Until I Say Good-Bye (18 page)

Stink Pickle

M
onday, June 11, two days after the Mango Madness party, was the day I finally had to ask my husband to wipe me.

And the day someone offered to publish my book.

Life is funny like that. Perfect like that.

I had passed a stink pickle, just like always, when I realized I could no longer reach around and wipe with torpedo accuracy. My right arm, the last one working, was impossible to control at that angle. My hand was too furled to spread out my paper squares.

“John! Help!”

Poor John. We'd known this day would come and discussed stink pickle protocol ahead of time. “As long as I don't have to stare at 'em, I'll be fine,” John said. “Please flush before you call me in.”

“Roger.”

So I flushed, and he came in.

I crouched, and he leaned me forward, nearly toppling me on my head.

“Sorry,” he eked out, holding his breath.

He wiped and wiped and wiped. I finally had to snap: “That's enough! It's my ass. I know!”

Now, we could have despaired at that moment. But I had forsworn despair. And we had far better things to do. Namely, check my e-mail.

I had been writing ever since my diagnosis. Actually, I had been writing all my life, but I'd been writing about myself since the diagnosis: my triumphs, my falls, my attempt to live with joy and die with joy. I'd been writing the story of my life, as seen through one great year.

On Christmas Day, the
Palm Beach Post
had published my article on my Yukon trip with Nancy. In May, they published an article on my trip with John to Hungary. I received some of the best feedback of my career. People wrote to cheer me on. Someone said they hadn't cried in seventeen years, but they cried when they read about my journey.

Poor John. Women gushed over his line from the Hungary article: “It's not a burden. The least I can do for you is everything.”

“But it's true,” he said sadly.

Then, as things do, the hubbub died down. I went back to Chickee huts and friends, planning trips and laughing about Marina's teenage drama.

Then an old colleague, Charles Passy, called. He liked my articles and wanted to mention them in his
Wall Street Journal
blog. It wasn't a printed article, just a long blog entry on the paper's website.

I asked Charles to please include that I hoped to publish the book I was writing.

The next day an agent called me. He had heard about the blog from a friend, who heard about it from another friend . . . you get the picture.

An hour later, I was on a call with the agent. We chatted. I liked him. 'Nuff said.

Peter, ever the agent, started explaining book deals. 'Nuff said, Peter! 'Nuff said.

“I can barely talk,” I told him. “I can barely walk. I don't care about the details. You're hired. Let's get 'er done.”

And next thing ya know, I was on conference calls with producers from ABC and Disney, and I had a New York City lawyer, former general counsel of Simon & Schuster.

Stephanie stood by for the calls, helping clarify my slurred speech. “Drop lotsa F-bombs when ya talk for me so they know I might not be Disney material,” I told her beforehand.

Soon an offer came from a major publishing house. I was thrilled. Peter wanted to try for more.

“Go for it!” I said.

This was Friday. I had a mango party to prepare for the next day. I had a memory to make.

“This is going nuclear!” Peter wrote me on Monday morning as I sat on the toilet. “A BIG offer is coming.”

After my stink pickle, I ran to my phone. Okay, okay, John put his hands under my armpits and walked me slowly, step by step, back to the Chickee hut, pausing for a long moment at that pesky step that led down from our pool. But in my mind, I ran.

No messages.

“What will come will come,” I told myself. “What is meant to be is meant to be.”

I put my iPhone down. I sat on the steps of my pool with Stephanie. Spent time with Wesley. Laid in the guest bed to rest, ate a few bites—all I could chew—and watched
Law & Order
.

When I returned to my phone, there were a host of missed calls from New York and e-mails with the subject line: “Big offer!!! Where are you??”

“Light me a cigarette!” I said to Yvette, my helper.

Breathe.

I dialed Peter.

“Are you sitting down?” he asked.

I was so distracted, I didn't even think of the snappy comeback: “Yes, dear. I can't stand up.”

He told me the offer. It was BIG. Not quite as big as later reported in the newspapers (even my beloved
Palm Beach Post
), but big enough to send my kids to college. For John to quit his job, if he wanted, and go back to school to become a physician's assistant. For me to leave my family well off.

“I think we should go with it,” Peter said.

“I promise to make you proud,” I told him. “I am confident I can do this. I will write until the day I die.”

I saw the struggle on John's face when I told him the news. I knew what he was thinking. I had heard him say it a hundred times, with his words and eyes. “I know you want me to be happy. I know you need me to be happy. But I'm just so sad.”

He was conflicted. My illness had led to the book. It was my life for financial freedom. A terrible trade.

“I just want you to be well.”

“I know.”

“I'd rather have you than the money.”

“But it doesn't work that way,” I said. “This is the best possible outcome of the worst possible scenario. It is my gift to you.”

That night, I lay beside my husband and marveled anew at the yin and yang of everything. It wasn't a trade. It was life.

A day begun in indignity had ended in the extraordinary.

Perfect.

My Triathlon

I
started writing full-time the next day.

I realized immediately that, as with the scrapbooks, my pace had been too slow. I had spent my time wandering through my life, in and out of happy moments, jotting them down casually. I had maybe 10 percent of a book complete—and only a few months of coordination left.

I took a deep breath.

I had a triathlon to run.

But I wasn't worried.

I had been training for this most of my adult life. Banging out stories from the courtrooms of Palm Beach County, my front-row seat for the flotsam and jetsam of humanity.

Stories, too often, about teenage thugs sentenced to life, some without a parent in sight. About victims mowed down by drunk drivers, their families weeping so hard the courtroom benches shook. About husbands hiring hit men to whack wives, and vice versa.

Sometimes the crimes were so senseless, they made me angry. Sometimes the criminals so neglected I found myself wondering if society was to blame. Sometimes the details so brutal, I went home each night and hugged my children, thanking God we were all right.

But occasionally, the stories went the other way. I profiled a state supreme court justice, Barbara Pariente, who got breast cancer and kept working, appearing bald on the bench.

I wrote a long piece on a homeless woman, Angel Gloria Gonzalez, who taught herself the law, represented herself in a federal complaint, and got her eviction overturned on the basis of racial discrimination.

“This never happens,” I told her straight up. “You are unique.”

My proudest moment as a journalist, though, was the time I tracked down four killers and crossed our top prosecutor to tell a story nobody involved wanted told.

It started with a plot to murder a beautiful blonde named Heather Grossman. Her ex-husband, Ron Samuels, was a megalomaniac businessman who always got what he wanted. And he didn't want Heather alive, not after she got custody of the kids.

It wasn't that Ron didn't love his three young children, Ron's new wife later testified. It's that he hated paying child support.

So Ron turned to a crack-addicted friend, who turned to a crack dealer, who hired two crack addicts to “whack the wife.” On October 14, 1997, one of them—Roger Runyon—loaded a high-powered rifle and fired at the base of Heather's skull as she and her new husband sat at a stoplight.

Heather survived, a quadriplegic.

Ron Samuels was eventually arrested and tried for attempted murder. In October 2006, he was convicted and sentenced to life. The other four conspirators walked free. They had been given immunity in exchange for their testimony.

I sat near Heather Grossman in the courtroom for weeks. I saw her pushed down the aisle in her wheelchair day after day, her head permanently slumped on its rest. I watched tears roll sideways into her ear and listened to the machine breathing for her,
sh-sh-sh-shewww
, one mechanical puff after another.

I will know that feeling soon.

But my disease will render me so. Heather Grossman was shot. Four men plotted. One put a bullet in her brain.

Did they have to go free?

The top prosecutor's flak told me, “There's no story here, Susan.” And, “None of the networks covered it.” And it will only “piss off” the top man.

As a journalist, you know you are onto something good when people say stuff like that.

So I researched the case and discovered there had been evidence to charge and prosecute the men. I discovered that the testimony of Roger Runyon, the shooter, did not directly implicate Ron Samuels. Yet he had been given immunity in advance and walked free.

I tracked down the would-be killers.

To a life insurance agency in Hollywood, Florida, where one of the conspirators told me the immunity deal was “the best thing I ever did.” To an office in Deerfield Beach. To a flop house in Carol City, north of Miami.

I flew to Indianapolis and drove to the small town in Indiana where the shooter, Roger Runyon, lived. His house was on a rural highway at the edge of a cornfield.

I stood at his front door, attempting to interview him. A wild turkey in his yard began chasing me. I heard him inside, but he wouldn't answer the door.

I talked to the local police chief and Runyon's parole officer. He was on probation for traffic violations. Neither knew he had once shot to kill in Florida.

It felt important to write that story, so that readers would understand the dynamics behind our criminal system. It felt important to let them know how complex justice can be—and how far-reaching the ramifications.

But it felt personal too.

I love that story because I loved Heather Grossman. She inspired me with her will to live after the crippling shot. With her tenacity raising her children. With how beautiful and strong she seemed in her wheelchair, even with her body lost.

She couldn't breathe on her own. She couldn't live on her own. But she competed in Mrs. Wheelchair America. I mean, the clams on this girl.

Write about strength, I told myself, as I sat in my Chickee hut. Don't write about your disease. Write about joy.

I was stunned, a few months ago, by a documentary about Heather's case. Years after the shooting, Heather saw the emergency room surgeon who had operated on her. The doctor told her she had begged him not to save her life.

Heather had not remembered. She wept as she recounted it more than decade later, her children nearly adults. “I am so glad the doctor didn't listen to me!” she cried.

Be honest, I told myself.

We can despair. Like Heather Grossman. Like me. It's what we summon after the tragedy—the tenacity—that matters.

By June, I had lost the ability to use my iPad. The keyboard was too big, and it tired my right hand to move it back and forth.

I decided to write the book using the “notes” function on my iPhone instead. John or Stephanie, or even Aubrey or Marina if they were around, would slide the phone into my useless left hand, where by serendipity my curled fingers formed a perfect holder. I would type each letter with my right thumb—tap! tap!—the only digit I could control.

I added “Thank God for Technology” as my e-mail tagline, for I realized that five years ago, before the touchscreen typing pad, this book would have been impossible for me.

I tapped and tapped away.

I rose early, willing myself to finish a chapter every day. I wrote through the weekends. I wrote when I was traveling with my loved ones. At one point, knowing how weak I was becoming, I committed to write forty chapters in one month (some were cut or combined by my editor). I accomplished it, though I took two major trips during that time.

Such is the power of desire.

When people came over, I asked them to take the phone from my hand (since I could not hand it to them) and read the latest section out loud (since I could no longer read aloud). On the iPhone, I could see only twenty or thirty words at a time. I wanted to hear the cadence and flow.

I had my favorite sections read over and over to me by different visitors. I could not hug them. I did not go out for meals with them or to the beach. I could not walk the yard or hold a conversation for more than a few minutes.

These sections, read in the cool shade of the Chickee hut, were my conversations. I was speaking to my family and friends with my written words, and I was reliving the moments.

Meeting John. My children's births. The peace I embraced inside.

Sometimes a word or turn of phrase made me smile.

Sometimes I would smile with anticipation, knowing a favorite line was coming soon.

(Like Soulla, when I asked about the man in the photo: “That's your grandmother!”)

When I wrote with others present, it frustrated me. Like when I would watch Nancy typing away quickly on her phone, then think about my own slow pace—an effort to push each letter.

But writing this book was not work. Like each journey I took during the year, it brought me joy. It kept me alive.

Like every good thing in my life, I didn't want it to end.

When I typed the last letter of the first draft in mid-September, three months after beginning in earnest, I couldn't believe what I had accomplished.

I felt as if I'd pulled myself up a mountain with nine fingers tied behind my back.

I let the moment linger, the thrill of a triathlon completed.

I looked at John, who was sitting across from me in the Chickee hut. I expected to smile. To beam with the dream fulfilled.

I cried.

And formed the words as best I could: “What will I do now?”