Yesterday I cried on the drive home.
I didn’t even know yesterday was Sully’s last appointment.
Three years cancer free.
That’s what they told us yesterday. The appointments we have been going to year after year are over. Sully now moves into the survivorship program.
I should have felt nothing but happiness.
Instead, somewhere on the drive home, I started crying.
Yeah, I’m a tough guy. I’ve taken a lot of pride in being able to take a hit, figure shit out and keep moving. But every once in a while life catches you when you’re not looking and gets through the armor. Any man who tells you that never happens to him is either lying or doing his crying in his closet.
Yesterday it got me in the car.
Maybe because happiness wasn’t the only thing I was feeling.
There was relief. Gratitude. Pride. But there was also this enormous wave of remembrance for a period of my life that I don’t think I completely understood while I was living through it.
Years before Sully got sick, cancer had already entered my life. My former wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. I spent years beside her through surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation. I learned how to drain surgical tubes. I learned how to arrange pillows when nothing was comfortable. I learned what it was like to wake up over and over during the night because the person beside you was hurting.
She survived.
What happened to our marriage afterward is another story. There were things happening that I didn’t understand at the time, truths I learned much later, and a long period when I was desperately trying to save something that, looking back, was already gone.
Eventually our marriage ended.
I stayed in the house with our three children. Soon afterward, my daughter left for college, and suddenly it was just me and the boys.
I was broken.
And there wasn’t much time to be broken.
The life we had created had always depended on two people carrying it. Suddenly there was one. The house didn’t get smaller when she left. Neither did the mortgage, the electric bill, the taxes, the groceries or any of the other obligations accumulated over a lifetime together.
But my children were there, and I was there, and leaving them or leaving the only home they knew was never an option. I was never leaving.
So I stayed.
The arithmetic didn’t work. I knew it didn’t work. We were always a two person income, it was impossible.
There were months when I was deciding which bill could wait because there simply wasn’t enough money for all of them. There were days when someone from the electric company was standing at the front door while I tried to figure out how to keep the lights on.
It wasn’t some grand or dramatic act of sacrifice on my part. It was simply the only choice I could live with. I just knew in my head I was never ever going to not wake up under the same roof as my children. So I worked, raised the boys, tried to hold onto the house and figured out tomorrow when tomorrow arrived.
Mostly, I tried to give the boys some sense that life was still normal when almost nothing about our lives was normal anymore.
I missed my daughter. There was always a sense of comfort having her home. I was running Preston all over the country, maxing out credit cards to pay for college visits and football camps because I wasn’t going to let what was happening in my life become the reason he didn’t get a chance to chase what he wanted for his.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I was trying to put myself back together too.
Then, a year later, Sully was diagnosed with acute B-cell lymphoblastic leukemia.
And COVID arrived.
Everything, everywhere, all at once.
I have been sober since November 16, 1990. Looking back now, I genuinely don’t know how I stayed sober and kept everything together through the days, months and years that followed.
Strangely, I think it is harder to look back on it now than it was to actually live through it.
Back then there wasn’t time to think.
There was another appointment. Another spinal tap. Another medication. Another bill. Another problem at home. Another morning when two boys needed their father to get out of bed regardless of what was happening inside his own head.
So I did.
And Sully did too.
Kids are remarkably resilient. He would wake up, put one foot in front of the other and do whatever that particular day required of him.
Some days required more than others.
I’ll never forget one night when the neuropathy became unbearable.
He was screaming in pain.
Not crying. Screaming.
He sounded like an injured soldier.
The Gabapentin medicine wasn’t touching it.
I felt terrible and didn't know what to do. Eventually I laid my entire body across his legs, putting all of my weight onto them because, for whatever reason, the pressure seemed to give him a tiny amount of relief.
We fell asleep that way.
There was another day during all of this when Sully’s best friend—his dog Lenox—was killed in front of our house.
Because apparently leukemia, chemotherapy, COVID, divorce and watching the family he knew disappear weren’t quite enough for one kid.
And then there was the house itself.
I had once looked at that house as evidence of everything I had accomplished. On a shoestring budget and with doing most of the work myself; I had taken a small three-bedroom ranch that we could barely afford and turned it into a beautiful Georgian colonial for my family.
Now I was walking through the same rooms alone.
Something that had once represented our family and everything we had accomplished together had become a reminder of what used to be. It was a dark time.
So I exercised.
And I wrote.
Those were my two forms of therapy.
The blog posts from those years are still here. Every so often, someone going through cancer, divorce, addiction or some other catastrophe finds one and sends me an email or calls me. Years later, people I have never met still tell me that something I wrote while trying to survive my own life helped them survive a little bit of theirs.
Maybe that’s one reason I’m writing again today.
Because those years taught me something else.
Hard times have a remarkable way of showing you who people really are.
There were people whose kindness I will remember for the rest of my life.
And there were people who were complete assholes.
People who knew exactly what I was going through and somehow found ways to make an already impossible period of my life even harder.
I remember them too.
But strangely, as the years have passed, they matter less and less.
The people I remember most are the ones who showed up.
My mother. My best friend Pete Mitas. Jennifer McNaughton. Brian Silk. Kim & Gerald Filardi. Laura Buzzetta. Angela Clark. Caryn Bardunias. And so many others.
The people who called.
The people who came over.
The people who helped with the kids.
The people who loved Sully.
The people who did something when doing nothing would have been much easier.
Some of them probably don’t even remember the things they did.
I do.
When your life is falling apart, what seems like a small gesture to somebody else can mean fucking everything to you.
Which brings me back to yesterday.
The universe has a strange sense of timing.
I had lost track and had no idea yesterday morning that Sully was going to graduate into survivorship.
And that same night, Long Island Elite Football gathered around the wife of one of my coaches as she fights breast cancer.
We had shirts made for all of our players and families. We brought her onto the field and surrounded her with people who simply wanted her to know:
You are not doing this alone.
Yesterday, of all days.
Maybe that was random.
Maybe it wasn’t.
I don’t know anymore.
But driving home yesterday, thinking about where Sully and I had just been and where I was going that night, something became very clear to me.
I have been given an extraordinary amount of love in my life.
And I owe some of it back.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whatever years I have left and what I want to do with some of them.
I want to show up for people.
I'm going to volunteer some of my time at Hospitals. Hospice. Nursing homes. Homeless shelters.
Not because I think I’m going to change the world.
Because somewhere there is a person sitting in a hospital room who doesn’t have a mother calling. Doesn’t have siblings checking in. Doesn’t have friends coming through the door. Doesn’t have a football organization making shirts. Doesn’t have twenty people asking what they need.
Some people don’t have anybody.
I know what it felt like when I had people.
And I know what it felt like when someone I thought would have compassion didn’t.
Maybe that’s enough reason to walk into a room every once in a while and be the person who does.
Most of us spend an extraordinary amount of our lives going through the motions. Work. Bills. Practices. Appointments. Traffic. Emails. Tomorrow’s problems.
Then every once in a while life grabs you by the throat and reminds you what actually matters.
Yesterday my son reached three years cancer free.
Yesterday he became a survivor.
Last night we stood beside someone who is still fighting.
And yesterday, on the drive home, I cried.
Not because I was sad.
I think I cried because while I was living through all of it, I never really had time to stop and understand just how dark it had gotten.
Yesterday I finally had enough distance to turn around and look back.
And holy shit.
We made it.
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