by Dave Kindred
Friends have assumed that doing this book must have been cathartic. No. Across five years, the reporting and writing were the most painful I have ever done. I am haunted by the eviscerating horrors of alcoholism. And our family, like many, has wounds it wants to forget, but a telling of Jared’s story would not allow me that privilege. No, no catharsis. The work extended the sadness by telling me more than any grandfather wants to know about either his grandson or himself.
Cheryl and I sat with the preacher who had done my mother’s funeral. His name was Maurice Stribling. “Call me Skeet, everyone does,” he said. Skeet had the look of an Old Testament prophet, a wizened face encircled by a snowy white beard. In the way lives intersect in a small Illinois town, he was the pastor at the Atlanta Christian Church where, a lifetime earlier, I had attended Sunday school so I could sit with my third-grade girlfriend, Luanne.
“Christians believe God has compassion on all that he has made,” Skeet said. “I take comfort in that because we don’t know what personal demons people have been fighting. I trust in a compassionate God to see truly into our hearts. We are not in a position, as God is, to measure what value a life has produced. It’s not the years that determine our value. You can live to be a hundred and not contribute to others. Then again, you could die at twenty after contributing tremendously. Your grandson shared love and brought love into your life. Even his struggles contributed to your life. Even his final loss contributed to your life. What he gave you and Cheryl, in his short time, helped make your lives what they are.”
On January 14, 2019, five years after Jared’s death, I sat with Cheryl in the nursing home where my mother had died and where Cheryl, after her stroke in December of 2015, became a resident; she is an invalid who cannot communicate. I showed her the portrait of Jared and Jacob, three years old, the world champion twins, golden in their white tuxedoes. She looked at the picture for five, six, seven seconds. I wondered what she saw, if anything, and wondered what she remembered, if anything. Then came an answer. She smiled a soft, sweet grandmother’s smile.
I remembered a day in July 1997. Jared was eight years old. We had gone exploring, a grandpa and a boy. He rode behind me on an ATV. We bounced around our Virginia farmland. We rode up and down hills, through great stands of trees, along a waterfall that fed Russell Run, which ran to the Rappahannock River, which ran to the Chesapeake Bay, which became the Atlantic Ocean. We rode for an hour or so and then, late in the afternoon, we stopped on a rise in a pasture.
I said, “Look at the sky, Jared, it’s pretty.”
The day’s fading sun had dropped near the horizon behind a cottony blanket of clouds.
Jared said, “See those?” He pointed to puffs of clouds. “Those are angels looking over us.”
I saw the angels and I saw the sun soft on them and I saw shimmering rays of gold streaming through the clouds into the sky. Jared saw more.
He said, “That looks like the gateway to heaven.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not and would not have written this book without Lynn Ann Sigda’s blessing and trust. Nor would I have done it if Jared’s twin, Jacob, had gone silent. Instead, like his mother, Jacob asked me to tell Jared’s story in full and tell it truly. My son, Jeff, and his wife, Lisa, answered every question, however uncomfortable the question, however painful the answer. I pray that all of them—mother, brother, father, stepmother—find peace in confirmation of what they believed. Jared was loved by everyone who knew him.
I can testify to that love because my reporting put me in Jared’s world on the road. There I met his friends. By then he was alive only in their memories. Yet they spoke of him so vividly, as the essence of happiness, that a grandfather could be forgiven for thinking the boy might at any minute dance out of the dark and come laughing into the light. I thank Christine Maynard, Michael Stephen, Nicholas Mandrell, Lema Lynch, Alexandra Tallent, Soleil Laboy, and Jimbo Smith and his wife, Lyndzy Goss Smith (and their daughter, Kindred). Whenever this book speaks of Jared’s sensory experiences, the information most likely came from Charity Ann Williams, the inimitable Aggro, a troubadour of the rails, who all but put me in her backpack and carried me onto roaring freight trains and into stinking ravines. And, always, there was Maggie. Loving, beautiful Maggie. Maggie Fulmer and her mother, Kayla, were heroic—absolutely heroic—in giving Jared every chance to be the man we all wanted him to be.
Aggro was not alone in carrying me. Friends picked me up. In my little sportswriter world, I am a famously stubborn writer. I resist editing. I say this with no pride. It is a failing. Every writer needs a wiser person whispering into an ear, “You can do better than that.” I wanted this book to be the best I could make it. I asked exceptional writers to read the work in progress and tell me how to make it sing. Thanks to the long-suffering, invaluable Gary Pomerantz. Thanks to Verenda Smith, there for me decades before Jared was born and every day since. Thanks to Jane Leavy, Tom Callahan, Billy Reed, Joan Ryan, Juliet Macur, Jeff Schultz, and John Feinstein. I bow, too, to Patti Parker. She read the manuscript in all its forms and she heard my darkest doubts as to when, if ever, I would let go of it. She finally delivered to my ass a swift, sweet kick. And here we are. Forever grateful, Ms. Parker.
The experts: First, I read David Sheff’s book, every sentence and every page of Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy. My understanding of the addiction tragedy profited from conversations with Jay Davidson, the administrator of an alcohol abuse facility, The Healing Place, in Louisville, Kentucky. I spoke with Sheila Levine, a mental health counselor in Nashville, Tennessee. A doctor in Michigan, Yossi Holoshitz, and a Philadelphia social worker, Deborah Lamb, cared enough about Jared to explain the desperation of his circumstances.
Hometown friends: Dave Byrne told me God stories when I needed to hear God stories. Lisa Crocker kept me smiling when there was small reason to smile. My sister, Sandra Litwiller, loved me even, or especially, when I was unlovable. The administrators, nurses, and staff at Apostolic Christian Restmor cared for my mother and then for Cheryl with 24/7/365 kindness. Early in the return to our Illinois roots, I began writing about the hometown Lady Potters. Why? Well, why not? As a big-time sports columnist I had written about every major sports event in the world. Then Cheryl and I found ourselves sitting two rows behind the players’ bench at a girls’ high school basketball game. Writers write, and in ten years I wrote five hundred thousand words on the Morton High School Lady Potters. Every game day, the team delivered to me a box of Milk Duds.
David Black did extraordinary work for this book as literary agent and first reader. In my early drafts, Black the first reader immediately saw a book I had not written, a better book, a grandfather’s story about a grandson’s story. Black the agent knew where to take the new grandfather/grandson manuscript. And here we are at PublicAffairs, embraced by publisher Clive Priddle and executive editor Benjamin Adams. Production editor Kaitlin Carruthers-Busser moved the project from manuscript to hard covers. Cindy Buck was the best of copyeditors, doing her work with a surgical precision that left the writer’s fragile ego intact while improving every sentence. Julie Ford, a lawyer, protected me from legal mistakes. I thank them all.
Cheryl’s heart is in every word here. This book is what she wanted it to be. A love story.
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Vicki Raider
Dave Kindred has been a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the National Sports Daily, the Sporting News, and Golf Digest. Kindred is the author of several books, including Heroes, Fools, and Other Dreamers: A Sportswriter’s Gallery of Extraordinary People, Around the World in 18 Holes (with Tom Callahan), Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life, and Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship.
Kindred is one of only two writers who have earned sportswriting’s three highest honors: the Red Smith Award, the PEN America ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He also has won the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award (for outstanding media contributions) as well as a National Headliner Award for general-interest columns. He is a member of the National Sports Media Hall of Fame. He lives in Illinois.
