Remembering Dad: Lasting Words
My dad died 22 years ago this week. Even as I write that sentence, I don’t believe it, yet I know it to be true. It is hard to imagine that the man who so loved his four granddaughters never saw them grow up.
Lauren was only 9, Kailey, 8, Emma and Maddie, 4, when I had to explain that their beloved “Poppy” had died at the too-young age of 64. My girls didn’t understand words like Acute Myeloid Leukemia, but they had understood their grandfather was sick.
Over the spring and summer of 1998, I traveled several times from Charlotte to Houston where my dad was undergoing an experimental treatment at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. We all hoped and prayed it would be able to add years to his life. When he was first diagnosed, it was a shock. How could this man who still played a vigorous tennis game several times a week be dying of a very aggressive disease? Even more surprising, how could it be cancer?
You see my dad was a very civic-minded attorney in my hometown of El Paso, Texas serving on nonprofit boards and leading at our church. My father lived a life of service as did my grandfather and they passed along this core value to me: Doing Good. Service was not something you did so people would think you were a good person. A life of servant leadership was simply the right thing to do. Dad believed that was how we earned and in some sense, paid back, the gift of this one amazing chance we get at life—you make your time here matter.
Although Dad did a lot of good, his biggest service, outside his legal practice, was to the El Paso Cancer Treatment Center (now the Rio Grande Cancer Foundation). He was board chair for years and helped run a charity golf tournament hosted by Terry Bradshaw, the former Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback. Even though Dad was a diehard Dallas Cowboy fan, I remember his excitement at being able to meet and greet the famous NFL player and helped raise $103,000 in 1980. Dad was raising money and doing good for cancer because it was the right thing to do. Dad never, ever expected that eighteen years after he held up that banner at a golf tournament (he’s the one on the right), he would be the cancer patient. And he never, ever imagined it might kill him.
As he was undergoing his painful bone marrow treatments in Houston, Dad remained optimistic and upbeat. For thirty days, he lived inside a sterilized glass room that only the nurses and doctors could enter. There was no escaping his 12 x12 foot hospital room in what I remember only had a bed and a television. In 1998, there were no iPads or Netflix so there was not much to distract him from the daily medical drama of his dangerous white blood cell counts. Accustomed to three-set tennis matches and long daily walks, Dad was more than a little stir-crazy. He finally convinced his doctors that he needed some form of exercise while he waited in this solitary health confinement. They brought in a stationary bike and Dad would grin and spin waving at my mom and me through the glass of his small world.
With his unexpected cancer diagnosis, I think Dad truly believed it was another test of his faith. Something that if he prayed faithfully, the doctors would eventually declare him to be in remission. But, that never happened. Dad went through not one, but two rounds of experimental treatment, living for weeks on end in that glass room never to be declared victorious in his battle.
I know my dad wrestled with that as much as I did. Dad was a good guy. He lived to serve others. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. He went to church every week. Surely that should count for something. Shouldn’t that mean he would live into his eighties watching his grandchildren graduate, marry, and even meet his great-grandchildren?
Even though we knew Dad would not live much longer, we were still shocked that November just days before my mother’s birthday and Thanksgiving when it happened. I spoke to him on the phone that Saturday morning and he sounded subdued from what he felt might be severe indigestion. Dad presumed the likely culprit was the hotdog he had eaten the night before at the University of Texas-El Paso basketball game.
“Are you going to call your doctor?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “It won’t kill me.”
Dad died about twelve hours later likely caused by listeria, a type of food poisoning, which wreaked havoc in his body already weakened from leukemia. Always a planner, Dad left behind explicit directions for his service and his obituary. As instructed, Dad’s death notice did not have the long list of his life’s accomplishments but instead concluded with this:
His family would like you to know that in his 64 years, John Leighton Green, Jr accomplished even more than is listed here, but didn't often want it known. In accordance with his wishes, it will not be written now. Those who loved him know that he valued love and family, faith in God, friends, integrity, fairness, compassion, and service. He tried to live these daily. On June 28, 1998, he wrote, ''I have had a wonderful life.'' He certainly did.
I don’t know if I carry that same gene for Acute Myeloid Leukemia or if like my dad, I only have six-years left to live. But because of my father, I am acutely aware that our time here on earth is both precious and finite. Dad hasn’t been here for over two decades but his words have. I hear them when I worry about failing. I hear them when I wonder if I am making the right decision. I hear them as I try to craft a life that might matter. When I am breathing my last breaths, I want to be able to write that I valued love and family, faith, friends, integrity, fairness, compassion, and service. I am trying to live those words daily so when it is all over, I will have made the most of this one amazing chance.
I hope, like Dad, I can make it matter.
After his death, The Rio Grande Cancer Foundation named its comprehensive library and resource patient education center The Green House to honor my dad. Their website notes: The J. Leighton Green, Jr. Cancer Resource Center is affectionately named for the El Paso attorney whose journey with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) ended in 1998. While the name of the library "The Green House" was intended in tribute to Leighton Green, Jr., the name itself evokes light, hope, help, and healing.