERMINED to live until he dies.

This expression–to live until one’s death–is of course an old one, a cliché that’s stuck around because it points to a fundamental truth. But I’d never thought below the surface of the words until observing Peter–seeing the stubborn and exalted contrast between his physical failing and the richness of his days. Peter’s body is dying by increments. As with the most sadistic kinds of torture, the hallmark of his disease is its relentless gradualness.
Tumors slowly and inexorably grow. Blockages develop; stressed systems struggle to function. Peter’s store of resilience is inevitably paid out, like a losing gambler’s stack of chips. His pain increases; the periods without pain become ever more fleeting oases. The body slowly fades.
But Peter’s spirit will have none of that. He refuses to accept the waning of intensity and joy. He insists that his wonderful moments shall continue. If the cost of those moments is exhaustion, he’s more than willing to exhaust himself. There’s a kind of ecstasy in flinging himself against the wall of physical limits, waging war against the ultimate fatigue. He will, as they say, live until he dies.

In our conversations through the spring, Peter spoke of many things–ideals and disillusionment, the value of risk, the anguish and thrill of transitions–but the overriding theme was always the idea of becoming ready. Ready to live; ready to die. Ready to change directions when change was necessary.

Timeliness was everything. Opportunities were useful only to those who were prepared to seize them. Gifts were appreciated only by those whose minds were equipped to see their value. And nothing, not even death, is daunting to the person who is ready for it.

It’s not the leap that’s dangerous, it’s the landing.

The only reason a leap is scary is that a landing must inevitably follow. So why not plan that part first? Solve the problem of the landing, then work backward to the leap. If you think about it that way, the leap becomes the easy part. As I’ve said, no one gets hurt in the air.
I was creating an illusion. An illusion, by the way, that is useful in many avenues of life. Certainly in business, where the crazier, more volatile person usually has a negotiating edge.
But I always had a strategy. In every negotiation, every deal, I knew where I wanted to end up. Again, I’d planned the landing. That freed me up for all sorts of antics with the leap.

Mortality doesn’t limit us only in time. It limits us, as well, in what we can ever hope to understand.

Along the way I had a peculiar thought. I thought about the odd phrase “gone to glory” that was used when someone died. I forced myself to glance back at the corpse of Mrs. Janz, saw her body cradled against the dimming mountains and the trees. Gone to glory? She’d been in glory the whole time. I only hope she knew it.
By now I was beginning to feel a little like Voltaire’s Candide, the relentless young optimist who goes into every situation believing it’s for the best and gets clobbered by life every time. The grown-up world was proving to be not such an easy place to navigate. But if Voltaire’s wisdom applied, so, it seemed, did Woody Allen’s: Success is 80 percent just showing up-if, that is, you show up willing to do almost anything, and to work your butt off at it.
I’ve always felt that there are two elements of value in a job: the things we learn from the job itself, and the things the job teaches us about who we are and what we need.

Readiness isn’t something that appears all at once. It’s something you earn by increments, at the cost of much anxiety, and rage and sadness.

There’s no surprise in a truly brave person acting brave; it’s when the erstwhile coward rises to the occasion that we feel pride in our humanity. Similarly, it’s no great accomplishment for a genuinely confident person to seem confident. But I had to work at it every time. I had to suck up fear over and over again. (This, by the way, is a trait I seem to share with many of the most successful people I have met in business.)

Appreciation

I didn’t need to stick a label on it. I planted trees because it pleased me to plant trees.
I love that my house is full of noise. My own feeling is that there’ll be plenty of time for silence, thank you very much. In the meantime I take tremendous joy in clamor. This family noise is the music that’s beyond music. This is vitality. This is life.
And of course it’s my kids, way more than anything else, that remind me every minute how incredibly lucky I have been on this earth.
My children know I love them. If I’m sure of anything, I’m sure of that. But I wonder if they realize that even the smallest details of their lives have been unspeakably precious to me.
Can my kids possibly understand how much those little things have enriched their old man’s life?
Some people, I think, ask way too much of heaven. They want it perfect. I see it very differently. I’m not looking for an upgrade of my life on earth, because I frankly can’t imagine what an upgrade would be like. I feel like if I’m half as fortunate in the Hereafter as I have been right here, then that’ll be as much as I, or anyone, deserve.

If I crashed and burned, so be it. But there had to be some big dream worth pursuing, and there had to be joy and excitement in the challenge of pursuing it.

My classmates could analyze, but I, thank God, could rhapsodize. In business as in life, that’s a far more precious thing.

Well, one of the things I’ve learned from having cancer is that it’s always worth it to continue. Death will come when it’s ready to; the bad stuff will end. You can count on that–and I don’t think it’s morbid to consider it a comfort.

But in the meantime there continues to be good stuff, too.

Small pleasures loom large. As with anything in short supply, their value rises with their rarity. A favorite two-minute song can offer all the satisfaction of a symphony.

There’s rapture in watching a dog chase a tennis ball. Sometimes a breeze from the west carries a pine smell down from the mountains.

Redemption.

There’s another word I’ve never really thought about till lately, another one for which I don’t pretend to have an airtight definition. But if there is such a thing as redemption, it doesn’t happen only once, or all at once. I think we’re redeemed at every moment we find something good among the bad, something joyful in the sorrow, something to continue being grateful for.

Andre is a romantic, an aesthete, a perfectionist. He tells his friend Wally that, for him, a great day has to be sublime in every detail. There has to be a perfect meal at a perfect table over. Looking at a perfect sunset. One flaw anywhere and the whole experience is spoiled.

Wally is just the opposite. He asks very little of life. He’s thrilled with whatever scraps of pleasure the world throws his way. A good day for him is when he wakes up in the morning, finds a cup of coffee left over from the day before, and discovers that no cockroach has crawled into it and died.

Well, when I was young and healthy, pumped up with the brightness of my prospects, I wanted to be Andre. Demand the best. Insist on perfection. But later in life, humbled by sickness and the prospect of mortality, I’ve come to understand that Wally, all along, was really the wiser person, and certainly the happier one.

He had the great gift of being pleasantly surprised, of seeing small delights as large victories.

A person of Andre’s temperament would have a really tough time getting ready to die. He’d grumble at every bodily insult, mourn every vanished possibility, see every lost pleasure as a personal affront. A person like Wally, on the other hand, is al ready so much closer to acceptance and to peace.

Thank God I’m becoming more and more like Wally,

IF ONE ADVANCES CONFIDENTLY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS DREAMS, AND ENDEAVORS TO LIVE THE LIFE WHICH HE HAS IMAGINED, HE WILL MEET WITH A SUCCESS UNEXPECTED IN COMMON HOURS.- Thoreau, Walden

Occasionally Peter would interrupt himself to listen to the insects and to savor the air.
“Each of my friends has one goodbye to say. I have hundreds. It’s exhausting.”

Through that summer, a season that Peter never thought he’d live to see, he taught me that just as there is a prime of life, there is a prime, too, in the process of approaching death.

If life’s prime corresponds to the period of greatest physical power, then the prime of dying is defined by strength of spirit.

In this other prime, Peter mustered an unflinching awareness and maintained it in the face of awful pain, and battled to keep it whole even as concentration became an ever-greater challenge. He made an array of choices as bold as any he’d ever made before: He chose gratitude over disappointment, curiosity over complaint, hope over despair.

Somehow, he transformed fear into a bracing suspense; he reshaped death itself, so that it was no longer a gaping terror, but just one more of life’s intriguing twists.

Gradually, I had to stop thinking of my illness as a fight that I would either win or lose, and begin to understand it as a mysterious process that was bound to run its course. My disease and I were not opponents, we were more like unwilling roommates forced to live in the same tight quarters of my body. Maybe it wasn’t a happy arrangement, but it wasn’t warfare either. It was an uneasy coexistence that would continue for a certain length of time, and I had to get on terms with it. I had to accept the annoying truth that I was no longer in sole control.
- In the course of doing that, I realized something useful: that acceptance doesn’t mean the same thing as giving up. The distinction is subtle; the language isn’t perfect; but I can tell you from personal experience that I’m not just playing with semantics here.
- Giving up is when you’re in a contest and you acknowledge that you’ve lost. Acceptance is when you graduate to a different way of looking at the situation. You make peace with the obvious fact that the outcome is no reflection on your character; you no longer see it in terms of winning or losing. Somehow you leave those opposites behind. It’s a big relief.

Facing Death

There’s another way, too–a more positive way-in which my tendency to go for it has defined my attitude toward my disease. This has more specifically to do with facing death. It might sound weird or morbid, but the fact is I’m excited about dying. I wouldn’t mind putting it off another twenty or thirty years–but that’s a different issue.
Given that my death is inevitable, I’m genuinely interested in what it will be like. I’m curious as hell. I’m not just passively sliding toward the moment, I’m imagining it all the time. I’ve always prided myself on having a zest for each new phase of life. Why should that zest evaporate when the next phase is dying?
I’m not saying that fear isn’t part of the equation. Fear of death is natural. I’m sure it’s hardwired into us. Which is a good thing- it keeps us from leaning too far over the edge or canoeing too close to the waterfall.
I’ve been learning that as death grows imminent, the fear of it no longer serves a purpose. And so it falls away. Not entirely. Not all at once. But it grows milder, gentler. The panic drains out of it.
Then again, there’s fear at every one of life’s big transitions. Fear goes with the territory. And I see that as an opportunity. Fear makes us study ourselves, forces us to admit our soft spots, to see where we are vulnerable. In the end, we can’t undo that vulnerability; we can only accept it, and crawl forward in the face of it. That, I’ve had to learn, is part of being human.

Marriage

Boy am I glad I rented that balloon! I have savored this memory five thousand times. I savor it still. You’ve got to go over the top for romance now and then. It’s a way of making life exalted. It sweeps you out of the everyday, but also reminds you how precious the everyday is. I mean, when that balloon came down, this amazing woman and I would go home together.. (Peter proposed in a hot air balloon)
DURING THOSE DOZEN YEARS, Laura and I have savored a life full of love and fun and one of the deepest satisfactions that people can have the making of great kids. I sometimes think there must be an afterlife, if for no other reason than so my gratitude for these gifts can continue. Of all the things I can’t imagine just suddenly stopping, my thankfulness and wonder for the life I’ve had is near the top of the list.

Parenting

But if I were to pick a point at which my life reached its richest, and most fulfilled, and most complete stage, I know exactly what It would be; the moment I became a father.
At the birth of each of my children I have felt the undeniable presence of some version of a supreme being.
I’ve said earlier in these pages that for many years now I’ve been in the habit of wishing on a star each night. That began on the night our first child was born. I needed to worship, to give thanks. I needed to pray for her well-being. Call me pagan-standing alone under a cold, crisp November sky and mumbling to the stars struck me as the most natural and honest way to do those things.
As our family has grown with the births of Jeff and Chris, my prayers have gotten longer, taken on more texture. I give myself a lot of leeway when I wish on stars. I ramble. I scatter my wishes with no great discipline. Ultimately, though, all the wishes and all the rambling comes down to one unchanging plea for the health and safety and happiness of my family. What else matters next to that?
I feel that, in regard to my kids’ lives, I am exiting far too early. Maybe i’d still feel that way if I lived to be eighty. But the fact is, I’m going now, when my daughter and sons are children. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m letting them down; for all my progress toward acceptance, this one aspect of dying makes me sick at heart.
Selfishly, too, I mourn all that I will miss of their lives. When I think of the challenges and discoveries that my children have before them, I am full of boundless curiosity and giddy hope. I’m thrilled at the prospect of everything they’ll learn and accomplish. That I won’t be here to see their destinies unfold fills me with helplessness and frustration.
This is the anguish of a parent. I can’t pretty it up. It hurts like hell.
My only solace is to remind myself that there has also been great joy-joy that has compensated me ten times over for the grief I’m feeling now.
Nothing raises the stakes in life like having kids. Suddenly, the future matters. Emotions take on an amazing resonance. Love bounces off the family walls and multiplies. Everything you do with your kids lives on in their memories as well as yours; everything’s more valid because it’s shared.

Let me tell you about the best hour of the best day I’ve had since getting sick.

These were unspeakably precious moments; my spirit wasn’t about to sacrifice them to the problems of my body. We zipped and bounced along. Kate held on to my back; her cheek was against my shoulder. It was like she was a little girl again, and I was a young and healthy and protecting father.

We explored a bunch of little coves around the resort. The water was a hundred shades of blue and green; sunlight glinted off it so brightly that it almost hurt. Rays scudded by; tiny fish went skittering across the surface. Everything amazed us; we just pointed at things and giggled. And we talked about how great life is. How lucky we were to be living it. As a family and as ourselves.

I choke up when I recall this story. But not because I’m sad. Because there’s more joy in the recollection than I can hold. There was a lifetime’s worth of pleasure in that single day-an intensity and a completeness that strike me as a great deal more important than the mere question of how many years a life contains.

That excursion on the water taught me that each moment is a life, that life is renewed every time we’re walloped by beauty, every time we’re shaken up by gratitude and love. I have nothing to complain about. I feel like I toured much of Heaven in that single afternoon.

I love entrepreneurs.

I am in awe of people who can come up with a fresh concept and by sheer will make it a reality. There’s nothing I respect more than that. Let’s face it: 99 percent of people in business just move preexisting pieces around the board. Entrepreneurs create. If they are very good at what they do, and if they have some luck thrown in, they may leave behind something that will continue after they’re gone. Believe me, I think a lot about such things these days.
Many lives grow thin and stale before they end. I feel grateful that my life will not have time to taper very much. I want to go out with a full heart, and five things in my mind at once, and a desk cluttered with projects I fully intend to get to, maybe the day after tomorrow.
Have I made it clear that I loved my work? Then I hope it will be equally clear that I love my family a whole lot more. That’s why, from the first day our kids were born, I made myself a solemn pledge: I would not, for any price, allow my career to turn me into an absentee father.
I didn’t want to miss precious moments of my kids’ growing up–the first lost tooth, the school play-by being off on business trips. I didn’t want my kids to have to get to know me all over again after I’d been gone for weeks.
I made myself a promise that, whatever else was going on, I’d be home every evening by six. With only the rarest exceptions, I held to that pledge for the rest of my working life. I didn’t do business dinners. I didn’t do business cocktails. I drove our corporate pilots crazy. If I had a meeting in New York, I’d schedule it for nine A.M. This meant leaving Denver at four in the morning. But it also meant I could be home in time to hear about my kids’ days, maybe to throw a ball or help them with their homework. I hope this was good for my children; I know it was good for me. Not only was, but is. I savor these family moments in the present tense. They are with me all the time. I smile about them in private.

I make no apologies for these inconsistencies. I’d rather be honest than consistent.

But I can no longer take my clarity for granted. I have to choose it. I have to work for it. I have to keep believing that the thoughts are worth the price. I’m still afraid of missing something wonderful.

The End

During the course of his final weeks, Peter grew calm. No doubt, this was partly due to sheer exhaustion, and to the benign effects of medication. But seeing him, talking with him, I became firmly convinced that there was another cause as well. Peter grew calm because, for him, there was no longer any tension between the past, the present, and the future. His entire life was available, compressed, in every passing instant.
As time lost its dominion over him, Peter came ever closer to reaching the goal of all religion and all philosophy: seeing things in their completeness, and accepting that everything that is, must be.

It dawned on me that a totally weird series of events was beginning. From now on, I’d start doing the last this and the last that.

I think over the years of my illness–no, over my entire life-and I consider my flailing efforts to find serenity. I chased it with logic, but at the same time used logic to fend it off. I sought it with yearning, with private rituals that were my own eccentric way of praying, of moving closer to the spiritual. Now I feel that these exercises, while necessary, were probably beside the point. Peace keeps its own schedule. You can’t hurry it. And when it comes, it’s a gift freely given, more than something earned.

My hunch is that it comes to saints and sinners equally. It’s not about justice, and it doesn’t mean that life is fair. Just inevitable.

It’s a calm that comes from knowing that I’ve held nothing back.

It’s simply this: I really tried. I did my best.