“When you’re down on your luck, you gotta do it,” –
Andrew W.K.’s feel-good song Got to Do It
After my wife found she had cancer a couple years ago, Thanksgiving took a different meaning for me. I felt guilty that it took her illness for me to appreciate the holiday for what it is, but I do now take the time to remind myself and my kids about how thankful we should be at this time of year for what we have rather than next month when people start wishing for what they don’t have. Tonight I sat on my brother’s couch after dinner, half napping as the tryptophan kicked in. Fighting the lure of a nap, I picked up the recent Sports Illustrated and started to read an article about Jill Costello, a local girl from San Francisco with a big heart who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley this past Spring and as the coxswain for the women’s rowing team, led them to second place in the National Championships.
Jill Costello - former Cal rowing star
I had read briefly about Jill back in May in the local newspaper after I heard about her through the UCSF Medical Cancer newsletter that my wife gets. Jill had been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer although she did not smoke.
Although I hadn’t kept up with her story, as I read through the article I felt myself tearing up. I knew what was coming. I looked over at my wife smiling and laughing with my family and felt truly blessed.
Thanksgiving is truly THE family holiday of the year. It isn’t long enough for most people to travel far away. It isn’t about presents or religion. It is about celebrating your place and those around you and being thankful for what you have. Sometimes hearing stories about the loss of others who really are special people reminds me of this.
I want to give a special thanks to my friend Donald Wilhelm who we lost this year. A good guy who inspired many and left us too soon. In the article in Sports Illustrated: The Courage of Jill Costello, we read a great story about another inspiring person who can teach us to appreciate what we have today. Although the article did not mention it, Jill lost her battle after graduation, but her strength inspired many to give more than you receive.
As her coach so succinctly put it at Jill’s funeral, “There are givers and there are takers, and you want to be more giver than taker. She never complained. She gave far more than she ever took. She was an inspiration to all of us. I hope when we face something as daunting as this, we can show some of the courage that she showed.”
May the good lord be with you down every road you roam. And may sunshine and happiness surround you when you’re far from home. – Rod Stewart
Thanksgiving Day Sunset 2009
The four days of the Thanksgiving holiday give you just enough time to be thankful for what you’ve received over the past 11 months but give you just barely enough time to rest before the onslaught of the holidays consumes you. These days we are not only hit with Christmas, but we have Kwanzaa and Chanukkah, and we also have commercially Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you’re in the affiliate world it just hits you all at once. The bargains are there to be had but getting those discount codes in front of everyone is becoming more and more difficult.
Consumers are also more savvy. They know that there is more demand for your business that ever. I even saw one site giving away a $1000 gift certificate to their Twitter follower that gave them the right answer. The funny thing is that this company only had 233 followers! What odds! Are they kidding? They didn’t even have much of anything on their site that I wanted to buy. I think it is funny that this promotion couldn’t even get people to follow them on Twitter. I even just checked and noticed that they lost 3 members since I last looked. This goes to show how brand awareness is still significant when running promotions on the web. The social web is not as viral as it once was. People are only following things they know and trust. They aren’t blindly following people and becoming friends with strangers online. It does concern me about the validity of the networks and friendships being created on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
Anyway, I digress as usual. I am truly rejuvenated in thought, body and soul. Over the holidays it hit me. Thanksgiving really has more meaning to me because it is the holiday where I met my wife. Where I met her 25 years ago and for that I will be forever thankful for that fateful night. 25 years later I ran out to the bridge and soaked in the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge and took some photos of one of the most beautiful spots on Earth. Earlier that day I had watched my 10 year old son play golf and he played his greatest round ever, almost beating me. In his mind he was playing golf with his dad. In my mind I was also playing golf with my dad. There are so many similarities between my son and his grandfather. The smile, the giggles, the swagger, and his incredible casual demeanor….his spirit lives on in my son. Did I mention their golf game? Such a beauty to watch. I only wish they could have played golf together. Such a pair they would have made.
The holidays are tough on many and I still feel the loss of my father during the holidays. We had some of my aunties (my dad’s younger sisters) over for Thanksgiving. I don’t remember how it happened or what the conversation was that led to it, but we all broke down over dessert as my 75 year old aunt told me how much she missed my dad and wished he were still around. Imagine that. A 75 year old lady still needing the comfort of her older brother. My sister and other aunt and I just shed a tear and for about 2 minutes as we couldn’t talk as we tried to compose ourselves before pushing on, but it was nice to pay respect to my father and remind myself of how thankful I was to be the son of a man that still emitted those emotions years after his death. My brother-in-law who never really knew my dad I think was very touched by the scene.
I don’t know why, but that night more than ever I felt my dad with me on my run. I felt like I was running in solitude but I ran like the wind and ran faster than I had in a long time. Sometimes, revisiting your past I guess can just remind you of your youth.
I had a friend turn 45 the other day and I casually sent her a link to Alphaville’s “Forever Young”. It seemed so a propos. She responded so affirmatively that it made me smile. Then I found Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young”. The words rang true and all I could think is how good and motivating those words are…..enough to get me through this holiday season at least.
You share a bond and friendship that can’t be broken – Fortune Cookie
Given what we have been through this year, some might wonder how Thanksgiving might be different or how we can be thankful. In fact, on my run tonight I spent a half an hour just thinking of all the people and things I am thankful for. Well this Thanksgiving was different for me. For one, I never before had a Thanksgiving where I didn’t sit down for a big Turkey meal with either side of our huge family.
In fact, today marks the 4 month marker since the day she was diagnosed with cancer and our world was set spinning.
The thought of almost losing the love of my life and the mother of my children at an early age to breast cancer has been a bit of a wake up call to me / her / us. I am so thankful that she has been able to endure her skin sparing mastectomy to remove the cancer and has been given a new lease on life. Today was spent “being thanksful” and thanking all those who have helped us to get through this year. We also spent the morning helping out those less fortunate than ourselves. Is not all about health and wealth.
To hear and see the stories of others we were able to see other people out there who are just as thankful as we are for what we have today. In fact some definitely have more to be thankful for than us and I was happy to show our children how lucky we are. This year though we have many friends, family, doctors, etc who are all part of the reason why we are thankful for their love and caring, for the health of my wife, and for the lessons we have learned from them to know what true compassion means
In recent days we were happy to hear that my wife’s parents finally have decided to come out and see my wife. I know it means so much to her that they will be coming to visit. I guess we have one more thing to be thankful for this year.
“I am Superwoman, Put an S on my chest” – Alicia Keys
Continuing my theme of letting go, my wife is starting to do a lot of little things which are showing her confidence and need for independence from going grocery shopping alone to resuming her exercise. It is a simple thing sometimes but I can trace this renewed energy just from a simple invite from some of the “popular moms” in our kids school who asked her to join them for an evening out. It really made my wife feel good to still fit in. I know her confidence wiill ebb over the next few months as she goes through her recontstruction and deal with both the emotional and physical scars.
Interestingly enough we had the same conversation about confidence with our own children. We want to teach them humbleness. While both are well liked by their classmates we want to teach them to be humble individuals and help them for the inevitable day when they receive rejection and teach them how to handle it.
Part of gaining confidence is providing exposure to as much as possible. As a parent it is our job to show our children as much as we can while providing guidance. As we go through our lives our parenting takes on many forms that are influenced by our own experiences. We sometimes learn by giving our children things that our parents couldn’t give us or providing many of those same experiences. For me, I miss those moments with my dad and this weekend I was able to take my son to his 1st Big Game (Cal vs. Stanford football), but it is was more than just a game. As I say, it is always the experience of getting there, and taking a 9 year old to Berkeley is always an eye-opening experience. Blondies Pizza, Top Dog, the homeless, Rasputin’s Records, etc are all part of the mystique after taking Bart to Berkeley. For our son (and some day our daughter) the experience started with listening to the Cal Band.
After listening to the Cal Band we marched up to the stadium with them. The smile and laughter that he had watching the band made me tear up. 30 years ago that was me with my dad. I only hope my dad felt as satisfied with giving me that same experience and I showed him the same amount of gratitude. The casual conversation about the history of the schools and the area were part of a great day of bonding that hopefully will create many pleasant memories for my son because they sure did for me.
My wife and I are still being cautious about the post-surgery experience and what it will mean to us. I think we know how it will be physically but psychologically we’ve been talking about some of our concerns and issues each night. We will have to work through it, but at the moment we aren’t sure what those exact issues will be. What we do know is that we have to be observant of each other’s behavior and let each other know when we observe anything.
One thing we did agree upon though is that leading into this Thanksgiving, we will not be at a loss for things we will be thankful for.
