Of the thousands of letters, texts, and emails I’ve received since announcing my diagnosis, many of them have mentioned my courage. But that’s not the way I look at courage. Courage is a conscious decision. You do it in a dangerous situation, when you have a choice. Here, there’s no choice. I’ve been diagnosed with a disease that is probably going to kill me. And probably sooner than later. So courage does not enter into it.
That word—courage—is something I’ve thought about quite often in my life. If you’re a guy, you worry about things like that. Well, maybe not all guys do. But I do. And there have only been, in my mind, a couple of times when I have demonstrated courage.
The one that stands out most occurred in my twenties in Canada. I had built a ski chalet up at Georgian Bay, about an hour drive from Sudbury. At that time, I was driving a 1965 Cadillac convertible, which I used as a pickup truck. I would haul ten-foot and twelve-foot lengths of lumber—one end on the dashboard, the other end sticking out through the unzipped rear window. Those cars were so long—both the ’65 and the ’66 Cadillac—that the lumber never extended past the rear bumper. Not too long ago I thought about buying one, just to revisit my youth, but it wouldn’t fit in my garage, so I passed on it.
One Saturday night at my chalet there was a big pounding on the door. I went to the door and there was a young lady disheveled, in a terrible state, panicky as hell, saying, “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me! He’s overdosed on drugs, and he said he’s going to kill me!”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. It took me a couple of seconds to get her calmed down. She said her boyfriend in the chalet across the street had gone crazy and was after her to kill her. I told her, “Go sit down, call the police, and I’ll go take a look.”
I went across the street, and I arrived on the porch just as the front door opened. Out stepped this crazy-looking twenty-year-old with an ax in his hand. When he spotted me, he threatened me.
“Get out or I’ll kill you,” he said.
I don’t know why, but as soon as he threatened to kill me, I put my hands in my pockets so I would not be perceived as a threat. Then I casually started talking to him. Like, “How you doing?” And within a few minutes he calmed down. We were talking for a while, until finally, in a moment of frustration, he just turned quickly, went back in the house, and slammed the door. I went back to my chalet, and the police arrived. They went across the street, and they took him into custody with no problem whatsoever.
So I’ve always thought of that as an example of courage in my life—especially the way I made a conscious, deliberate choice to put my hands in my pockets. That’s what I remember most about that incident. Though I was probably just hiding my shaking hands.