Going Back, Moving Forward

It had been nine months since Pat had passed.

I was still struggling to get my life back in focus. Clearly I had lost more than my wife and best friend. I had lost a big part of myself.

If I still had a career I gave a shit about, I’m sure I could have easily buried myself in some semblance of “work.” I spent 30 years in advertising as a copywriter/producer and creative director. But back in 2009, I unceremoniously walked away.

It had always been a young person’s game and, with the Internet and social media taking on a larger share of our clients’ marketing plans, old-school traditional media, TV, radio and print, were dying a slow death. Over the years, I had watched as new technologies swept away decades-old family-run businesses and life-long careers. Now it was my turn to leap out of the way of progress. The awards that lined my office walls, once considered validation of my talent, had become quaint artifacts of the past. My glory days.

The coolest job in the world suddenly wasn’t fun anymore. The pride and the passion I had for my work was gone. I can’t blame it all on the “evolving” advertising industry. I had changed as well. Since the turn of the century, Pat and I had dealt with a lot of sickness and death. And by the end of the decade, we found ourselves orphaned and exhausted. I lost my mother in 2000 to breast cancer, although it was a metastatic brain tumor that ultimately did her in. My dad passed seven years later; complications from ALS. In between, Pat lost her dad to pulmonary disease, then her step-father was taken by Lyme disease, of all things. A few years later, her mother died of broken heart disease, although the official diagnosis was septicemia. Somewhere in there was 9/11, a few wars, the bursting of the Dot-Com and Real Estate Bubbles, and the Great Recession.

It was hard to find much joy in the naughts. Then, just 23 months into my self-imposed exile/retirement, a small “lesion” would be found in Pat’s esophagus during a routine endoscopy. The doctor was hopeful, but the look on his face said is all.

It would eventually be diagnosed as a neuro-endrocrine tumor (aka NET). A rare, one-in-a-million small-cell cancer. Same type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs. No known causes or risk factors, aside from genetics. Very aggressive. Shitty survival rate.

I was instantly thrown into the most challenging job of my life for which I was completely ill-prepared: Caregiver. Two years and nine months later, she’d be gone. And I’d be out of a job. Again. Moping around the house. Thinking about burning the place to the ground. Completely, utterly, unmotivated. Didn’t want to do shit. Ironically, it was a TV commercial that would drag me off the sofa, give me a goal, and get me excited.

Matthew McConaughey. Bongo-boy. Speaking to me! Yes me.

While cruising behind the wheel of his new Lincoln MKC: “Sometimes you gotta go back to actually move forward. I don’t mean going back to reminisce or chase ghosts. But go back to see where you came from, where you’ve been, how you got here. See where you’re going. I know there are those who say you can’t go back. Yes you can. You just have to look in the right place.”

I may have given up writing ad copy for a living. But that doesn’t mean I stopped appreciating other people’s work.

The more I thought about that commercial, the more I realized that I needed to get away. Blow town. Take myself out of my comfort zone. Challenge myself. Revisit people and places that, for whatever reason, helped make me who I was.

Before and after I met Pat.

I needed to get re-acquainted with that old friend of mine named Doug. Wasn’t sure if I’d find him walking along the Niagara River in Lewiston, looking out over Grandfather Mountain in Boone, standing next to Taughannock Falls in Ithaca or enjoying the surf at Kill Devil Hills. There was also the chance that I’d return still broken. If you tackle something like this expecting a life-changing epiphany, you’ll likely walk away disappointed. I could easily end up back in Tampa with nothing more than a maxed-out credit card. Which was fine, too. At least I was making an effort to heal. Not just rolling over and giving up, waiting to die of broken heart disease.

Well, at least not yet.