It’s Christmas morning, and Kent is cooking in the kitchen. I smell dressing roasting in the oven, a cherry pie she made from scratch—all-purpose flour, salt, sugar, unsalted butter, shortening, and water, whipped, but not too much, together—that’s cooling, filling the house with sweet and tart aromas that smell like family, but.
It’s just us.
I’m in the den, hammering away on the computer, taps on the keyboard coming lickety-split. It’s not so much what I want to be doing. It’s just, I can’t stop. I’m a US editor for a national news organization, full-time contract—good pay, work from home—though my head is buried in the computer all hours, seven days a week, because I only know one gear when tasked with driving audience growth: nonstop. Kent is wary of seeing my head in the computer seven days a week. When I stop for a bite or to take a walk or watch a show with her, I’m checking the news to see what’s new online, and I can’t look away. Even today, on Christmas.
“Really?” Kent says from the kitchen.
“I saw on Twitter there’s a tornado on the ground doing damage in Louisiana,” I say. “Can you imagine? It’s Christmas. A big storm blows through, disrupting everything. I need to find a reporter to write and post the story first before the other national news orgs get it.”
“Really? Really?”
Marriage is hard, but remarriage to the same person is harder in ways. Like, way.
Harder.
That’s because a first marriage is built in part on naivete and hope, while remarriage can’t help but ruminate on the past that ruined it in the first place. A burned hand remembers the flame, and Kent is flashing back to the heat and resulting scars that linger. It’s likely that way for most who remarry after infidelity, financial distress, much less after profound loss, and multiple cases of addiction lasting for prolonged periods. One item from the list will do a couple in, statistically speaking, and we’ve had it all, and in a few short years.
I told her when she took me back that I’d not try to persuade with words; I’d let actions and results do the talking instead. And that’s the problem now. My actions. When I’m staring into the computer, ignoring Kent, she imagines couples our age watching children open presents like a new iPhone or—surprise! A trip for all to Italy. She can’t help but remember the Christmas Day seven years before when, in the midst of our separation, I flew to Arizona for lunch and presents with another woman and her family. Kent is concerned, watching me like a lightning storm in the distance that threatens a good walk.
There’s been a higher tension in the house since last night when we arrived back from the Christmas Eve candlelight service. Kent had looked at me and I looked at her, and I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted this holiday. Hudson and his wife, Lo, had their first child in late October. They live in Montana, blanketed with picture-perfect Christmas snow, but we weren’t invited up for the holiday. Lo’s been battling postpartum depression, overwhelmed in the early days of motherhood and dealing with so many well-intentioned people after the birth, and Hudson wants to have his family’s Christmas with just them, an attempt at peace and quiet, for her. It’s understandable, it is, since we were just there, rocking our first grand-infant, William Wilder, while restocking groceries, making dinner, and changing diapers. But the problem is also that Mary Halley is a newlywed, and she wants to spend Christmas with her husband Luke’s family, to get to know them and their traditions better. Understandably. But that leaves Kent and me watching Home Alone and It’s a Wonderful Life by ourselves, and I’m thinking of this wonderful life we have, and she’s not ungrateful, no, but she’s making a pie, by herself, and we went to the candlelight service, by ourselves, and we are grieving, by ourselves, missing our dear William, and the absence of our children who are alive, because we are by ourselves.
Pitiful how aloneness feels multiplied by two. We have so much, despite our loss. You could list it all on paper and take several pages, starting with a new grandchild we love, like, love, and a daughter-in-law who’s like a daughter, a son-in-law who’s like a son, and my work and our remarriage and.
We have one another.
Thank God. We fit together in leisure and grief after all these years like sweet potatoes and marshmallows flavored with a hint of tangy, fresh-squeezed orange juice, but Kent was reared on large family holiday gatherings. Understandably. The aloneness strikes unsuspectingly, however, a spinning vortex of energy dropping from the clouds at the worst moments, even Christmas Day, perhaps especially on Christmas Day. The mind thinks it has healed from trauma, like loss of a loved one, enough to negate sudden valleys, because laughter and joy have returned, because day-to-day doesn’t feel so hard anymore, but just when you think you’ve gotten it under control, mastered the pain so it doesn’t rise up and bite you at the worst moments, surprise!
It’s back.
We never avoided or intentionally delayed grieving for William. But grief is like tough brussels sprouts, or a walk on a scorching day—you won’t go there unless it’s all you have in a moment of hunger or when you’re just too pent-up. That’s why we have never fully felt aloneness since his death, because Mary Halley and Hudson and their significant others had conjoined with us in mourning, in reunification, in rebuilding our family togetherness—soup and cornbread gatherings on Sunday night, made from Kent’s granny’s recipes, “How are you doing?” check-ins throughout the week, and listening. More listening.
I’m more than five decades old, but finally, my goodness.
I’m learning.
To better listen.
Lesson number one for family well-being: hear more than you speak. And on this Christmas Day, the sound of Kent’s pain is ringing in my ears. Her mother died the year before and was too often a jerk before that, enough so that we sometimes secretly wished we didn’t have to tend to her. But her recent absence, preceded the year before by Kent’s only sister, who died of cancer at fifty-four, the same age her father died twenty-four years before, leaves Kent as the only remaining member of her immediate family in this yuletide season.
My adopted family is mostly gone, a relief, honestly, but I still called that brokenness home, because.
They were all I had. Mom, Dad, and Eunice—on Christmas Day, Eunice would be dissatisfied with her presents, mostly, but no students would knock on the door to see Dad, and he’d adopt the role of a father a little more, in his way, snapping pictures from a camera, putting together toys, if needed.
And also, William is dead.
Dear God.
William is dead.
Some days that reality strikes harder than others, but every day, I know, as others know, the child may die but he or she never leaves the parents. Ever.
Those of us who have lost a child have to say that out loud to believe it, because when your flesh and blood is born, you think because your DNA is there that you have some control over that, but no. You don’t. I mean, yes, for a spell, changing diapers and saying no to an eight-yearold, and even then, not so much if they are spunky. Once they become adults, if we’re lucky, that spunkiness remains, and that’s where our two surviving children, Hudson and Mary Halley, are now. Spunky. They’ve made it, and they want to spread, make their own families, their own holidays. But Kent is crying off and on frequently enough that I stop thinking about finding a reporter to post online that a tornado has touched down in another state, spoiling Christmas for many. I’m focused instead on our spoiled Christmas, that’s struggling amid the invisible storm.
I put aside my laptop and phone.
I think of William, my angel, who hasn’t made a peep today.
“You there?”
No answer.
I’m worried.
What will Kent and I say, looking at one another over turkey, dressing, sweet potato casserole, and rolls for lunch? “Mmm, this is good”? Sure, I’ll say that, but she’ll see beyond the shallowness, the knife of loneliness twisting in her gut. This is why some drink excessively on holidays, getting soused and pretending it’s all in fun. But I’m long done with that. No changing how I feel; it’s all feeling now instead. No matter how that feels. And I’m feeling now like we need another option.
I suggest a new dog.
As in, immediately. A present, yes, but Kent doesn’t like surprises, so I pose the idea beforehand. An adopted puppy, especially one bred to appeal to your most sensitive senses, with colors, just right, with personality, almost right, but who’s keeping score, anyway, one that will cure most anything. We already have one dog, Bea, a three-year-old Blenheim Cavalier King Charles Spaniel—who with her perfectly spotted Blenheim and coarse but fine hair could be a showgirl in dog trot competitions, like the Thanksgiving National Dog Show that we crowd around the TV to watch like it’s the Superbowl, and the action is better, honestly, but the commercials, no—but her companion Cavalier named Lady died the year before when her heart wore out at the age of ten.
I’m clicking around online, and find a tricolor Cavalier, same as Lady. Everyone said Bea and Lady were the perfect match, and I’m picturing this puppy, petite with brown eyebrows, black body, with white spots, saddling up with Bea for our family Christmas card.
Click.
The puppy is nine weeks old and available tomorrow, on December 26, in Augusta, Georgia—a seven-hour drive away.
We leave the afternoon of Christmas Day for a dinner and hotel in Atlanta, hoping the scenery change will distract from the aloneness the way a second glass of wine once worked—dopamine! The Interstate is a bit sad on the holiest day, despite the occasional driver wearing a Santa hat or car ornamented with blinking lights.
We arrive at a hotel in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, a place that looks nice, but I’ve never understood in previous trips why so many people live there, why so many present it as a place to covet, for living, full-time, since it’s supposedly a suburb but feels, while we’re traversing it, like more of a quagmire. On Christmas, though, it’s busier than we have encountered along the way, cars buzzing by in the dozens, and I wonder where they are going, but we walk across the street easily enough to a well-known steakhouse for dinner. The dining room is full, but most tables have four or more seated—families or friends who want to gather but don’t like to cook, which makes Kent sad, for them, since cooking is her love. I comment how my fillet is just right, even though it’s overdone, like the day’s expectations, while Kent, beautiful in the table’s glowing candlelight, wipes a tear from her anguished cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m just sad.”
Maya Angelou said when someone shows you who they are, believe them. I think about that line regarding Kent, who’s hurting, who’s showing me that hurt, whom I could try to put a Christmas spin on, attempting to talk her out of it. She’d go along with it if I pushed hard enough, yet she’s spoken her truth to me, and rather than talk her out of it, as I’d have done years before, building a facade around our reality, I’ll hear her instead. I’ll allow her to feel, instead.
Kent is sad, and I’m uneasy over that fact, but thankful to know. We’re learning to own our feelings, speak our feelings, and I’m glad she’s voicing her truth. We’d have saved ourselves immeasurable pain years before had we not tried to squash feelings, or medicate feelings away.
We humans were created to experience the array of emotions, after all, with sadness arguably the most profound, the most sadly beautiful. Love is nothing, after all, without sadness, because sadness breeds from love. If we had no care for anything, we’d feel nothing. I feel love for Kent, and want to snap her from the chair and into my arms, making it all go away—the cheating, the divorce, William’s death, selling our home. But I’m beginning to understand that this lonely Christmas is good, in a sorrowful sort of way. We must feel the dimness of grief that a home place was left behind, that William is never coming back, that our two living children are so alive and well that they are branching out, with families of their own, that we are transitioning to a new life stage, which might possibly mean more days of solitude.
Still, I’m thinking this trip, this dog, is a good idea, even if it doesn’t feel so good in the moment, because pets help us alleviate anxiety, grief even, through their companionship that gives everything, while questioning nothing. The therapy puppy isn’t about saving this Christmas Day. It’s about saving the days and months ahead, giving us something small that lives and breathes and needs us to worry over, together, as we find our place in the shifting sands of family and time, so that we may grow stronger together, so that we may find joy together.
The next morning, we get tall cups of coffee and fight traffic that is jammed and impatient, driving two hours to Augusta to pick up the nine-week-old puppy. We name her Milly, short for Millicent, arriving back home in Oxford seven hours later, worrying about where she’ll sleep, if she’ll sleep, and how long before Bea, who’s taken an early disliking, adjusts.
———
It’s the first week of January, and I’ve quit my job. Fifth time, eight years. It sounds bad to me, too, saying it out loud. I’ve looked up stats to make sure I’m not completely crazy, and seen that US adults on average have about that many job changes from their mid-twenties into their early fifties. I did the national average in less than a decade, is all, but in my mind, I’ve had good reason. It feels like I’m just getting started since I drove away from California, since in our season of sadness, I’ve put my laptop away and started thinking, really thinking. Time is ticking. I’ve got work to do, destiny to pursue—I can’t stay in a job just to say I did, if I’m determined to make a difference in the world, and.
I am determined.
People can say what they want, but life is short, goes the all-too-true cliché, and it’s getting shorter for me at fifty-three, leaving little time to waste. I’d learned at forty-five it’s not too late to start over again. Somehow, I’d foolishly thought in my early forties, when my life and career were unraveling, that I’d messed it up for good, that the forties were the years for making a move and I’d botched the opportunity permanently. I’ve learned, though, that opportunity doesn’t leave us until our last breath, or not even then. Look at William’s work, as a messenger, as a servant. My years are dwindling, yes, but my opportunity is only bridled by my fear. I’m called, and I can’t help but act, and faith is the firmness of that foundation, just as faith is the lighthouse of resilience, and in my eyes, its light is shining bright. I see it, and I’m following it. I’m on a mission and can’t have a job with its original purpose expired getting in the way. It would be easy to stay, drawing a paycheck, pretending I’m more professionally stable, to please judging others, but who would that benefit?
My larger purpose, I’m hoping, will deliver the benefit. With the impending opening of the Magee Center on the Ole Miss campus after nearly three years of effort, the time has come to tell our truth, which involves more than William’s story. It’s my story, its Hudson’s story, Mary Halley’s, and Kent’s. It’s our family’s story of the making and near breaking of a family, and its recovery, minus our devastating loss.
We can do this, Dad, William says.
He said “we.”
I’m listening.
I still have my literary agent, Esmond, despite the crazy emails I sent him in early 2011, saying I’d write about family when I’d wrecked my family, but I’ve been dark for more than a decade, working behind the scenes. That’s a problem if you want a book deal, and I do. I haven’t been on social media, even though I’ve been in charge of those who ran it at large media companies, managing the managers and strategies. Book publishers don’t care about work done behind the scenes, though. Books don’t sell themselves, they like to say. Being somebody before doesn’t help much, either, if you are nobody the day your book goes on sale. They ask: How will you get yours sold? Without a quantifying answer, publishers will pass despite a quality manuscript and a book sales track record from a decade ago. That’s how Esmond once explained it. “It’s a great story, David, but a hard sell to publishers.”
I know he’s right.
Frankly, I’m surprised he took my call after all the years. The last time I communicated with Esmond was when the Dreamer told me I’d write a bestselling book about family and fatherhood. I’d emailed him, bucking to go like an unbridled bronco when I was in fact a broken and exhausted field horse who had no prance. It’s just, I believed.
I knew it would be my next book.
Sounded crazy then, but I haven’t written a book since. Now, my marriage is back together, so is my family, and while we lost William, we have the university center, the Magee Center, at Ole Miss opening to support and educate students about substance misuse. We’ve found joy that we never had, with two children successfully in recovery along with me, which means a long-shot book deal has a shot, which means—that book I told my agent and ex-wife, now wife again, about, which sounded so crazy then, will be the next one I write, and now, with a university center opening in my late son’s name, with our family back together again, and healing, it doesn’t sound so crazy.
Not even a little. Because time, and change, can shift perspective that way.
“I like it,” Esmond says. “It’s worth seeing if you can develop something.”
For an author, such agent talk is golden.
“I’ll get to work,” I say.
Writing is similar to golf, excruciatingly difficult if so-called success is the ambition because rare is the work that gets the readership and acclaim that matches the writer’s soul-generated labor. Some are better at it than others, at garnering the eyes and noteworthiness, but everyone, every writer, has to work at it constantly to have any shot at finding more than vanity’s eyes. A writer must practice often, read, seek feedback, and revise, or odds of getting published are slim. Writing a better-than-average book, slimmer odds than that.
Words merely accruing to book length don’t make a book. Writing that makes human connection with detail and voice and story arc capable of inspiring thought, or introspection, make a book, or a good book, anyway. I should know, since in my former life before I crumbled in personal crisis, I wrote plenty of book-length works on business and leadership.
“How’s it going?” Kent says softly, asking about the writing.
“Honestly,” I say, “it’s not. Not so well, anyway. I’ve got words on a page, but I’ve not yet found my voice.”
That’s because I’m writing corn, a bland style of writing that looks like a commodity, easily mockable by the artificial intelligence they say will steal away our literary future. I’m no bot, and I must break this tendency to write like one. Snap out of the fear and let my life flow on the page, revealing feelings and description so others can relate, so others can learn without me merely telling them a play-by-play. I’m a man who wanted a good father, who wanted to be a good father, who had it screwed for me, who screwed it all up, but who lived to tell and do something about it, to break the family cycle, and I must tell that story, as in, how it happened, not merely what happened. We all know similar results—career wasted, family lost. “Go deeper,” Kent says. The only problem is, I’m self-suspicious again.
The Doubter hasn’t spoken, no. I’ve learned to tune him out—taking a walk, or thinking of William, Hudson, or Mary Halley, or the list of items I want to accomplish, if he tries to creep in. Also, I’ve learned that alcohol awakened that devil, taking me where I didn’t belong, and my mind where I didn’t want to go, and its elimination has become a garlic of sorts to my vampire voice of negativity. But writing is isolating, and hard, until you can chip away and chip away, finding, you hope, a seam to knit something worthy together. My mind is speaking with less confidence on its own because the truth is, I’ve never written well enough for my satisfaction.
Despite the advances and royalties earned from two handfuls of business books written from 2002 through 2009, there’s barely a paragraph I can point to that I feel good about, no paragraph or page written that has the chance to change a life, mine included. I got book deals because I could gain access to captivating subjects, and I knew enough to structure words and sequences into stories publishable by the big houses, including Penguin and HarperCollins. But those books were not much good, because they weren’t stories I’m called to write. They were merely practice in the apprenticeship, leading to the destiny I’d later chase.
I’ll give a talk these days, and a hand will go up asking about The John Deere Way, my 2005 book about how the agriculture equipment maker gained preeminence, or about Toyota, and how it became one of the world’s most successful automakers after starting in Japan as a loom manufacturer, and I’ll shoot quickly back, “You don’t want to read those books.” Everyone laughs because no author in their right mind says “Don’t read my book” and means it, especially one who has sold tens of thousands of books worldwide. But I’m in my right mind, I think, and so I mean it, shooting back, smiling, “No, I’m serious, don’t read it. It’s not that good,” and now and then a wise person who’s studied up on me will come back with “I’ve read one or two, and they aren’t that bad.” I’ll smile again and say, “Thank you, cousin.”
If determined, one can find some valuable lessons embedded in those books. But there are also equally valuable lessons you won’t find. I was told Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, didn’t want me to write about his face, which a former Cowboy head coach said made him look like a clown, so I didn’t because, really, what does tight skin have to do with a business book about football and business? Except, it was a profile of a complicated business leader, along with stories of how alcohol was a frequent companion, and troublemaker, for him and his family. I was encouraged by his aide not to go there, discussing the face, and I’d played along because I was more intrigued by the fact that someone with such a self-absorbed personality who hasn’t won a championship as owner in years, no, decades, has succeeded from a business perspective, leveraging his franchise into something much bigger than eleven men pushing around eleven men. Jones did it, he explained to me, by making the game seem bigger than it is in reality, and then leveraging that by attaching premium value to every aspect, from parking to merchandise to brand deals. If Ford or Pepsi wants to hang around the Cowboys, and they do, well, they pay up.
John Deere, I learned, likes talk about its quality, as all manufacturing companies do, and its quality is better than okay, contributing to its global marketplace preeminence. But it didn’t rise to the top of agriculture equipment manufacturers until the company doubled down on design with its products in the 1950s, and everything changed overnight. Thus, quality matters, but it takes all—and we can never overlook the power of design in the equation.
As for Toyota, you can read my book on the company and quickly understand how its obsession with continuous improvement has become a part of my life, and turnaround, with elements showing up throughout this book and, therefore, my journey—not because I love Toyota. It’s just a company. Still, I fell in love with the concept Toyota built its culture upon in its rise as an automaker beginning after World War II, the premise that good can always be better, when writing that book. It’s just, I was too busy falling apart then. But once I got back on my feet in California, fluttering home with big ideas and focus on a purpose, I began to implement my version of lean manufacturing, personal success style, down to my writing—now that’s a book I’d read, how a business book with purported lessons actually helped change a life for the better with tangible results for all to see.
The problem that my business books didn’t fully deliver on, I now realize, was me, because when I wrote before, I didn’t trust my voice, and give it the time required for percolation, and craft, and that’s where I am now with Dear William, the name I’ve given to the memoir I’m writing about my family’s story of addiction, recovery, love, and loss. I’m only telling part of the story, as I did in leaving out the part about Jerry’s face, and other information about John Deere and Toyota, because I don’t yet trust my voice, so what I’m crafting isn’t good enough, by my standards. I’ve suffered for years by underwhelming with my book on John Deere, for instance, but I can’t make that mistake with my family memoir, letting something less-than reach the marketplace—letting down my dear William, letting down myself. So far, I’ve got words on a page, adding up to book length, good enough to keep my agent in conversation, but the words are no good. Not by the Dreamer’s standards. Not if I plan to make an impact.
I’m writing scared, afraid to reveal my truth. No, I’m terrified. Terrified I’ll leave this earth without fulfilling the one thing my son William asked for, the one thing I owe myself, to show once and for all I’m not that worthless boy David with big nipples and clown shoes who couldn’t stop staring out the window—who couldn’t finish his homework, or anything worthwhile.
It’s not just the writing, either. If only it was just the writing. It’s my whole sense of purpose that’s on the line, that’s in question. Was I crazy when I heard the dream in California? Have I been a fool, chasing a facade of achievement generated by my imagination? Or did I hear from a higher power?
Would faith mislead like that? Would fate? What about karma?
From where did that voice come that I’ve believed in, that I’ve followed, for years now?
I fall to my knees, closing my eyes, speaking out loud.
I’ve never done this before, not like this, speaking to God when I’m not desperate for my next breath. Perhaps ego stopped me. Perhaps I didn’t comprehend the opportunity.
“Dear God,” I say, knees to the floor, elbows into a bed, hands clasped, eyes closed, like I’ve seen on TV. “Help me help myself.
“I can’t do this alone. I’ve tried, I’m trying.”
I open my eyes, wipe tears from my cheeks, and stand up.
My head spins.
I fall back to knees, shoulders to the bed, closing my eyes, and shout, feeling a rush of desperation.
“I’m failing! Dear God, I’m failing. I can’t do this.
“Wasn’t that you talking?
“I listened. I followed. But now I’m drowning. I need help, so I can help myself.
“If this is your will, dear God, I pray to you.”
I hurl the last words to the moon. “DO YOU HEAR ME? DO YOU?”
I sniffle, take a deep inhale. Another.
I stand up, open my eyes, look around the room.
No angels flying in the air. No miracles I can see. But I feel lighter, having exhaled the mass of distress in desperate breath, hurling a projectile of weighty, accumulated angst into a vastness that’s bigger than me, that’s bigger than my problems.
Another deep inhale.
I feel better. I can do this.
One breath, and then another. One step, and then another.
I can do this.
I’m not alone.