I read the email but it wasn’t processing. “Wayne Fuller has ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was diagnosed a year ago.” The eyes passed over the words but nothing was really catching. “three to five years” Nothing. “attacks the muscles” Jesus Christ. Wayne.
I played basketball with Wayne in the mid to late eighties. When I gave up basketball after I turned 40, and then went back a year later, Wayne came up to me and said, I know why you gave up b-ball, man. At 40, you can’t play any more. Everything hurts, and things don’t heal any more.
Wayne.
ALS. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. It’s the thing Stephen Hawking has.
Last person on the planet to whom this should happen. Wayne is a man who loves to talk, and talk fast. He’s an ideas guy. They come to him a mile a minute, blam blam blam. Things can’t happen fast enough for Wayne. Wayne is a born sales guy, except he loves engineering too. University of Virginia undergraduate, Stanford for his master’s, Bell Labs, etc etc. The trajectory of his life was forward and fast.
I saw Wayne when my daughter played lacrosse for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Yes, they really say that, except the kids all call it TJ. Wayne was in the stands with his lovely blonde wife, and his younger daughter Brittany sat with him. Wayne is the dad who doesn’t miss a trick on the field. He knows all the rules. He knows all the referees. His older daughter Jessica was playing for Chantilly HS. Wayne is also the kind of guy all the other guys’ wives sit around, because he’s smart mouthed and irreverent, and he makes people laugh.
When we played basketball, I was the bruiser, the inside guy. I pushed, and I got pushed, and there were a lot of elbows where I played. I was slow and I moved ponderously, but I tended to go where I pleased and people would move around me. Wayne was the ultimate point guard, a slight, scatty, quick-moving guy who loved the one on one challenges out there close to the three point line, where a player lived or died with a feint and a fast break. He was always talking while he was playing, always.
After our lunchtime games Wayne was the guy who recounted the game for us. He served as our unofficial post-game analyst. If he didn’t talk about a shot or a spectacular shot or egregious foul or terrible injury, it didn’t happen. He made our games far more interesting than they actually were.
Wayne has ALS.
Doesn’t seem right. Why can’t Osama bin Laden get ALS? Why can’t conservative Republicans get ALS? The ones who oppose nationwide medical care? Why? Why does a father of two beautiful girls have to get it? A good guy we all like? A guy who made something of himself and didn’t screw anybody and was a net plus for society.
I’m pissed. I’m angry. He doesn’t deserve it. Why not some fanatical Muslim anti-technology mullah who studies his damned Koran all day long? Why not a fanatical Hasidic Jewish guy who studies only the scrolls and believes he’s God’s Own People, and preaches that women are worthless unless they’re married and have babies, and incites centuries long hatred against all who are non Jewish? Why not people like this? Why not Jerry Falwell? Why not televangelists?
Why not people who spam the Internet? Why not men who rape young girls and kill them? Let them die this horrible death. MAKE them die this horrible death.
Not Wayne.
Because if it could happen to Wayne, it could happen to any one of us. No one is immune. It could happen to me. It could happen to someone I love.
When your body becomes a coffin, except your brain is still alive. What kind of hell is that? The worst kind.
We’re too ‘civilized’ to allow our citizens the option of euthanasia. Yes, we believe in the sanctity of life. We believe that a man should be forced to live every miserable minute of his life, even though he looks at you with his eyes and begs you to release him. Please, they say, please don’t let my kids remember me like this. We are such morally advanced creatures, God’s creatures, that we couldn’t possibly. It would be murder. That’s so horrible, the stopping of a life.
I want to scream and howl and cry at the capriciousness of life and all the many and horrible ways life winds down into death. Goddammit. I’m angry. ANGRY. It’s not an abstract thing when it’s one of your friends.