This week, a local artist I know lost her son to cancer. I had been watching his story with the disease unfold for a couple years. At one point in time he owned a video production company called, Uncage the Soul (the phrase was apparently one he used to sign correspondences while he was young and traveling in Europe). He was an award-winning filmmaker, speaker and adventurer. I never got the chance to meet him, but from all accounts, he sounded like an inspiring, one-of-a-kind human being who lived his life to the fullest and faced his last days at peace with love and support around him.
What really struck me this week with his passing was a Facebook post his wife made (they were married this summer, with the full knowledge of the dire state of his disease). I hope she doesn’t mind me citing her words in this post, but they were so powerful and something I really feel deserved an even larger audience –– this audience, since she now sadly shares space with all the other widowed people who have loved and lost. Having been in the situation of watching your spouse die of a disease before they even reached the age of 50, I couldn’t help but relate.
“Love isn’t always pretty – it’s not all forest sunbeams and mountain tops and huckleberry milkshakes. It’s choosing to stay and be present when the storm sets in, when we are at our lowest, when our partner is at their worst, simply because love filled your heart and you can’t imagine any other choice.”
I know I’ve talked about it before as being the hardest thing I had done in my life–being there, being present for every moment once it was very clear Mario was speeding towards the exit on the freeway of life. Those last months were his proverbial “hour of need” and there was no way I wasn’t going to be there for him. I’ve also talked at length about how Mario faced a certain death but in his case, he chose a silent path. I imagine how lost in thoughts he might have been. How, as minutes blended into hours and hours blended into what would be his last days, he carefully cataloged moments of his life–a life review. Certainly there were regrets. Certainly there were strong emotions. I made sure that he knew the door was open, so to speak, if he did want to talk. We talked about what we theorized happened after death and all manner of other things closely related, but talking about the personal nature of what was happening to him, he did not want. And that’s okay. And to me, love can dictate how these things play out. There was inner knowing between us and many things left unspoken, especially in the last month. In those last days, it was not about me and I felt that forcing him to talk about what was going through his mind would have made it more about me than him.
In sharp contrast, after his cancer diagnosis, my artist friend’s son did a TEDx talk about mortality, podcasts about dying and even had a story featured on local news station. That was his choice and the path he wanted to walk–to get a message out. I believe the last podcast he did was the last one I listened to. It was where he told the story of his early struggles, the rise and eventual exit from the production company and the hindsight he had after the cancer diagnosis. I felt there was a very important message in there and it’s something that I continually circle back to in my own life and that is misplaced attention. This is something that can be critically important to everyone, but especially to those of us who have chosen a more entrepreneurial path. While building up a successful business these days, it’s almost inevitable that to some extent, you are sacrificing your physical well-being. Through extreme stress, we’re taught to persevere–to “rise and grind”, ignoring aspects of our health. I got a real sense of regret and “if only” in his voice listening to that last podcast.
Many years ago now I got a kick in the ass that made me sit up and pay attention, but it was still a constant balancing act for me to not sacrifice too much of my physical well being. I love what I do and it’s very easy to pour too much of myself into what I do. I had recent reminder with the episode of the pinched nerve in my neck. I’m grateful and thankful that I’ve paid more attention to my physical well-being and still been able to maintain my business. But I know the regrets as well. Mario and I ran this business together and in the “heyday” we were both working long hours pushing out projects for extremely large corporations and every year we’d talk about traveling somewhere and every year we both decided we were “too busy” or something always came up.
Through all of it, I’ve come to realize two things are for certain: stress IS a killer and no one is guaranteed a specific amount of time alive on this earth. How we spend that time, who we choose to spend that time with, is profoundly important. Mario only got 47 years. We all have to exit the freeway at some point. Uncage the Soul.
RIP John Waller and I hope for a healing path for your other half on her journey forward.
I’ve put links to the local news stories and to his last podcast below as well.
