Preface

A Warm Saturday Morning

It was a warm Saturday morning in June of 1997.

The house was full in the way I liked it full. Angelica and her mother were on the couch, talking the way the two of them could talk — about nothing and everything at once. My father-in-law sat in his easy chair. I stood at the kitchen island in our great room, coffee somewhere within reach, looking out through the double French doors at the backyard of the home Angelica and I had closed on that February. Our Valentine’s gift to each other. A wife I adored. A daughter I adored. A new house. Work was good. From the outside looking in, it was a fairy tale.

The phone rang.

It was Maria. Maria Llorente — my childhood friend, and a doctor, the one who had finally hunted down the answer when other doctors could not be bothered to look. I knew before she spoke that she was not calling to chat. I could hear it in the single second before she said my name.

She told me I had cancer. Hodgkin’s lymphoma. And then, in the same breath, with the particular gentleness of someone delivering hard news she desperately wants you to survive, she said the thing people say about Hodgkin’s. “It’s a good one to have.”

A good one to have.

In that moment I barely heard it. Because something happened to time.

You have heard people describe it — the accident that unfolds in slow motion, the fall that takes half a second and lasts an hour. That is what happened to me, standing at that kitchen island with the phone against my ear and the morning sun coming through the French doors. The world slowed almost to stillness. I have come to call it the Eternal Moment.

And in that stretched, silent, endless moment, I did not fall apart. I took a breath. I listened. And I watched my own mind do something I did not expect.

The first thing it said was simple and certain. I will not die from this.

The second thing it said, quieter, was honest. But you might.

And then — this is the part that changed the rest of my life — my mind did not ask the question almost everyone asks. It did not ask why me. Not that morning. Not in any of the years of treatment that followed.

It asked something else entirely.

What legacy do I want to leave? And just as important — what legacy do I not want to leave?

I set down the phone. I walked over to Angelica. I put my arms around her, and I said, “I have cancer.”

Then, before the fear could finish crossing her face, I said the rest. “Don’t worry. I’m not dying from this. I have a greater chance of being run over by a trolley car on my way out of my last chemo than I do of dying from this.”

We live in South Florida. There are no trolley cars.

She laughed. And she cried. At the very same time — the laughing and the crying so tangled together that I could not tell you where one ended and the other began. I have loved her for that laugh through tears for more than thirty years.

That is where this book begins. Not because cancer is the point. It is not. But because that warm Saturday morning is where I learned, in a single stretched second, the difference between a man who is merely alive and a man who has decided how to live.

I did not become that man on the phone with Maria. I had been becoming him my whole life — since a boy opened a gate on a quiet street and asked himself why. The Eternal Moment did not create me. It revealed me.

So before we go back to that boy, and forward through everything that came after, I want to ask you the question I have been asking ever since.

If the phone had been for you —

what would you have done?