by Curtis Bunn
8) Can relationships with a thirty-five-year age difference work?
9) Did Elliott’s past justify his desires to pursue younger women?
10) What are your thoughts on the book’s cover? Was it effective? Did it match the book’s content?
IF YOU LIKED “OLD MAN IN THE CLUB” WE HOPE YOU WILL PICK UP CURTIS BUNN’S NEXT TITLE. ENJOY THIS SNEAK PREVIEW!
SEIZE THE DAY
BY CURTIS BUNN
COMING SOON FROM STREBOR BOOKS
CHAPTER 1: LIFE
I’m about to die. Doctor said so. Maybe not today. Perhaps tomorrow. Whenever it’s coming, it’s coming soon.
Cancer.
But I’m not scared. I’m a little anxious, a little curious, to be honest. Curious about how it will happen. Where I will be at that moment—the place and where will I be in my head, my mind. Will I get scared when I feel it coming? Will I feel it coming?
Well, those are thoughts for another day, a day that, truth be told, should not come for a few months or so. That’s how long it will take the cancer to totally ravage and deplete my body and put me to sleep. Forever. That’s what the doctors say. And they know everything.
So, here I am. In the prime of my life…waiting on death.
Can’t cry about it. Not anymore. When I said I wasn’t scared, I was talking about now. Three weeks ago, when Dr. Wamer gave me the news, I was scared as shit.
Do you have any idea what it’s like to be told you’re at the end of your life’s journey? At forty-five? With a young daughter? With so much more to do? With so much not done?
I was so overwhelmed that it took me two days to pull myself out of bed, to turn on the lights in my house, to eat an apple. Then it took me another two days to tell my father, who took it as if cancer were eating away at his existence.
“Why can’t it be me, Calvin?” he said. “Why you? You’ve lived a good life. The best thing I ever did was marry your momma—God rest her soul—and contribute to your birth. The rest of my life, I can’t say I’m that proud of. Except you. You’ve made me proud.”
And why did he say that? I bawled like a freshly spanked newborn, and my sixty-eight-year-old dad and I hugged each other at the kitchen table at his house for what seemed like an hour, two men afraid out of their wits.
Since then, I have pulled myself together—what’s left of me, that is. Doctors say they can’t do surgery, but I can try radiation and perhaps chemo. But there are no guarantees. That’s code for: “it won’t work.” And I have seen how debilitating those treatments can be.
It never made sense to me that you go to the doctor for a checkup feeling fine. Then he tells you that you have cancer or some hideous disease and starts firing chemicals into your bloodstream like you shoot up a turkey you’re about to fry on Thanksgiving. Almost immediately you feel like shit and before long, you start looking like shit. You lose your hair, you lose your energy…you lose who you are. And eventually you lose your will to live.
For some, for most, that’s the route they choose and I don’t begrudge them that. That’s their choice.
Me, I would rather live whatever time I have left instead of having my insides burned out and become so drained that I could not live, only exist…until I die.
Maybe it’s me, but that doesn’t seem like fun. Haven’t had much fun since I went to the hospital for my annual checkup, feeling good and looking forward to a date that night with a nice lady I had met. Next thing I know, they tell me I have some form of cancer I can’t pronounce, much/less spell. “Sarcoma” something or other. Attacks the blood cells, organs, bones…you name it. When they said it was fatal, I lost interest in any more specifics.
I will be forty-six in four months…if I make it that long. I have a twenty-year-old daughter and a zest for life that is as strong as a weightlifter on steroids. Staying laid up in a hospital, withdrawn and diminished after chemotherapy does not qualify as living to me.
When I finally was up to eating, I ended up at this spot in midtown Atlanta called Carpe Diem in the plaza across from Grady High School. It was an interesting spot with good sandwiches and nice desserts, which fulfilled my sweet teeth. Yes, I enjoy cakes and pies too much to limit my attraction to “sweet tooth.” That’s why I said “sweet teeth.”
Anyway, I sat alone, at a high-top table near the bar—a dying man with a plate of food and his thoughts. Ever since the doctors told me I would die, I haven’t been able to slow down my thinking. Everything is on express.
People walk right by me, many of them speak to me or smile at me. None of them realize they were in contact with a dead man. That’s how I see myself—Walking Dead. I’m like a zombie, a creature walking around the earth but already departed. I just don’t look like one…yet.
I see everything differently now, too. Like, it does not matter if my favorite football team, the Washington Redskins, wins another Super Bowl. I don’t care much anymore about my wardrobe or purchasing that Mercedes 500 I had been eyeing or even if my 401(k) flattens out. It all seems so meaningless to me now.
Still, I’m not sure what I’m inspired to do or how to live out my life, other than to not let doctors turn me into a bed-ridden slob before my time. That, again, did not appeal to me and I didn’t ask anyone else’s opinion on it. I just went with it.
My daughter, Maya…I couldn’t tell her. I can’t even say her name without getting choked up. That’s how daughters are to their dads; we live to their heartbeat.
My father told her. “She deserves to know,” he reasoned. “Maybe not everything going on with you. But this? She deserved to know this.”
Maya did not even call me about it. She just showed up at my house one Saturday afternoon, right before I was about to get in a round of golf. The garage door went up and there she was, pain and sadness all over her soft, lovely face. I know my daughter and that look made me cry, without her saying a word.
“Daddy,” she said, hugging me so tightly. Every time we embraced, I smelled baby powder, like I did when she was an infant. It was my imagination or my desire for my little girl to remain my little girl.
“I’m OK, Maya,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”
She sobbed and sobbed and I held her as tightly as I could without making her uncomfortable. It broke my heart. We’re here as parents to protect our children. It crushed me that I was the cause of her anguish.
“You didn’t have to come here, sweetheart,” I managed to get out when I finally composed myself. “See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you right away. You are all upset over something you can’t control. It’s out of both our hands right now.”
Maya wiped her face and looked up at me with those eyes that were the replica of mine: brown and piercing.
“Daddy, we can’t control it, but you’ve got to let the doctors try,” she said. “I spoke to an oncologist from Johns Hopkins on my way over here. He said nothing good will come out of doing nothing.”
I had to break it down for her so—as, Isaiah Washington said in the movie Love Jones—“It will forever be broke.”
“Let’s go inside,” I said. I wiped away her tears and kissed both sides of her precious face. She turned me into mush. We both were.
I called my friend, Thornell, and told him I had to renege on golf. I hadn’t told him the news, either. That would be another tough call. But nothing compared to that talk with Maya.
“Sweetheart, about two months before I went to the doctor, I spoke to an old high school classmate at Ballou. His name was Kevin Hill. Yes, your godfather. Great guy, as you know. Do you know how we met? We played basketball against each other in junior high and became friends when we ended up at Ballou High together. When Kevin got sick with MS, it slowly but surely ravaged his nervous system over the years until he was unable to do anything but lie in bed to die.
“I visited him at Washington Hospital Center. We reminisced and I was able to make him laugh and take his mind away from his plight, at least for a few moments. But the whole
time I was looking at him and feeling so sorry for him; there was so much more for him to do in life. I thought I didn’t convey that, but he sensed it. And he wrote a letter to me that means more to me now than ever.”
I pulled out the folded sheet of paper with the letterhead that read: “Kevin Hill…Remember Me.”
And then I read it to Maya: “Calvin, don’t feel sorry for me. The things I did in my life, I enjoyed them. I could have done more, but I learned and accepted that God’s plan was different. But all this time laying around in bed, I have had a lot of time to think. And I have a lot of regrets. I regret not traveling and not mending my relationship with my sister and not learning Spanish and so many other things. You know what I should have done, but makes no sense to do now? Cut off all my hair. I saw how some bald guys looked so cool with a shaved head. Even Samuel Jackson looked cool with a bald head in Shaft. I should have done that a long time ago. Now, if I do it, no one will see it.
“Anyway, my point is: Don’t live with regrets. Live your life. Carpe diem. You know what that means? It means: seize the day. Seize it. Take it. Own it. Make it yours and get the most out of it.
“Nothing is promised. Yeah, you’ve heard this before. We all have. But we go about a day as if it’s no big deal to make the most of it because we can do it the next day. Or the next. That’s not the right approach. I’m thirty-six. I got this disease from bad luck. If I knew it was coming, I would have done a lot of things I planned to do later. You and I have done a lot together and been as close as two friends could be, so I can say this to you without you getting offended: Get off your ass and live your life.”
Maya got it then. The fear and hope left her. Reality settled in. She knew, at that point, I was done. No amount of radiation, chemo, surgery, Tylenol or anything else could help me. My days had been finalized. It had to be about what I did with those days that mattered.
“Daddy, what can I do to help you?” she asked.
“Love me, baby,” I said. “Your love means everything to me. And pray for me. Pray that I’m able to make my last days here meaningful and fun and that I live them as if I’m alive, not waiting for death.”
My daughter cried. “I can do that, Daddy,” she said softly while hugging me.
We corralled our emotions after a while and I walked her to her car. “I feel so much better,” I told her, and it was the truth. I didn’t realize how much of a burden it was not having had that conversation with her. I finally was prepared to live my final days, to “seize” them as my friend Kevin said I should.
Problem was, I didn’t know how or where to begin. I actually did not have lofty dreams of travel or glory. I didn’t have a “Bucket List.” I was an ordinary man with few extraordinary ambitions. I didn’t like to travel much because I didn’t like to fly and riding too long in a vehicle made me car sick.
I ate when necessary, but did not have exotic tastes. I had plenty of friends, but only Kevin whom I spent much time enjoying. I had but one vice: golf.
My first thought was just to play golf every day…until I collapsed on a lush fairway. Kevin would appreciate that. He and I were so close that we had become like brothers. For sure, we had a connection that is rare among people: I carried his kidney in my body.
When one of mine was damaged in a bad car crash and I needed a new one to avoid a life of dialysis, I was amazed by two things: Kevin was willing, without hesitation, to go through tests to see if we were compatible; and that he was a match. I had no siblings and my father’s kidneys were not healthy enough to share.
If Kevin had any reservations about doing it, I never saw them. If there was any fear, I never felt it. And he never expressed any ambivalence about donating an organ to his friend.
For all I had done with and for him in the twenty-eight years we had known each other, there was nothing I could do to repay Kevin for his deed to me. And as I read his letter as I had each day, something occurred to me the way an idea comes to a prolific author: As a way of honoring Kevin, I would live out some of the things he never got to do based on what he wrote me in that letter and shared with me in conversations.
That was the least I could do, considering the kidney transplant allowed me to live fifteen years past when I was told I would die without a new one. Kevin saved my life. Doing things he wanted to do would extend my life, even if just for a little while.
Credit: Courtesy of Sid Tutani
Curtis Bunn is an Essence magazine #1 bestselling author of Truth is in the Wine, Homecoming Weekend and A Cold Piece of Work. A Washington, D.C. native and graduate of Norfolk State University, he is the founder of the National Book Club Conference, an organization that hosts an annual literary event for African-American readers and authors. Visit him at www.curtisbunn.com and on Facebook and Twitter.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Curtis-Bunn
Facebook.com/AtriaBooks
@AtriaBooks
ALSO BY CURTIS BUNN
The Truth is in the Wine
Homecoming Weekend
A Cold Piece of Work
Strebor Books
P.O. Box 6505
Largo, MD 20792
http://www.streborbooks.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© 2014 by Curtis Bunn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means whatsoever. For information address Strebor Books, P.O. Box 6505, Largo, MD 20792.
ISBN 978-1-59309-572-7
ISBN 978-1-4767-5871-8 (ebook)
LCCN 2014931185
First Strebor Books trade paperback edition June 2014
Cover design: www.mariondesigns.com
Cover photograph: © Keith Saunders Photos
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
