by Bruce Feiler
So how have you all been reacting? Depends on when you get us, frankly. Our families have lurched into action, and my parents, in-laws, siblings, and cousins have helped us manage the house and the girlies. Much of the brunt of all this falls on Linda, who not only has a husband retching in the bathroom many nights at 2:00 A.M. but two darling daughters who have yet to fully grasp the meaning of: “Please play in your room until the digital clock says 7:00 A.M.!” Then, just when I hit the nadir, Linda came down with a case of shingles, forcing her to be quarantined in a nearby hotel for three days. As she said of this stress-related illness, “Message: I care!”
The girls have been adapting to our new lifestyle. In a bid to show them that losing my hair was an affirmative choice, as opposed to a negative reaction from the medicine, I had my head shaved like a marine. They were instantly charmed by my “shoft” hair, their homemade combination of short and soft. In one of the more amusing sideshows around here, their grandmothers had the idea of feeding them a diet of films with bald, father-hero types to prepare them for the inevitable hair loss to come. To date, this has included Daddy Warbucks from Annie and was about to include King Mongkut from The King and I until someone pointed out that he dies at the end of the movie.
In the early weeks, Eden and Tybee did show signs of empathy and stress. They stared intently at my new crutches, trying to figure out how they worked and what they meant. Eden suddenly had the need for multiple Band-Aids; Tybee started to limp every now and then. We had some bed-wetting and the occasional nightmare.
A few nights ago, at 4:30 A.M., Eden went over to Tybee’s bed and started jumping up and down on the mattress. Linda got up to deal with this unusual outbreak but was quickly flustered. By the time I hobbled down the hall, Eden was on the potty, Tybee was crying, and general chaos had ensued. I tried every trick I know: Threatening. Offering “grown-up” points. Volunteering to tell a story. No dent. Worse: Tybee wanted to listen to Brazilian sambas and Eden wanted Disney love songs.
At this point, I lost it: I snapped at Linda; I screamed at Tybee; I picked up Eden and plunked her down on her bed. Then I began to sob. This was my worst nightmare writ large. My illness was ruining the lives of everyone around me. Linda was suffering. The girls were unraveling. I was a wreck. Our home had become a gruesome parade of psychological disfigurement.
I left the room. “If you want to speak to me,” I blurted to Eden, “come to my office.” To my utter shock, five minutes later she followed. I sat on the floor, and she climbed into my lap, perching on my right leg. I tried to perform some archaeology on her feelings. First she was mad at her sister. Then her mommy. Then she unfolded this story: Monsters have invaded our house, she said. They sit with us at dinner and eat us up. “Then we are lost,” she said, “because we can’t walk.”
Walk. The word leapt out of the story like a mushroom cloud. Walking had been such a hallmark around our house. Walking is what Daddy did. Even before they could walk themselves, Linda taught the girls that I had written a book about walking. Now, walking is exactly what I could no longer do, and in her nightmare, she couldn’t either. I didn’t need a Ph.D. in child psychology to understand that she had internalized my illness and created an imaginary situation where the worst that could happen to her was that she would become like me. And what better description of our situation can there be: Monsters have invaded our house and are mashing us up.
By now the sun was coming up outside my office window, and Eden’s face seemed more tender than I had ever seen it. Her delicate skin sloped gently around her cheeks. The perky lips she inherited from her mother were puckered in fear and need. Her hair bobbed around her face.
I pushed the hair from her eyes, kissed her cheek, and held her close.
“I am going to make the monsters go away,” I said. “I have magic and can make our home safe.”
She looked down at my leg. “Is this your boo-boo leg?” she asked.
“No, that’s my better leg,” I answered.
“I want you to have two better legs,” she said.
“I am going to have two better legs soon,” I promised.
She reached down and stroked my left thigh.
“But I can still walk,” I said. “I just use crutches.”
“I want a pair of crutches like Daddy’s,” she said. “You have to share.”
I asked her if she wanted to go back to bed. She nodded. We walked the few steps to her door. Would she insist I come in? Would she start to cry? No. She padded off gleefully to bed and assumed her sleeping position. The magic had worked. The monsters were gone.
We have been touched, tickled, and just plain agog at the outpouring of best wishes. I’ve heard from half my high school class, a number of neighbors who remember my bicycle accident as a boy, and nearly every girl I ever kissed. I am heartsick at not being able to communicate with each of you personally, but please know that we are attacking this challenge with the full force of determination, love, and humor. We find piercing shafts of meaning on even the most challenging days. And we treasure the reconnections this situation has spun.
Cancer, I have found, is a passport to intimacy. It’s an invitation—maybe even a mandate—to enter the most vital, frightening, and sensitive human arenas. It’s a responsibility to address those issues we rarely want to discuss, but we feel enriched when we do. In that spirit, I hope you find occasion to ask a difficult question of someone you love, renew a long-forgotten promise you made to yourself, or spread a little magic of your own to help keep the monsters at bay.
And, please, take a walk for me.
Love,
.8.
MAX
Pack Your Flip-Flops
IT BEGAN WITH A WALK. On the Saturday before classes began at Yale in 1983, huddles of freshmen gathered outside the dorms to trek together to the first football game of the season. One was a feisty schoolboy with hippy curly hair and cutoffs, who was so short and bookish he had been bullied in the Iowa town where he lived as a teenager, yet so smart and endearing his mother had trotted him out to beat her friends in chess. Another was me, preppier and a half a foot taller, but also fresh from growing up in a place where it was cooler to slay a rum and Coke than to read To Kill a Mockingbird.
We set out on the hour-long walk to the stadium and an hour later had spoken to no one else. What I remember most was the feeling—the absolute conviction—that this person would be in my life forever.
“Immediately I felt we were kindred souls,” said Max, twenty-five years later. “Yet I tried to figure out where your self-awareness had come from. After all, unlike me, you hadn’t lost your father when you were three. Your dad hadn’t shot himself.”
EVER SINCE THAT AFTERNOON, Max Stier was a constant presence in my life. Days might go by when we didn’t talk; but, in a quarter century, a fortnight never passed when we didn’t communicate. For two years we were roommates in college; for two months after our junior year we backpacked from Singapore to Beijing—getting stung by jellyfish in the Indian Ocean, urinating off the Great Wall, and getting booted from the lobbies of the great hotels because Max insisted on wearing tank tops and flip-flops.
That summer we made a pact to return to Asia when we were fifty, with whatever families we had, and stay in those hotels. Whichever one of us had made more money would have to foot the bill.
About halfway through that summer, Max and I arrived in northern Thailand. We arranged to go on an elephant safari with two blond backpackers from New Zealand. It had all the makings of a teenage male fantasy. But the night before, after we splurged on a meal of chicken, baby corn, and ice-cream sundaes, Max’s stomach exploded and everything went running for the nearest exit. Soon he was splayed on the bathroom floor, covered in vomit, shaking. I did the only thing I could think to do: I doused him in water, wrapped him in a bedsheet, and carried him to the nearest hospital. Instead of spending the next three days riding elephants, smoking opium, and chasing my wet dreams, I was camped out in the emergency w
ard, in between Max and a dying man, whose family had built a Buddhist shrine in the corner.
Two decades later I was the one on the bathroom floor, heaving, shivering, and Max had flown in to be by my side, leaving his wife and two young sons at home. That’s when I realized the grim bond we shared: Max’s father had died when he was three, the same age as my girls. The man who knew me best had grown up in the situation I feared the most.
MAX STIER COMES FROM a family of fatherless sons. His maternal grandfather lost his father when he was thirteen and began pushing a fruit cart to support his family. Max’s own father lost his father young. “My dad was an only child and my grandmother was extremely possessive of him,” he said. “She was also very negative. I was on a kids’ television show when I was six and was asked, ‘Why does your grandmother love you?’ I was supposed to give a cute answer, but I…didn’t know the answer. That was the end of my television career.”
“So what is the answer?” I asked.
“There is none. For someone like a grandparent or a parent, the answer is that they just do love you. It’s the nature of the relationship. But the painful reality for me is that I’ve had very few of those relationships in my life.”
Max’s father, Herbert, was an orthopedic surgeon, a charmer, and a hard-driving father of three in the fall of 1969. “Apparently he was a very smart guy, overly ambitious, who wanted to succeed, so he pushed himself relentlessly,” Max said. “He was doing research for the intellectual stimulation and consulting for the money. He started taking drugs to get up, to get down, to work, to sleep. He was trying to be Superman. Basically he had a psychotic break.”
The housekeeper found him in the garage of their Tudor home in Los Angeles. He had a gun in his hand and a bullet hole in his heart. He left no note. Max’s mother picked him up from nursery school and told him, “Your father is dead.” When I met Max fourteen years later, he still believed the story his mother had told for all those years: The shooting had been an accident.
“She was waiting for us to ask,” Max said. “And I think she was right. More dramatic for me is my complete lack of memory about the event—or my father. And when I think of my own kids, who are three and four now, I think, ‘When do you cross that threshold when you maintain a conscious presence in your child?’ I have no doubt I was impacted by my dad in ways I don’t remember, but still, I can’t remember.”
“Do you have some keepsake?”
“I’m not a very materialistic person,” he said. “I think I have a watch in a safety-deposit box somewhere. But truthfully, physical objects are not him for me. My connection is the stories I hear from people. My growing sense that he liked to kid around, that he was loyal and intellectually curious. All things I am.”
I said one of the hard things for me is that my girls did not yet understand the meaning of death. “I met a woman recently who lost her husband,” I said. “She told her eight-year-old daughter, ‘Daddy is dead,’ and her daughter said, ‘Yes, I know. But when is he coming home?’ Did you understand that your dad was dead?”
“When I was six, I had a series of nightmares,” Max said. He paused to inhale. “This one is really hard to tell.” His eyes reddened, and he squinched his nose in pain. His voice fell to a whisper. “The doorbell would ring and I’d get the door. And my dad would be there. But he’d look as if he’d just come out of the grave. Like a zombie. I didn’t want to see him.”
“What do you think those dreams meant?”
“I think it was part of my ambivalence,” he said.
“Part of me wanted him; part of me was afraid of him. And that tension was very strong.”
“So let’s just say that in ten years, Tybee and Eden come to you and say, ‘You were the closest person to our father. The same thing happened to you that’s happened to us. What do we do?’”
He reflected for a second. “I would start by saying how much you loved them,” Max said. “How I watched you blossom by having children. How good a dad you were. The most important thing a parent can do, I believe, is water a child profusely with love. I would water your children with love.”
“What would you tell them to do with the pain?” I asked. “Should they confront it, or try to get over it?”
“It’s not something you get over,” he said. “It’s something that’s already a part of you. So you have to come at it directly—and keep coming back at it. The Jewish tradition of remembering those who have died every year is pretty useful. I cry once a year. I say the mourner’s Kaddish and suddenly the emotion returns. I feel a deep hurt.
“But at the same,” he said, “I would do something else. I would tell them stories. When you lose someone, the loss becomes the dominant memory. You have to build a rival memory. We went here and did this. He took you there and did that. By doing that, you help the girls find their own voice. They take the negative pain and create a positive side to it.”
BEFORE SITTING DOWN TO speak with Max, I went back and read the journals I’d kept that summer we traveled together in Asia. Beside the youthful atrociousness of my own writing, what struck me most was how much hostility I felt toward him. Some of this antipathy probably came from my insecurities. Max was more confident and independent than I was at the time, and it bothered me. But part of this was his inflexibility. He had to have orange juice every morning before seven; he gave the Chinese lectures about customer service; he was fond of giving me discourses about how his Swiss Army knife could do more than mine.
May 30: “Max annoyed me a little bit today.”
June 8: “I got really mad at Max tonight.”
July 8: “Max is not the most sensitive friend I have.”
At one point we actually split up for three days.
In retrospect, we were probably incompatible as roommates. Max is an early-to-bed, early-to-riser; I’m the opposite. Max insisted on doing push-ups and bench-pressing our backpacks every morning; I ate leftover dumplings. Max is obsessively neat; I’m only mostly neat. At one point we actually saw a production of The Odd Couple in Chinese.
But precisely because we endured those trials, our friendship became unbreakable. What happened in Shanghai stayed in Shanghai, and what was left was as enduring as the Great Wall. Max was my “Purple Heart,” as in, “I went to war with this person, got wounded, but survived.” He’s the friend who nicked me a few times when we were younger, but our connection became so strong that the wounds soon melted away.
I would want him to tell the girls how we earned those wounds, of course—who we were when we first left home. But beyond that, I would want Max to embody for Eden and Tybee the values he has always represented to me. The loyalty of the friend who sees how far I’ve come instead of how far I have to go. The dignity of the person who has devoted his entire life to serving others. The self-respect of the man who insists on meeting his own standards instead of succumbing to those of others.
Max would teach them how to live. “To me it all comes back to when I was a teenager being bullied in Iowa,” Max said when I asked where those values came from. “I had to make a choice. I could change who I was and become more acceptable to the people around me, or I could stick to who I was and not worry about others. I decided that the world be damned, I was going to stick with who I was.”
Armed with that self-reliance, Max became one of the most focused, efficient people I know. He was Phi Beta Kappa in college, clerked for the Supreme Court, counseled presidents. He started and still runs a nonprofit that encourages young people to go into public service. His confidence and sense of fairness were on display in one of the more selfless decisions Max ever made. He agreed to give his first son, Zachary, the surname of his wife, Florence Pan, the first Asian-American judge in the nation’s capital.
“To me it was a no-brainer,” Max explained. “There are no males in Florence’s family, and it was meaningful for her dad to have the name continue. I honestly feel there is no legitimate reason why a child should have the father’s name instead of
the mother’s. Plus, with our second son, we flipped. Noah got my name.”
“You make it sound like a logic puzzle,” I said.
“To me, it’s part of equal parenting,” he said. “When you’re married to somebody, you need to put yourself in their shoes. There are some things I do better; some things Florence does better. But they have nothing to do with the particular XY chromosomes we have.”
“Where does that attitude come from?”
“Part of it is a cultural norm,” he said. “You’re the same way. But there’s no doubt that in my case it also comes from not having a dad myself. I value fatherhood more because I know what I lacked. And for me, the great thing about being a parent is that even though I feel like I didn’t have much of a childhood as a boy, I’m having one now as a father.”
As he talked I realized Max was speaking in a voice I had rarely heard him use. It was the voice of contentment. The fatherless boy had finally found peace in part by becoming a father himself. That morning, before coming to see me, he planted a vegetable garden with Zachary. That evening, he read a book to Noah on the phone and was genuinely worried about the golden treasure stolen by the pirates. That night, he was still wearing a tank top and flip-flops. Perhaps Max’s greatest accomplishment is that he would still get kicked out of the great hotels of Asia for appearing too much like a child.
