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Dear Rachael, Amy, Tom, Mary, and Dean’s GISTmates:
Many of us whom you never met mourn with you.
I
knew him only a short time, but Dean Gordanier was a special friend to
me, as he was to all of us. I don’t know why he reached out to me, but
I remember how it happened, and when. Maybe something I had posted to
our Listserv touched something particularly in him - or perhaps it was
a mutual desire to find meaning in close proximity with a kindred
spirit, at a time of reciprocal need.
For
whatever reasons, for which I shall long be grateful, Dean extended his
hand, and wrote to me quite openly about himself, trusting and sensing
that we had much more in common than our gastrointestinal stromal
tumors (GIST).
Perhaps in the face of some
nagging sense of urgency that cancer sometimes engenders in us to try
somehow to “think things through”, Dean wanted to reflect on some
thoughts about who he was and where he had come from, and share some
things about what and how he felt, and what he cared so much about in
the face of GIST. And so we corresponded, and I felt a kind of rapid
bonding with this remarkable person.
And then
Dean wondered about a possible visit last summer, down here in
Maryland, when he and Rachael might be bringing their son, Tom, down
this way to look at prospective colleges. Unfortunately, that didn’t
work out, and then, in the Fall, Dean did a very Dean-like thing.
Knowing
I was an older person who wanted so much to meet our cyberfriends face
to face, but who might not want to make the trip alone, how would I
feel, he wondered, about his driving down from Cambridge, MA to our MD
Chesapeake Shore in his yellow Porsche Boxter, to spend the night, and
then driving the two of us up to Robert and Tania’s Annual Walk for
GIST in Congers, NY, and thereafter, if you please, bringing me back
down here - after which he would drive himself back up to Boston?
How
would I feel? Amazed, but don’t dare think of it, energetic Dean, with
GIST metastases lurking in your liver. Much as I might love to fly
along the Turnpike and byways in a yellow Porsche Boxster, absolutely
not, Dean. And so he flew down here the day before the Annual GIST
walk, and I found in my home the true friend you all know.
And
so we looked at each other, and talked eagerly. And then we strolled
along this lovely shore, still talking together, and then through our
country road to a nearby marina, and then back here in due course where
my good wife, Irmgard, had prepared one of her special crab cake
dinners (Irmgard makes the best crab cakes ever). And we looked at each
other some more, and we ate, and talked on together - and bonded, as
kindred spirits sometimes do.
And then, after an
early breakfast the next morning, Dean and I climbed into my Jeep on a
cold and gray day and I drove us from Maryland into nearby Delaware,
then across the bridge into New Jersey, and turned the wheel over to
Dean who drove the rest of the way. He drove my ‘98 Jeep with what I
might call skillful abandon, but I was never happier, I thought, to be
sharing such a day with a newfound friend.
Can
you believe, we reminisced as though we had known each other for years
– as indeed we had in a kind of way that brought back to each of us
parallel memories from our own lives as we discovered, and touched with
delight, on numerous things in common that we each had known at
different ages and different times, and some of the distances we each
had covered in our lives - until finding ourselves on the front seats
of a Jeep, hurtling up the highway to meet dear cyberfriends with
cancer, GISTmates whose posts had touched us, but whom we had never
seen.
We were high together on the discovery of
many kindred perceptions about shared experiences we had each known
among life’s challenges. We sang college songs together, and a bit of
Gilbert and Sullivan. And I looked at Dean as he drove, and thought
about his Dad, feeling as though this joyful, courageous and rather
brilliant person was the worthiest son a man might have.
Dean
was born in 1948, the year I graduated from medical school at the age
of 26. Proud as I am of my own sons (my oldest is 49), and knowing what
a son like Dean might be, I quietly wished, and prayed briefly with all
my soul - as the windshield wipers brushed off a brief shower - that my
young friend, Dean, might somehow live to see what his daughters, Amy
and Mary, and his son, Tom, might bring into his and Rachael’s lives.
It was not meant to be, but I remember to this day, the brief but
fervent prayer that I mumbled as the windshield wipers seemed to be
wiping both rain and tears away.
And then, after
that long ride and ongoing visit together, we arrived at Congers NY,
and had the grandest time, hugging shy friends we had never seen
before, as though they were relatives from another part of the country.
And I watched Dean with his red vest, his small
black fedora, his neatly trimmed beard, and broad smile, as our GISTers
came up and got to know him on that cold, rainy day by that lake in NY.
A cold day? But a warmer day was never known in our hearts.
Dean
and I spoke of that, and of all of you, on our way home – and I tell
you these things because I want you to know the joy that each of you
gave Dean that day up there. And I watched him, later that afternoon,
at Robert and Tanya’s lovely home, as Dean talked warmly, and even
affectionately with a few special cyberfriends who I knew he had been
so eager to see.
I knew then another thing,
something else about Dean, and how loving a person his Rachael was.
Dean and I had phoned each other a few times, and once when I called
him Rachael told me he was at choir rehearsal, and so she and I talked
for a bit, and she wished that I could somehow get him to slow down,
and to stop trying to do so much for so many people.
He
was her Dean, you know. Where do you think this busy lawyer, whose work
with clients and with key committees of the national Bar Association
took him flying from coast to coast, and whose ongoing postoperative
fight against cancer required so much follow-up examination time, and
waiting, and scheduling of doctor’s appointments – where do you think
he found the time to write to you and me, and post to our Listmates?
Yes,
Dean was up all hours of the night, reading and responding to our
posts. Brilliant as he was, many of the things that Dean researched and
studied about, and wrote so generously about to us, are things that are
not that easily whipped off in 5 or 20 minutes. Dean was spontaneous,
but conscientious and thoughtful in his posts, and never glib, I
thought.
Rachael worried about all of this
activity, and Dean’s late hours at the monitor and keyboard, and what
all of it might be taking out of him. I tried speaking to Dean about
getting enough sleep. Yes, he knew. But, he drove himself like he drove
his Porsche.
Of course you also must know,
without my telling you, that the vast amounts of time, and the
substantial degrees of emotional energy, that Dean invested in
connecting with us, were time and energy that he took from Rachael, and
from their kids. How much time and emotional energy that this very good
and busy man spent with us was less time left for Rachael and their
teenagers?
There never seems to be enough time
for the needs of teenagers - and when there it seems there might be an
hour, they then are often busy with their own friends, or something
else it seems. And so, parental guilt is inevitable.
And
also inevitable, I find, is our guilt as children of any age when a
parent dies. Even today, as a grandfather many times over, I regret
that I never did hardly as much as I could have and should have for my
own parents, dead these thirty or more years.
Amy,
Tom, and Mary, these things take time. Your Dad and I wrote to each
other, and I have recounted here for you only a few memories we shared
during a single day and an overnight together. You have shared much
more than I, or any of us, with your Dad - and as you grow, so will
your love, understanding, and appreciation of him grow. I still am
learning to appreciate my own father, and understand what his life was
really like, as my own life unfolds.
Your Dad
was a hard act to follow, but no one says you have to follow unless you
want to follow. He must have told you that. He knew that Rachael would
help you each to find your own way. We spoke of such things too, as we
drove those additional five hours together on our way back down from
Congers NY, talking and wending our way to The Philadelphia Airport to
catch his plane to Boston.
Dean knew the odds,
and faced them bravely, wisely, actively, and very shrewdly, with as
much judgment and tactical skill as any general might have in fighting
a battle. I know that Rachael, your Mom, and each of you have Dean’s
courage and love to hold you through the years
In the end, your father had everything a man might want:
a
loving wife and family, a distinguished and successful career, a good
name, bright and beautiful children, even a yellow Porsche, and more,
much more – everything in the end that a man might want, except luck.
He ran out of that, and that, my Dears, it seems to me, is what it was,
and sometimes can come down to for each of us, in this brave world or
human endeavor. Help your Mom too in sharing your young, bright, and
enduring future together. Your Dad envisioned it. You are not alone.
With much love,
“Uncle” Mel
Dr. Melvin Heller
15 Tower Road
Chesapeake City, MD
