My friend Vic Rosenthal died of cancer this week. He was an amazing organizer, advocate and friend. I was honored that his family asked me to give one of the eulogies at his funeral. Vic wanted me to talk about living with cancer and dying and death. My words are below. May his memory be a blessing.
*******
Vic and I forged our friendship in a three-hour traffic jam.
That’s not when we met of course. We had known each other a long time, meeting through Paul Wellstone’s campaigns and getting to know each other through organizing and JCA. Vic recruited me to the JCA Board at a point in my life when I had sworn off nonprofit boards. I am going to lean into understatement here and say: “Good God was that man persuasive.” And, if I may respectfully add, a complete pain in the ass until he got what he wanted.
Anyway, back to that traffic jam. Vic and I had begun to bond over baseball. Now that wasn’t entirely a natural fit because Vic was a Yankee’s fan and that was almost more than I could bear. But we found common ground in baseball’s history, connection to our childhoods, and the sights and sounds of a ballpark. So, one summer night we were driving home from a Twin’s game only to discover that every highway in the Cities had been shut down for some reason. Seriously, 94, 35, 55, 62, University, Lake Street – all closed. So, we sat in traffic. And we talked. And talked. And talked.
I’ll never forget that conversation. We shared our fears and our anxieties. We talked reparations and restaurants. Justice and television shows. Depression and politics – that was early in the Trump era — so depression and politics went together really well. It took us close to three hours to get back to St. Paul and when we finally got there, we were tired, pissed and frustrated. But as time passed, we both looked back on that never-ending drive with real fondness. Me, I look back on it as the moment when Vic first started modeling male vulnerability for me and first showed me what it means for a white man to fully commit to racial justice and equity.
From then on what Vic and I mostly did together was walk and talk. Even before Covid, we would meet for long walks around St. Paul and in recent years, the things we talked about became even more personal. We talked sickness, cancer, dying and death…And living too.
We talked all the time about living with cancer and what that means and takes. A few years ago, my wife Cassie was diagnosed with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer. It’s a treatable disease but not curable. It’s considered a terminal diagnosis and most people die within five years. Cassie’s doing ok for now but after she and Vic were both diagnosed, cancer became another bond that connected the two of us.
So, Vic and I would talk often about cancer. And loneliness. And gratitude. And hope.
A cancer diagnosis is a lonely thing because most people fortunately don’t have cancer. But Vic and I talked about how it’s made even lonelier because, as a society, we are bad at talking about sickness and dying and death. It scares us, so we avoid it. But by avoiding it we add to the loneliness of the people who are going through it and the loneliness of their caregivers.
Vic and I would also talk about gratitude and how to practice gratitude even when facing cancer. This seemed unnatural at first – I mean you’re certainly not grateful for being sick. What you are is scared and angry and sad and fearful and lost. But what we came to realize together is that the amount of anger and fear and sadness that we were both experiencing in different ways was directly proportional to the amount of love in our lives. Love for our spouses, families and friends. And it’s this love that we could always be grateful for.
We talked too about hope. That while, big, long-term hope might be hard to find when facing cancer, you can still practice hope every day. You can “hope” for as good a today as possible. You can “hope” to be able to live fully today. You can “hope” to love fully today. You can “hope” to keep your heart open. You can “hope” to find it in yourself to connect with others. And so on. And what Vic and I both found was that if you can practice these little concrete hopes then you can actually find hope.
When cancer is in your life you develop a strange sense of humor. In that vein, Vic and I often observed that when you told people about a cancer diagnosis a good number of them would surprisingly respond by saying: “Well any of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”
A couple of reflections on this. First, don’t say that to people with cancer – or any serious illness. Just don’t.
Second, Vic and I realized that what these people were probably getting at, is that life can be short and that nobody is ever guaranteed any specific amount of time. They were trying to empathize with us and speak to a different way of living. Here’s the thing though – we don’t live our lives as if we might get hit by a bus tomorrow or get diagnosed with cancer tomorrow. Most of us tend to live our lives like we are guaranteed a lot of tomorrow’s. Putting things off. Waiting. Deferring.
Vic and I probably talked about this more than anything else these past years. Why do we wait until a cancer diagnosis or some other life-changing event to think more about living fully? What would it look like to live more fully – not irresponsibly – but more fully, all of the time? Why is living fully so hard? How much of this is about white supremacy culture and how we dismantle it? What does it take to live fully and love fully? We are all going to die – it’s the one absolute guarantee in life. So, what if we talked about dying more and hid from it less? What if we lived fully while preparing to die?
I’m going to miss these conversations with Vic. The last time we got together in person we discussed whether he had developed a death plan. I might have been better off avoiding that topic because that could be how I wound up here today.
But the thing is, we got to a point in our relationship that thanks to cancer — not because of cancer — but thanks to cancer — we could talk about any of this. And, as a couple of organizers, we wanted to encourage others to have these same conversations.
Living. Loving. Dying. In health and in sickness.
I think the reason Vic asked me to stand up here and talk about these things today is because he wants us to keep thinking about them, keep talking about them. Let’s honor his wishes. His memory. Let’s live fully. Let’s prepare to die. And let’s talk about it.
I love you Vic.
