Chemotherapy And Donuts

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In 2005 I was twenty-six years old and the youngest person in the chemotherapy room by about forty years.

I can walk through all of it now. The doctor telling me. The surgery. Getting the port put in that they’d run the chemo through. Driving myself to treatment, then to work, then home. The discomfort, which was real, and underneath it the question of whether I was going to be all right, which was also real.

But when I go back there, that isn’t what comes back first.

What comes back first is a Dell laptop.

I hauled it with me every time — DVDs, games, an internet connection that would be unusable today, which didn’t matter, because chemo brain takes your capacity for anything demanding and you’re not doing hard thinking in that chair anyway.

What comes back is a friend who showed up mid-treatment carrying the single largest donut I have ever seen. Dinner-plate sized. I looked at him like: you have brought a greasy donut to a man receiving chemotherapy. I tried. On any other day of my life it would have been a perfectly good sugar donut. That day it did not work at all. Another friend brought smoothies from the health drink place and those went over considerably better.

What comes back is the people-watching. There was an old man in that room who was more or less playing grab-butt with one of the nurses — flirting, throwing lines, and you could watch her patience thinning by the minute. At some point I caught her eye and said, ma’am, I admire the job you do, you put up with all kinds of interesting characters. I got her to smile. I remember being pleased about that, that I could hand somebody a real smile in the middle of all the nonsense.

And what comes back is the singing. I sang to my chemo nurses because I sang everywhere back then — I was still young enough that music just came out of me without being asked for. Partly to stay positive. Mostly because that was who I was.

I don’t remember what I sang the last day. I remember the thought exactly: I made it. My levels were where they were supposed to be. They told me I’d most likely never deal with this again.

They were wrong about that. I’ll get there.

Something struck me going back through it.

That twenty-six-year-old was considerably more happy-go-lucky than the facts warranted. Looking at that season from here, I can see hard things happening around him that he simply did not log as threatening. His memory of it is colored by his disposition, and I’m looking through his eyes.

For a minute I wondered whether that made any of it unreliable.

Then I understood what I was actually seeing. His hope wasn’t sitting on himself. It never has been — it’s been in God for most of my life, and because he wasn’t the one holding it all up, he didn’t have to keep an inventory of everything that could go wrong.

The rose-colored glasses weren’t a distortion. They were the mechanism. Seen clearly, that year might have flattened him. Seen through hope, he sang at the nurses.

Thirteen years later it came back.

  1. Four rounds, a week in the hospital at a time. Fifty-some pounds gone. No hair, and I’ll tell you plainly I am not a handsome bald man.

Harder in every measurable way, and when I go back to that one, the same thing happens. Friends showing up. My wife — my best friend — taking care of me. Food tasting like food again on the other side of it. God bringing me through it a second time.

I don’t deny a minute of the hard. It was hard. It was hard both times and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

But I don’t want the hard to die without being useful.

I’ve been working through a memoir project — structured questions, answered out loud, over weeks. What I’ve found is that memory isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s more like architecture. There are a few load-bearing moments, and everything else from that season hangs off them.

Find the pillar and the room reassembles around it. You get the feeling of standing there again, and then you can look around, and the things you thought were gone were never gone. They were living next to the pillar the whole time.

Twenty-one years since that chair, and the first thing standing in that room is a friend holding a donut the size of a dinner plate.

Take A Nap

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

May 2016. The vice president over our group called and asked me to come to his office.

He hardly ever talked to me. I knew before I stood up.

I knocked, he waved me in, and he said it from behind his desk — times are tough, the decisions have been hard, we’re going to have to let you go, HR will handle the rest. Then he got up and walked out of the room.

Nine years at that company. No thank you, no acknowledgment of anything I’d built there. He put it down and left.

I don’t hold it against him. He was a man in a bad position at a company in a worse one, and somebody handed him a list. But the way he carried himself in that room disappointed me and it still does.

Fifteen of us went that day. It was the sixth round of layoffs — a over a thousand people had already gone ahead of us. I’d lasted a long time.

I went to Starbucks.

Got a coffee, sat down, and called my wife to tell her. Then I called a former manager to ask if she knew of anything, and she did — she gave me a lead and offered to write me a referral letter.

I filled out the application at that table. Before I drove home, before I’d been unemployed four hours, I’d already applied for the job I’d eventually get.

Then I went home and my wife said: I love you. Now, take a nap.

She knew. She’d watched me be miserable there for a long time and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise on the one day it stopped.

So I took a nap. My son was eight. We told him my job had changed and that we’d figure it out, and as far as I can tell it barely registered in his world.

Here’s the part I still marvel at.

That morning, before any of it, I prayed about that job. Not vaguely. I said God, I hate it here. I’d be glad to leave. And I named a number — this many months of severance and I’d walk out grateful.

Two hours later in that VP’s office, HR told me what my package was.

It was two months more than I’d asked for.

I said something like okay — wow, cool, that’s awesome, thank you. Which is a strange thing to say to a woman whose job that morning was firing people, but she took it well.

Interview about a month later. Offer at eight weeks. New job three months out, in a new city, in a new house. And I played more at that one. I was lighter. Nobody had buried me in projects yet and I made myself available to my family in a way I hadn’t been in years.

That firing was an answer to a prayer I’d said out loud that morning.

So this year I wrote a song about a man it almost destroys.

He’s got a family he’s been providing for by not being around. Then he gets the speech. His response?— they went back to their mansions and threw my stuff in the yard — and he drives home in the middle of a Tuesday and walks into his own house in daylight.

His wife looks like somebody he used to know. His kids have changed and he can’t say when. And he works out that all the unfinished business he’d been staying late for was never in that building.

None of that happened to me. I came home in the middle of the day and my wife told me to go lie down.

I think I wrote the version that didn’t happen because it easily could have.

I’ve never lost track of my family, but I’ve come close enough to see where the road goes. There was a stretch in 2020 when I was at the computer by six-thirty and still there at dinner time, day after day, only duty making me do it.

The song is a warning I wrote to myself about a road I’ve been on and haven’t walked to the end of. It’s easier to sing about a man who did.

She Hated The Car

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The rescue had named her Cookie, because her face looked a little like a chocolate chip cookie, which it did.

We changed it. Neither of us wanted to spend the next decade calling out a dessert every time we opened the back door. She became Sabrina — half basset, half beagle, picked up because our dachshund needed a friend and we’d decided one dog wasn’t enough dog.

I drove out to get her by myself. On the way home I stopped to pick up photos from the photographer and left her sitting in the cab of our Honda Accord for about ten minutes.

She threw up in the cup holders.

First day. We learned right then that she did not care for riding in a car, and she never revised that position in her entire life.

She was one of the sweetest dogs we’ve had, and she never stopped being a hunting dog underneath it.

There was a house we lived in when my son was five or six with mice living under the shed out back. Sabrina was up there by then. Arthritic. She hobbled everywhere she went and had to think about getting up.

I was outside and saw a mouse running along the fence line, and that old broken-down dog lifted her head and took two hops and had it in her mouth.

Two hops. I don’t know where they came from.

Then she looked up at me, completely satisfied with herself, and went hobbling off across the yard with it, briefly about four years old again.

The day we took her to the vet for the last time, she threw up in the car.

Same as the first ride. Same problem, all the way at the other end of it.

I don’t know how to describe what that does to you. You’re already driving somewhere you don’t want to go, and the dog does the exact thing she did the day you brought her home, and for one second you’re twenty-two again in the Honda Accord with a dog you’ve had for four hours.

She never did figure out the car.

Thirteen years of it, and she never got any better at riding, and I have never once wished she had.

Too Slow

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The dishes would stack up in the sink and eventually my dad would have had enough of it.

He’d call me in to help, and then he’d get frustrated with me, because I was too slow. That’s the thing I remember about washing dishes with my father — standing next to him at the sink not moving fast enough, and him letting me know.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, and I want to be fair about it.

I was slow on purpose. Not consciously, not as rebellion, but I did not want to be standing there and my hands moved at the speed of a person who did not want to be standing there. If somebody had explained to me that the faster I finished the faster I’d be back to whatever I actually wanted to do, I suspect I’d have gotten quick in about a week.

Nobody said that, and it didn’t occur to me, and so I dragged.

I’m fast now.

Genuinely fast. Sometimes I finish a sink and I’m a little surprised at myself, because I know exactly how long that used to take me and it makes no sense that it’s the same task.

Nothing about my hands changed. What changed is that I want it done.

If I get the kitchen clean in twelve minutes, that’s twelve minutes and then all of us are on to the evening. Watching something, playing something, sitting around talking. The dishes are not the thing standing between me and my night. They’re about four songs.

And there’s the morning. My wife comes into a clean kitchen and the day can just start — nothing to deal with first, nothing carried over from yesterday sitting in the sink looking at her. She’s happier. That costs me twelve minutes the night before.

What I didn’t understand at fifteen is what it means to be part of a household.

I thought I lived there. I thought the house was something that happened around me and occasionally required something of me, and the requirements were an interruption.

That’s not what it is. Being in a family means you run part of it. That’s the deal, and it’s not a tax on the arrangement, it’s the arrangement.

Nobody laid that out for me and I’m not sure a fifteen-year-old absorbs it anyway. You mostly find it out later, when the house is yours and there’s nobody left to be frustrated with you.

My dad is still quick

I’ve never told him I finally got faster than him.

I wrote most of this standing at the sink.

The Wrong People Are Shipping

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel.

Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing.

The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and somewhere underneath it all there was supposedly a product. I never found it. I got to the bottom of the page still not knowing what the man was selling or what it would do for me. The whole page was hostile to the eyes, all that early web HTML.

Here’s what I’ve never said out loud about it. I wasn’t only a mark. I was studying it.

I was desperate for side income and I was trying to reverse-engineer the machine so I could run one myself. Wanting to be useful to people has never been my problem — I’ve had that my whole life. What I couldn’t do was state plainly what I was offering. So I read those pages twice, once as a customer trying to figure out what I was buying and once as a would-be builder trying to figure out how they did it.

I failed at both, because the whole thing was built to be unclear.

Twenty years on, what bothers me isn’t that grifters exist. Con men are as old as dirt.

It’s the asymmetry.

There’s a whole class of people with no business shipping a product who have every ounce of fire required to ship a product. They’re loud, they’re fast, they’re shameless, and they’re constantly in front of you.

Then there are people who actually know things. Practitioners. Most of them won’t hype and won’t promise the moon and would genuinely rather do the work than talk about the work. So they don’t ship, or they ship quietly, and nobody ever sees it.

The worst products get the distribution. The good ones die in a drafts folder.

I feel this one from the inside.

Thirteen years in Toastmasters. Distinguished Toastmaster. I’m good at getting a frightened person to the point where they can stand up in a room and be heard, and I know exactly how I’d gimmick that. I could build the lead magnet promising you’ll be the next great keynote speaker. I could write the page. I know every move.

Somebody once pitched me an eighteen-thousand-dollar speaker training program. Do programs like that have real clients? Some of them, sure. But eighteen thousand dollars with nothing they could show me up front stops feeling like a program and starts feeling like a toll booth on somebody’s hope.

So the honest version and the gimmick sit right next to each other in my head, and I know how to build both, and the gimmick would sell faster.

The line between a grifter and somebody who’s just wrong is intent, and intent leaves evidence.

Everybody’s wrong sometimes. I’ve been wrong plenty. But a person who was merely wrong pivots — corrects it, says so out loud, tries to make it right, and you can watch them do it in public.

The test isn’t whether somebody made a bad claim. It’s what they do the first time a claim doesn’t survive contact with reality. One correction is a person learning. A pattern with a direction to it is something else, and the direction is usually toward the money.

The reason this isn’t just an internet annoyance is who’s on the other end.

It’s people on the edge. Real financial trouble, something hard going on, honestly trying to pull themselves up. They’ve got something good in them and no idea how to package it so anybody would want it, and that’s a genuine and painful gap.

What they get offered is three simple steps and a miracle.

The real answer is slower. Get good at something. Build an offer somebody wants badly enough to pay for. Then go do the job you said you’d do. There’s no version where you skip the first part.

But a desperate person can’t afford to wait, so they buy the shortcut, get frustrated, and buy the next one. Every trip through leaves them a little more broke and considerably more cynical.

Now the part I’d rather not put in.

I’ve spent this whole essay describing practitioners who know things and won’t ship, as though I’m reporting on them.

I have a finished product sitting on my hard drive. It’s been finished for weeks. I haven’t priced it, haven’t built a page, haven’t asked one human being to buy it. I’ve had two books out this year and sold about thirty copies total, and I have never once directly asked anybody to purchase anything I’ve made.

I’ve been telling myself that’s integrity. That I’m the practitioner who won’t stoop to it.

That story is very comfortable and I don’t think it’s true. The loud man with the bad product and I have produced roughly the same amount of value for the person who needed help — he took their money and I never showed up. His is worse. Mine isn’t good.

If I’m honest about the fear under all of this, it was never that I’d get taken again. I’ve been taken. You survive that.

It’s that one day I’ll look at what I’ve built and find out it was all noise and no value.

Which is a fear you can only settle one way, and it isn’t by not selling.