Reflections on Faith &
Life for the Years of Winter—
Grandson Joe moves to
college today. The same college where he was treated for liver cancer, starting
when he was 15 months old. He had so much chemo that he weighed 2 lbs less on
his 2nd birthday than he did on his first. In a way, it didn’t
matter, because there was a good chance he would be dead by the age of two
anyway. They said that if he lived, he would lose his hearing, be unable to
jump, have kidney dysfunction, and other unfortunate effects.
Instead, he plays tenor
sax and mandolin, he was a tennis letterman, and the nephrologist yesterday
said his kidney function is only 3 points [on a scale of 100] below what is
expected at his age. He’s an amazing guy.
I know it’s a bit
unorthodox, but in Joe’s honor, I’d like to have root beer floats served at the
party following my funeral.
This will happen, of
course, only if Helen dies first. The one major problem in our marriage has
concerned root beer. One of us loves it; the other loathes it. She tolerates it
not because I love it but because Joe loves it.
But when I die, I want
people to have a good time, to be happy, and it is from my grandson, Joe, when
he was about five years old, that I learned the secret of happiness.
His sister, three and ½
years older, experienced a distressing incident. I can’t remember what bothered
her so much, but it was enough to throw her for a real loop, complete with sobs
of agony.
Their mother found Joe,
standing on a chair in front of the refrigerator, with the freezer door open,
digging with difficulty into a container of hard ice cream.
“What are you doing, Joe?”
she asked.
“I’m fixing Biddey a root
beer float,” he said. “You can’t be unhappy if you have a root beer float.”
That’s the attitude that
kept him going in his second year of life, and has kept him going ever since.
He’s an amazing guy.
John Robert McFarland
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