Why We Ride: John

It was hard to hold a conversation.  He would speak a few words and then be interrupted by a cough; a wet, relentless cough, releasing a malicious fluid that gurgled up from deep within his failing lungs; a cough that convulsed his entire, now frail, body for what seemed minutes at a time.  The coughing seizures seemed to last for minutes and left him spent beyond the exhaustion brought on by the illness itself.  I was visiting John at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.  John was dying.  I knew it, his friends knew it, his family knew it and John knew it.  By this point John was philosophical about it all.  John was dying of lung cancer.

It was the spring of 2005.  I’d known John since 1997 when I was hired on as a buyer for a hydraulics equipment distributor.  He was an outside sales rep; the quintessential old school sales guy and that's not a knock.  He wasn’t smarmy or a sharpie.  He was a charming, gregarious drummer who knew his stuff and knew his customers and treated them fairly and with respect.  Sixty one years young he was a smart man, with a ready smile, a sharp sense of humor and a quick wit that sometimes got him into trouble in the sterile new office environment ruled by attorneys and their political correctness enforcement arm called HR.  John really never could get it; the new workplace.  So every now and then he said something that ran him afoul of the guardians of rectitude and then he laughed it off; a reasonable and logical guy John was.  John was well read, university educated and energetic for a guy in his sixties.  John was tall and trim.  If you closed your eyes and listened to him speak you would think you were hearing the actor Lee Marvin; that is if you’re old enough to remember the hard bitten actor.  He occasionally rode a bike or played tennis and he doted on his pride and joy, a little granddaughter who he would take to Episcopal Church service on Sundays. John called himself a recovering Roman Catholic and it was John who introduced me to the Anglican Church that I would myself join years later as a recovering Roman Catholic.

I decided to sign up for the June 24^th Livestrong ride in late April.  One hundred miles, starting and ending in Davis California, a small college town on the western edge of the Sacramento Valley. Davis is a cycling haven, having been voted one of the most bicycle friendly communities in the United States.  I’d done the Livestrong Ride a few years previously in San Jose but the new location in Davis and my wife’s recent battle with renal cancer inspired me to sign up.

This wasn’t John’s first bout with cancer; having been diagnosed a few years before with lung cancer.  Like any cancer diagnosis it came as a shock.  John had given up smoking many years before and I suppose he thought he’d dodged that bullet that carried his name.  John went through months of treatment, and during that time the company that he’d worked for, for so many years, tried to let him go.  Isn’t that what companies do?   You get sick, you’re laid up for months, you’re “unproductive” and your condition is a financial burden; and if you don’t just die and get it over with and you actually have the temerity to come back you’re a potential money drain down the road.   You didn’t choose to get cancer but in addition to worrying about your own physical well-being you wonder how long your employer will stick with you.  Do all the assets that you accrued over years of loyal service offset this big liability?

I was sadly out of shape when I signed up to do the ride.  A broken ankle almost a year before had stubbornly refused to get strong causing me to lose fitness and gain pounds.  I’d been doing some workouts on the elliptical trainer, a little swimming and some weight work but getting in shape for 100 miles would require some serious working out.  My physical therapist told me; “Your ankle will handle the ride.  I just worry about your conditioning.”  Fighting words.   

John didn’t die, and he came back to work but from the perspective of management was clearly not welcome.  And so over a period of time the company did what companies do; they got rid of him, made life difficult and set him up to fail; focusing on faults that in others they might overlook.  When he was given the news, John was allowed to make his rounds in the office and say goodbye to his friends.  He came to my desk and allowed that he’d expected it and then broke down weeping and said, “But it still hurts.” 

I lost touch with John, hearing about him occasionally through Billy, a co-worker who had been close to John for many years and had continued contact with John.  John got a job as a security guard.  It was hardly fitting for a guy of his talents and intelligence.  It must have been one hell of let down for him to come to that end.  It couldn’t have been more than a couple of years at most when Billy announced that John was in the hospital and very sick.  The cancer came back and as cancer is wont to do when it recurs it came back pissed off and on a deadly mission. 

On my first visit I was shocked by the weight loss.  He wheezed when he talked, pausing often to catch his breath.  The color had left him and his pallor was wan, sickly.  He still had the sense of humor but it was dulled now by the knowledge that his time was short.  He had a wrongful termination suit working against the hydraulics distributor.  We talked a bit, mostly small talk, awkward on my part I’m ashamed to say.  What do you say to someone who is dying?  It’s not something that your parents teach you when they’re drumming manners into your skull.

The weight circuits are designed to be aerobic and to build muscle endurance.  Short runs down the street and back are interspersed into the lifting sets. While the upper body sets are all counted in number of reps, the leg sets which are done with light resistance are counted not in reps but in minutes and continue until the muscles burn and become exhausted; the legs get a chance to recover during upper body reps until they're worked again.  It’s all based on a training theory developed by Coach and Biomechanics professor Tudor Bompa.

After that visit I made a call to Tim, another friend and former co-worker, to tell him of John’s condition.  We visited together a few days later.   He had further deteriorated since my previous visit.  Some of John’s family members were present and they thanked us for coming.  We spent a short time, talking mostly to the relatives.  John said very little.  He was more like an audience.  At that point what else are you?  You've relinquished control. You're shuffled from exam to test to consultation and then repeat as the doctor deems necessary.  Doctors make suggestions that ultimately become decisions. You've become a spectator to others planning what remains of your life. Tim and I took our leave.  That was the last time that I saw John.

Billy told us of John’s passing.  He went to the funeral.  The company wasn’t at all represented; no flowers, no card, no words of condolence and no announcement – after all there was the little matter of the lawsuit.   

The bike ride on the 29^th of April was my second in a year and a half.  It was a planned 40 miles and it had a specific purpose. This was the test ride.  If I could do 40 miles in three hours without a glitch I figured to be good for the 100 miles 6 weeks later.  It took my nephew Carl and I, 3 and a quarter hours to do the 40 miles.  Good enough since some of it was on a jammed recreation path where we had to constantly slow down for families, runners, dog walkers and large groups of cyclists who thought it would be a fine idea to ride three abreast. 

My recollections of John are of his laugh and of his biting and witty comments about the old skinflint of an owner of the company we worked for; of politics, the state of the world and life in general.  He talked often of his daughter, whose accomplishments he was so proud of.  And of course I'll never forget that Lee Marvin voice.  John was, like me, a history buff.  We had conversations about World War II, the Civil War, Lewis and Clark and the books of historian Stephen Ambrose.  He was a couple generations before me and so I enjoyed hearing his recollections of the forties and fifties and about Chicago where he hailed from.

In my younger years, in fact a few years into middle age, cancer was something that affected someone else.  Surprisingly I'd never had a family member that I knew of get cancer.  I was still young enough that my friends and acquaintances were all still relatively healthy.  And then, without even realizing it, I reached that point where friends and acquaintances were getting more than just a little sick and some were getting cancer; and some were not surviving.  I'd reached that point in life where friends come over for a fun get together and suddenly the talk around the kitchen table turns morbidly to so and so's surgery or someone's relative or friend passing.  The kind of conversation that "weirds out" the younger crowd.  

And so, like diabetes became a special cause for me when my daughter got it, cancer also became a cause. That probably isn't the way it should happen.  In the perfect world we all keep an awareness of terrible diseases and do what we can for good when the opportunity presents itself. 

A tradition in the Livestrong rides is for riders to pin to their jerseys the names of victims who they are riding in memory of and the names of survivors who they are riding in honor of.  John was one of those who I brought with me during my ride in San Jose and I will do the same in Davis.  

In the end John won his wrongful termination suit.