Preview Blog — Scott Stankavage

Last month we took the family, well, our three littles and Kate to the beach for a long weekend. Folks were in the ocean, up to their ankles, but not to the waist. I wasn't that brave and just stood at waters edge as Leo and Ella and Jordan jumped waves in laughter. The kiddos did go to the pool and "dared" each other to jump in and eventually Leo accepted the challenge and canon balled into the deep end, which broke the ice and had all three swimming away in the pool, only to come out with blue lips, shivering and saying ‘Daddy, I am cold." Great memories.

That night, after our favorite frozen pizza Satruday night dinner, we had setup family movie night and the feature was to be "The Wizard of Oz." The kiddos are 6 ½ now, and Kate finally felt it was not too scary for them to watch, especially if we were all together. In addition, we had just completed two weeks of bed time reading of the actual book The Wizard of Oz, and the kids really enjoyed it. My mom and dad didn’t really read that much to me or my sisters and brother when we were young, or a tleast I don’t remember it, but Kate's mom read books every night, with here favorite being Bilbo baggans and ……

I remember watching The Wizard of Oz in the basement of our family home in Warminster, PA way back in 1968. I was 6 years old and I watched it by myself, slumped on the orange hand me down couch in our basement. I remember not moving the entire two hours and that I was mesmerized by Dorothy, the lion, scarecrow and tinman. I told my kids that memory and Jordan asked, "where were your mommy and daddy?" I don’t know.

We had a wonderful family night watching The Wizard of Oz together and I have no idea how big a memory or impact the night will represent in my kids mind, but it was special to me. It seemed like only yesterday that I was the six year old watching …. But it was actually 47 years ago. Wow. Time flies, but then again, it seemed to stand still.

On my drive to the beach, I got a call from an old UNC football team mate who just wanted to reach out and say hello after he read an update on my book THE QB MENTOR in a local publication. I was amazed at how quickly we jumped right back into our friendship, even though it had been 30+ years since our time together. We talked about family, and leukemia, and life and legacy. We were bonded by our faith and our belief in life and eternal life, and we laughed at the past, the present and the future that we were both sure we shared.

I went to sleep over the weekend with this perplexed sense of time. What is time? And who does it apply to? I didn’t have any answers and don’t have any proposed insights in this blog, but I did conclude that time is a human construct, and that it applies to the physical, not the spiritual. Time is a temporal and material metric, not an eternal or spiritual metric. How else can we explain relationships that have no contact for decades, and yet within a sentence, its as if time never passed? Or how about the memory of being six years old and experiencing the Wizard of Oz, and then the next moment, watching the same movie with my own six year olds.

I smiled and slept well that entire weekend. Unfortunately there isn’t a day, or even half of a day when I don’t have to wrestle with some thought of mortality and the meaning of my latest blood counts or battle with paralyzing fatigue. But for this weekend, it felt monumentally obvious to me that time is a treasure that does not run out, but is merely marked by our relationships and our memories that continue and grow and we share in life, and then in life eternal.

I love the Wizard of Oz.

Amen and AMEN

For the past 33 months I have visited the 5th floor of the Duke Cancer Center faithfully to check my blood counts and discuss treatments for my leukemia. With that much interaction, you develop a relationship with the nurses and administrators. They have a difficult job, caring for cancer patients, many of whom they can see their future but are not supposed to recognize it. Their job is to keep hope alive and well in the hearts and minds of patients and their families, and that is an awesome responsibility that dovetails with the doctors medical protocols which together make ups the circle of care for cancer patients.

Our nurse is a wonderful woman who has been around the block a few times as evidenced by her willing smile and always positive attitude.

This one morning we were chit chatting about life, my kiddos, the chemotherapy regimens I am on and various and sundry other topics when I had to stop mid conversation and apologize for being so forgetful with so many of my words. She looked at me with compassion and smiled and shared, "Scott, its not the leukemia, because I find myself at a complete loss for words mid sentence nearly every day." And she told me the story of her visit with her sister just the last weekend when she was describing what it was like to be in Florida and how prevalent these little green lizard like animals were… and she looked at me as if I knew what she was talking about. She continued that it took her 5 minutes to describe these animals, little alligators, oversized salamanders… but she couldn’t remember their exact name. We were hand gesturing and motioning along the ground, but couldn’t remember the name of this reptile.

We were laughing with each other and at each other, feeling stricken by the same neuro mental shortcoming.

When suddenly she blurted out IGUANAS.

We laughed harder.

Fact of the matter is I don’t even second guess myself or even try too hard anymore to come up with the missing word in so many of my sentences. I chalk it up to old age, my wife says its from concussions from 21 years of tackle football and my palliative care specialist suggests that the chemo therapy medicine actually damages parts of the brain that we aren’t even aware of yet. So, there are lots of possible reasons, and I don’t really care which one is most culpable for my forgetfulness because I have chosen to spend whatever precious mental and physical energy I have on things that I can control over and things that have more long term meaning and significance.

Don’t sweat the rabbits when hunting elephants. Or simply put, its ok to say "iguanas" when that is the only word that comes to mind. Those close to us will know what you mean, and that’s really all that matters.

Amen and Amen.