I was deep into my search for opinions about hope. This was not a scientific study, only a mission that might mean something to me. Already I knew there was no single answer to any question on my mind. Perhaps this was only a self-indulgent exercise. But my different conversations were compelling and instructive. I was seeking perspective, not expecting wisdom. I needed only a friendly voice on the phone. My problems were piling on. I felt very alone. I wanted to touch and be touched.
I was determined to seek out individuals who had stared down trauma. January 29, 2006, was the day Bob Woodruff and his wife, Lee, saw their world explode. Bob was the newly installed anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, the successor to Peter Jennings, who had died of lung cancer the previous year. Bob’s first assignment took him and his cameraman to Iraq to cover the war. A few days after their arrival, they were out shooting a story just north of Baghdad when a roadside bomb ripped into their armored vehicle.
Both newsmen were grievously wounded. Woodruff sustained catastrophic injuries to his head, face, and neck. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury. There was so little hope for his survival that his producers in New York began planning his obituary.
Lee Woodruff, to whom he had been married since 1988, learned of the blast in an early-morning phone call from David Westin, the president of ABC News. As she recounted in their memoir, In an Instant, when Westin told her that Bob had been wounded, she asked him, “What do you mean wounded? . . . Is my husband alive?”
Yes, Westin told her, but he had taken shrapnel to the brain. “I tried to digest what that meant and couldn’t comprehend it,” Lee wrote. “He was alive; I’d start with that. The rest was gravy.” The simple fact that Bob was alive was enough for Lee to reach out and touch hope. It was not much, but it was something.
Later in their conversation, Westin told her that when Woodruff regained consciousness, he, too, asked if he was alive. Hearing that her husband had awakened and even spoken was grounds for further hope, she felt. “So he spoke, I thought. He spoke. This is going to be okay,” Lee wrote. “Bob would be okay. He was lucky and bright and hardworking and a good man. Things like this didn’t happen to good people. I could feel hope in my heart, as clear and bright as the streak of a shooting star.”
Bob Woodruff underwent surgery at a U.S. Air Force hospital in Iraq before being airlifted to a hospital at the U.S. Army base in Landstuhl, Germany. From there he was flown to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Doctors kept him in a medically induced coma from which he did not emerge for five uncertain weeks.
I had crossed paths with Lee in 2008, when she interviewed me about my second book, Strong at the Broken Places, for ABC News. I decided to reach out to ask Lee if she and Bob would talk to me about the hope that sustained them during that trying time. I did not know Bob, nor could I anticipate how they would respond. Lee wasted no time getting back to me, letting me know they would be happy to talk. They were gracious and accommodating.
Lee invited me to come to their home in a suburb north of New York, straight across the county from the village where my family lived. Lee, an author and a freelance writer who did gigs on television, greeted me in their driveway, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that read, “I Love Sundays.”
It was a warm, sunny spring day, and we sat out back, looking at the view of the ocean, with Long Island visible in the distance. It was just the two of us, since Bob was on assignment for ABC. I asked Lee how she had managed to find hope while her husband was still unconscious.
A kind of denial seemed to come into play. “I didn’t know a lot about brain injuries, and that saved me,” Lee said. “I very early on understood that if I wanted to stay in the world of hope, I should not find out more about brain injury until he came out of his coma.”
On the videotape in your head, I asked, were you seeing Bob recovered or not? “What a great question,” she quickly replied. “On the videotape in my head, I think I needed to play the tape both ways so that I could begin to get used to it, however it was going to break.”
Lee told me that she is a person of faith. She had leaned on that faith when she had a miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy in 1995. Faith, she told me, had pulled her through that ordeal. But when she found out what had happened to Bob, she wondered if her faith would be strong enough to sustain her again, especially if the news was grim.
In an article she wrote for Guideposts magazine a year after the explosion, Lee described what her faith had meant to her during a time of such uncertainty. She wrote about how the prayers of friends and family and even strangers had sustained her ability to hope when her own faith sometimes wavered.
As a person of no faith, I asked Lee if she felt one has to be a believer to find hope. Do you think hope is organic, that it can grow, even if you are not someone of faith? I asked. Do you believe everyone has equal access to hope?
“I do, Richard. I really do,” Lee said, becoming animated. “Let’s get back to your word, optimistic,” Lee said, referring to a word I had used earlier in our conversation. “People who would register as more optimistic are probably able to tap into their hope more easily,” Lee said. “I think some people are probably more predisposed to being hopeful than others.”
That could be a mixed blessing. Optimism can lead to expectations, sometimes unrealistic. If a person in need is seduced into believing that if you hope hard enough, the desired end will come to pass, then the expectation game can be dangerous. Lee, however, thinks the alternative is worse—that not having hope leads to despair.
“The absence of hope is a much scarier place to be and I believe a less positive place from which to heal and move forward,” Lee told me. “I think despair is crippling. It is somebody frozen and incapable of movement. But moving forward is the only choice we have if we want to grapple with our new realities.”
That did not mean Lee had not known moments when she felt frightened and unsure. By the time her husband was airlifted to the States, the doctors thought he would survive. But in the weeks Lee was with him at the Naval Hospital, while he was still in a coma, his prognosis was unknown, his future uncertain. A military physician described his condition in guarded terms: “The question is, what kind of individual will we have at the end of this period?” For Lee, the uncertainty about just who would emerge from the long sleep was agonizing.
“The doctors said he might be violent, that sometimes people recovering from brain trauma hit their loved ones. They said he probably wouldn’t ever be able to do his job again. Please, God, I prayed. I just want my husband back.”
Lee had been clinging to the fantasy of wounds healing and full restoration. Revising that to “I just want my husband back” meant that she was trying to adjust expectations. Lee still had hope, even if it was dimmer. When Bob had not emerged from his coma after nearly five weeks, that hope, too, began to fade. The doctors told Lee that Bob would have to be moved to an acute-care facility.
Just as the dark clouds began to take over, the sun broke through. Lee went to Bob’s hospital room one morning and was shocked to find him sitting up in bed. “Bob had awakened on his own, as I was at my very lowest moment, when I think I was pretty much out of hope. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, ‘where have you been?’”
As Lee wrote in Guideposts, “This was so much more than I’d wanted and prayed for, that I couldn’t really believe it. My husband was back and he was calling me.” Bob was back, but he had a long road ahead. Recovering from a traumatic brain injury is a marathon, not a sprint.
Half of Bob’s skull was gone, with his brain protected only by skin, so later he had to have surgery to replace his missing skull with an acrylic plate. Memory issues and cognitive deficits became the new normal, at least for a time. Doctors told the Woodruffs they would just have to wait to see how fully he would recover.
Some weeks after my conversation with Lee, when Bob returned, he told me the story of what he had experienced during the long months of convalescence and rehab. Bob described the raw emotion that frequently overtook him. “I just cried and I couldn’t stop. There are all sorts of brain issues that trigger things that are not natural. Everything from anger and snapping and that kind of thing,” Bob said evenly. “They did not tell me that a traumatic brain injury is permanent.” The old normal was gone.
“When I woke up, I couldn’t remember the names of a couple of my kids,” Bob said. “I couldn’t say paper clip, I didn’t know how to say coffee or especially decaf. I couldn’t even order something from Starbucks when I finally got out of the hospital.”
I told Bob I did not speak Starbucks either. He laughed. Bob’s sense of humor seemed to have remained intact. His friends tell me he is an incurable practical joker. I can relate to Bob’s need to laugh. A sense of humor is a valuable coping mechanism. “Laughter is a form of internal jogging,” Norman Cousins, the legendary magazine editor, wrote of his battle with illness. “It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.”
I think of all that Meredith and I have endured together over the years. My medical meshuggaas has veered out of control from time to time. When MS and cancer were foisted on me, it was a struggle to laugh. I was too freaked out. Meredith knew how to handle that. My good wife informed me she had purchased a cute black dress. “Just in case,” she added, putting on a grim face. “You will love it, except you won’t be around.” Relax, dear, I responded. I’m not dead yet. Laughter releases internal pressure.
There is a wonderful video of Bob Woodruff lying in bed with his young kids around him. The children are teaching Bob to pull words from his faltering brain and relearn how to pronounce them. They made it a game. Bob was clearly comfortable allowing his children to take the lead. Whether or not he truly needed their assistance, the video presented a moving picture of a family coming together to support one another.
Bob described the long path he had traveled to recover practical brain function. “I had to go through all these tests where they give me little note cards with a picture of a hammer to see if I could say the word hammer,” Bob said, “which I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember the different kinds of fruit. I didn’t know what that yellow car thing was. It was a taxi.”
One month after that conversation, I sent Bob an email, asking him to detail the cognitive deficits that remain. “Remembering words,” he replied. “Mild aphasia (an impairment of language, affecting the comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write). No small obstacle for a journalist.”
He continued, “I can make my points with different words if I forget certain ones. Names are more difficult because there are no synonyms.” I asked if he thought he could anchor again. “I suppose I could,” he wrote. “But not exactly the same way I was.” Woodruff has residual deficits from his injuries, but he has made an extraordinary recovery, having moved far beyond the point where doctors warned that his progress might end. He was back on the air within thirteen months of the explosion, though not in the anchor chair.
Woodruff knew he was fortunate to have had the finest possible medical care for the injury he incurred in Iraq. He and Lee decided they would do what they could to make certain that men and women in the military also received the help they needed. In 2007, they formed the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which raises money and provides grants to programs assisting veterans and their families. Their mission statement reads, “We will pursue ways to provide service members and their families access to the same quality of support through their recovery that Bob Woodruff and his family received.”
By the end of 2016, the Woodruff’s nine-year-old foundation had invested forty-two million dollars in various programs to help wounded veterans pay for rehabilitation costs and get educational and employment assistance after leaving the service. The Woodruffs have found a way to bring meaning to the trauma they survived. Their commitment to helping is now built into their lives.
Helping others with the same or similar issues becomes a means to elevate our lives and escape the dark hole that can swallow us. I have spoken all over the country about my battles with disease. That mission has helped me, probably more than anyone stuck in my audiences. Reaching out is rewarding.
Bob recounted being in the military hospital and seeing people suffering even worse injuries than his and thinking, “Why is this? It is not fair. If there is something we can do to help some of them, why can’t we? So, yes, I found good in the bad.”
This idea of finding good in the bad reminded me of what neurologist Oliver Sacks brought to his patients. Sacks was a physician who knew how to look past the conventional medical assessment of the deficits from which his patients suffered. Unlike most doctors, he understood it was possible for a patient’s problems to “play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence,” as he wrote in An Anthropologist on Mars.
When he was dying from liver cancer, Sacks discovered his ability to find renewal and strength, “new forms of life,” as he wrote during his ordeal too. In an op-ed for The New York Times in early 2015, Dr. Sacks wrote about his impending death.
“I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.” A powerful coda to an anthem of hope.
Bob Woodruff was blindsided by a bomb, causing a traumatic injury to his brain. Tom Brokaw did not see cancer coming until his world was upended by a rare condition and his grip on life imperiled. Tom is a highly regarded journalist—he anchored NBC Nightly News for almost two decades, until 2004—who happens to be a good guy too, often its own rare condition. I like Tom and have always found him accessible and open. I was working with Dan Rather, the anchor of CBS Evening News, when I first crossed paths with Brokaw in the lobby of the Savery Hotel in Des Moines during the 1984 Iowa caucuses. The bitter Great Plains cold radiated up through the soles of our shoes to our ankles.
In Iowa, all of us were onto the same story. The economy in the state and across the country was faltering. Unemployment was high and interest rates were through the roofs of farmhouses across the state. Everyone covering the presidential campaign that year was attending farm auctions because farmers throughout Iowa were losing their livelihoods. Thirty years later, Tom was in danger of losing his life.
In February 2014, Brokaw disclosed that he has multiple myeloma, a rare cancer affecting blood and bones. The announcement of his illness was jarring. Multiple myeloma had taken the lives of former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and ABC News anchor Frank Reynolds, my advocate during my earliest years in television news.
I later ran into Brokaw at 60 Minutes regular Bob Simon’s funeral. Tom was characteristically friendly when I saw him. He looked thin, even gaunt, wearing a suit that seemed too big for him. I asked about his health. “I am in remission,” Tom told me cheerfully, then asked about my health. I told him I was okay. Neither of us went into any detail. This was neither the time nor place.
In early 2016, I sent Tom an email to ask if he would talk to me about hope. “Of course,” came the quick email reply. “Given my own experience, I, too, have been thinking a good deal more about the subject.” Not surprising. The topic had to be front and center in his mind.
Brokaw’s public reaction to his condition had been typically understated. He chose not to indulge in melodrama, instead putting his focus on the good fortune he has enjoyed through the years. “In the seasons of life I have had more than my share of summers,” he wrote on the first page of his new memoir, A Lucky Life Interrupted.
When we spoke a few weeks later, we talked about his new struggle. You have enjoyed more than seven decades of good health, I said to the NBC veteran. Getting hit by the cancer truck must have been shocking, so beyond any expectation that it must have been like being the victim of a hit-and-run driver.
“It was, and you have known me long enough and well enough to know that I really have been a lucky guy. Everything has broken my way. When I have bumped up against stuff, it’s been resolved. So I was conditioned to believe [chronic illness] is not going to happen to me.”
I believe all of us rationalize and try to put a brave face on situations, I said. We have our hiding places until we have to face facts. “I think that’s true,” Tom responded. “I think in the life you and I had before we were diagnosed, the glass always was half full. I thought this would be an extension of that.” Of course a glass half full can empty before you know it.
Brokaw told me about going to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to have some tests because he was showing disturbing symptoms. When the studies were finished, a doctor called him in. The man was blunt. “I know I can be candid with you because you are a journalist. And we have to make some moves fast,” the doctor said to him before presenting a diagnosis.
When I asked Tom how he had responded, he thought for a minute before saying, “It was kind of an out-of-body experience. My first thought was, Okay. I have cancer. Then they [the doctors] said, ‘You know, people have died from this.’ I processed that and asked, how long do I have? They said, five years technically, but we think you are in good shape, and we might be able to extend it.”
The way Brokaw told me about that moment, it was as if he had stepped out of his body and was covering his illness as a news story for NBC. He was dispassionate as he described the scene with his doctor, talking facts, not feelings.
Tom is a smart guy. He had to know exactly what he was up against. I wondered how well he processed reality when he got the news. “Intellectually, I understood I had cancer,” he said. “But emotionally, I thought I had gotten through so many things in the past.” Tom cited a helicopter crash, a near-fatal boating accident, tours in Beirut and Iraq and Afghanistan. “I assumed I’d make it . . . I probably thought I was immune.”
There appeared to be no dents in the Brokaw armor. Tom sounded disarmingly positive. He had the self-confidence of being the captain of his own ship—someone who is always in control, the person who has the power to choose what to cover, to do things his own way. It looked as if he had control even now. I marveled at his calm. What did he know that I didn’t? I wondered.
You seem to have taken on your illness as a journalist, I said to him. It sounds as if you are in a little bit of denial. “I think so,” Brokaw agreed. Whether he thought that was a positive or a negative, I could not tell. Tom had answered with no hesitation, no discernible emotion.
I believe denial often is an instinctive reaction to bad news. Denial can be a good thing if it gives one ammunition to stay in the struggle. For fighters, denial is a powerful weapon. When we deny the inevitability of probable outcomes, that denial can partner with hope. Denial also can become a liability if it defies common sense. Tom learned that the hard way.
Tom’s ability to keep a lid on his dread about his illness is even more impressive given that his red cape fell apart the day after he returned to his Montana ranch from the Mayo Clinic. “Here I was, just diagnosed with an invasion of my bones. I felt pretty good and drove one hundred and fifty miles to go fishing.” That is difficult for a New Yorker like myself to wrap his mind around. “By the next morning, I was in fetal position on a cabin porch in so much pain I could barely move. Two days later, they were medevacing me back to Minnesota.” Wishful thinking had overtaken reason.
By the time I spoke to Tom, he was already a couple of years into his ordeal, and I wondered if in retrospect he thought denial had served him well. “Most people who have been diagnosed with cancer just take it to DEFCON 1 immediately,” Tom said. He paused. “Cancer means I am going to die.” After a deep breath, he went on. “I am an optimist. I am not going to die. They said it was treatable. I’m going to try to stay in that corner of the diagnosis.” The power of the mind must be harnessed when fighting a deadly disease.
Tom does know that denial has its limits. There has been no turning away from some of the complications cancer has caused, including painful fractures in his spine that had to be repaired. “This was a signal to me like pages of a book or a description from a physician on how the cancer had invaded my body in a more profound way than I had realized.” Reality had set in.
For both Tom and me, our families—strong wives and loving children—have been a crucial piece of our survival strategy. Tom’s oldest daughter, Jennifer, is an emergency room physician and has served as his point person in the wilds of modern medicine. Tom’s wife, Meredith, to whom he’s been married for fifty-five years, is his rock. “I think you know my Meredith enough to know she is a lot like yours. She is very stoic. When I delivered the bad news, she just stared at me. She was very analytical.”
After our conversation, I wrote an email to Tom with one follow-up question. If you had asked me what I hope for, I said, I probably would say as long a life as is possible and to get to have and know my grandchildren. What would you say? Tom answered, “My hope is much the same. I would only add that I hope for a long productive life, more time with my grandchildren, and not to be an undue burden on my family.”
Pretty standard, I guess, but Brokaw continued: “I have learned that my position in life and my experience with cancer and the culture surrounding it has made me a resource for so many others—and I am grateful I can be helpful.”
Bingo. Becoming an advocate, an activist or, in my case, a guinea pig for others soothes the spirit. Hope comes in many shapes and sizes. Helping others is a high calling. I asked Tom if he felt his illness had given him a new sense of his life’s mission. “I didn’t anticipate that I would become a kind of poster boy for MM,” he wrote back. But he was in a perfect position to fill that role by virtue of being a household name and using it for the good of others.
“I’m in regular contact with a Navy admiral, a Dallas Cowboys coach, a friend whose brother is struggling with MM, an assortment of strangers who stop me on the street to compare experiences. I don’t offer medical advice but we do exchange treatment protocols, symptoms, surprises.”
Dealing with illness and injury had pushed both Woodruff and Brokaw to new levels of self-awareness and insight. Both were different after what they endured. They probably were better human beings for their ordeals. Each thought it important to reach beyond his struggle and think in larger terms. Both were hoping to find meaning in all they had endured. I believe the ability to find meaning in personal battles is a form of hope, that selflessness eases the pain.
Some months later, I was hearing through the CBS News grapevine that my pal Allen Pizzey actually had pulled the plug on his time at the network, as he had told me at the Vatican he planned to do. I did not believe him then. Everyone in the business talks big about getting out from time to time, but in the end keeps their boots on and tied.
I knew that if Allen was leaving the network, his departure probably had something to do with the trouble he had been having with his eyes, which we had talked about in Rome. A few years earlier, he had gone to a doctor to have his eyes checked for what seemed to be a minor problem. The next thing he knew, his doctor was telling him to sit down.
“I like to be completely honest with my patients,” the doctor had said. He then told Allen his diagnosis, that he was going blind and made the diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa. Bam. I asked Allen if the news knocked him off his feet. “Not really,” he answered.
Pizzey is a guy who made a living catching grenades in his teeth. He was unflappable. “I just went home and sat down in a chair. I looked around. I knew I needed to make a mental map of where everything was.” Pizzey’s survival instincts were automatic.
Now, after thirty-six years and assignments in about one hundred countries, Pizzey really was retiring. Who’d a thunk it? Pizzey’s reporting had taken him to the epicenter of news in some of the world’s most dangerous spots. He had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and armed hostilities in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo.
Allen had been in the townships of South Africa in the age of apartheid, done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, covered battles in Beirut. It has been said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. For millions, Pizzey’s drafts had made sense of a violent, complex world. Now he decided it was time to choose calm waters over the turbulent seas he had been navigating for so long.
As he planned, Pizzey waited until his contract was up. I was trying to handle my situation with dignity and class. Allen did just that. He sent his CBS bosses a letter announcing his intention to leave the network. “I’ve been elated, exhausted, terrified out of my wits,” his letter read, “laughed, cried, reveled in adrenaline highs and suffered the lows of malaria and stomach bugs, been cold and dirty, coddled in luxury, logged hundreds of thousands of air miles. I’ve met villains and near saints, seen people do the most horrific, and heroic things imaginable, been awed by the kindness of strangers.”
All in a life’s work.
When I got back in touch with Allen, he told me that he knew it was time to retire because the damage retinitis pigmentosa had done to his vision had gotten steadily more severe. “I don’t drive at night anymore. I don’t like to be in crowds either, because I don’t see people coming in from the side anymore. I bump into people. It’s awful. I don’t see down unless I am looking down. I walk into tables and trip over dogs and small children. It is annoying and embarrassing.”
Forget embarrassing. Severely compromised vision would be dangerous to any person in Allen’s line of work. “I used to go to war zones,” he wrote to me in an email. “I know what you have to do. I’ve been in enough of them. Spatial awareness is really important. I’m either going to get myself hurt or killed or somebody else hurt or killed.”
I wondered how Allen felt about having to give up the work he loves, which has been so central to his identity. “It pisses me off,” he said when we connected by phone. I have been through the same thing, so I get it. I spent half my life battling illness and had to leave the news business decades before I felt ready.
Pizzey took a deep breath before adding, “I get angry at myself.” So do I. Admitting to an illness can feel like a sign of weakness. Guys do not do well with that. But Pizzey also surprised me with an expression of hope, or at least a feeling that bore a resemblance to it. “If you are going to give up on something and say this has got me beat, you might as well end it. I am not going to commit suicide,” Allen said, laughing before adding, “Yet.”
His determination to hang in there may have had something to do with the fact that although the doctor in Rome had given him an extremely dire prognosis, an ophthalmologist he had seen in London for a second opinion had questioned that prognosis. That doctor told Allen that although he would have to learn to live with RP, he would die of natural causes before completely losing his sight. I, for one, have learned the art of being grateful to nobody in particular for small favors.
I asked Allen about his emotional reaction to the good news. I expected a description of whiplash. “Emotional reaction? Not very emotional at all, more a feeling—maybe even expression of ‘Whooof. Okay. That’s a relief.’” I should not have been surprised. Pizzey probably survived his life covering a cruel world because of his ability to suspend emotion. He had done that in response to both the bad news and the good news that followed.
Living with RP has meant that he’s had to accept a lot of unwelcome change. Allen and I both know that many people have far worse problems than we do. Allen told me about a friend and colleague who had pancreatic cancer and was given a few months to live. “He said he was going to carry on as close to normal as possible. He was not going to sink into despair and drag people down. If he can do that, what I have pales in comparison.”
Folks in the news business can be a cynical lot, well defended against the inhumanity and natural horrors we cover. How do our well-oiled defense mechanisms function when it is our own wounds we watch and weigh? I was struck by Allen’s expression of humanity.
The determination to go on is an affirmation of hope. “A hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles,” according to Christopher Reeve. Allen and I are no heroes, but I, for one, feel better about myself when I can find that kind of determination in myself. That strength only adds to my resolve to keep going. That gives me hope. My resolve had been cracking. Allen was helping me rediscover my grit.
Allen told me he planned to remain in Rome, which has been his home base for many years. His longtime partner, Dee, the mother of their grown son, Alexander, stays by his side. He takes daily walks along dirt roads and paths through woods and fields near his house, often spotting the occasional cinghiale (wild boar) or fox. Allen also plans to spend time at his house on a lake in Canada. The stakes for Allen are high, and he has chosen to live his life one day at a time, enjoying the things that have always given him pleasure. A sense of normalcy can breed hope.
Six months after our last conversation, I contacted Allen for an update on his condition. “I’ve developed a retinal edema, which is characteristic of retinitis pigmentosa,” he told me. “I’m on a three-month course of drops to reduce it. If it doesn’t work, they try an injection and then surgery. It’s not getting any worse, so I’m hopeful.”
I asked Allen if his life had changed. “I’ve curtailed some activities, but my life isn’t a mess and I’m getting used to bumping into and tripping over stuff.” And then this: “No sense bitching.”
It felt good to talk to Allen. I identified with much of his positive attitude. Like me, Allen gets a lot of strength from his family. As with me, Allen had a father who taught him toughness. “My dad had no time for whining or giving up,” he said. “I guess self-pity was never an option.” I just smiled when I heard that.