WHAT IF someone threw a
party in your honor and no one showed up? That was George Sheehan’s fear when
local friends approached his son George III in early 1993 about organizing a
dinner for The Doc (as they called him).
Young George then broached
the subject with his dad. Dr. George’s first reaction: “Definitely not.”
“Fine,” said the son,
“it’s your call.” The next morning “Dad came to the office with 10 pages of
notes. They told where the party could be held, what the program might be and
who should be invited.”
Later Dr. George started
to worry that no one would come. “I gave a recent talk in Florida, and only a
dozen people showed up,” he said. “What if that happens here?”
“No chance of that,” the
son reminded the dad. “We’ll draw a crowd with the Sheehans alone.” Just to be
safe, they extended the invitation list and published an announcement in local
newspapers.
By the time I left home
for New Jersey, the guest list stood at 300 and was still growing. Young George
said, “We could top 400.” The crowd would grow to 500.
Paying tribute to George
Sheehan took a long time. He had lived almost 75 very full years, and the
program planners couldn’t leave out any of his phases. The program took three
hours to cover them all.
Finally, on the far side
of 10 o’clock, George himself took the stage. His voice came out quiet, slow
and hoarse at first.
But as he warmed to his
topic and his audience, this became the George Sheehan we’d always known:
lively, eloquent, funny and heartfelt. Everyone else had taken care to avoid
the subject that brought us all here.
George himself didn’t
hesitate to mention what everyone knew he faced. He said, “Dying [of advanced
prostate cancer] is my current experience. I’m going to face it and find out
what it’s all about.”
With his finish line in
sight, George felt fortunate. He’d had an early wake of sorts, when he could be
there to enjoy it with 500 of his nearest and dearest. We should all be so
lucky.
NO RUNNER wants to leave
anything unfinished. Dropping out goes against our training and our nature.
George Sheehan worried in
his last months that he would leave work undone. He wanted to finish one more
book.
He called it his “death
book.” Knowing that no publisher would accept that stark a title, I suggested
that it be “Miles to Go.”
That line comes from a
Robert Frost poem: “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
It best describes how George lived with the prostate cancer that had spread
into his bones and was inoperable when discovered in 1986.
In fact, he used Frost’s
words himself when first revealing his illness. George went those miles.
He spoke for all runners
when he told me in an interview several years earlier, “What we are interested
in is performance. Our consuming concern is getting up in the morning and doing
our best the rest of the day.”
Speaking for himself, he
said, “At my age I could be retired, I could be sitting by the ocean, watching
the waves roll in and out. But I feel I’ve never achieved all that I could. If
you take less of a view than that, you’re finished.”
He kept performing in the
face of his cancer. He demonstrated what he called “a healthy way to live.” He
wrote hundreds of articles, gave dozens of speeches and ran scores of races in
the next six years.
Two new Sheehan books came
out right on schedule during that period, as he took the usual three years
apiece to fill them. Maybe he couldn’t do his all-time best after the cancer
struck. But he still tried to do the best job he could with the tools at hand.
George fought the cancer
to a standstill for six years after his diagnosis. It hadn’t advanced, but
neither had it retreated. The final battle began in 1992 with news of further
metastases.
He continued to race until
August 1992, finishing the Crim 10-mile before the disease took him off the
road. He continued to speak until spring 1993, talking at the Boston Marathon
before the disease took him off the stage.
George continued to write
into that fall, turning his back on the ocean view until he’d gathered enough
columns to fill the next book. While Random House expressed interest, it still
hadn’t offered a contract by fall. George was weakening by then.
Finally, in October, an
editor planned to bring an offer to George’s Jersey Shore home. This was one of
his bad days physically and he felt like canceling the meeting, but he had
promises to keep. He would reach this finish line no matter how hard the final
miles felt.
George called me on
October 20th to say, “We made the deal.” He sounded as exhausted yet
ecstatic as a marathoner at race’s end.
Now he could sit and watch
the waves roll in and out. He could rest in the glorious peace that follows a
big effort.
Photo: George A.
Sheehan, M.D., died at home on November 1st, 1993, four days shy of
his 75th birthday. His wife Mary Jane and their 12 children were at
his bedside in a room looking out on the ocean. His final book would come out
the next year under the title Going
the Distance.
[Many books of mine, old
and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks
from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home
Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow
Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We
Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]
No comments:
Post a Comment