Grace Doesn't Mean Agreement

 As always I've got lots to say about Charlie Kirk and the 25th anniversary of 9-11, but I'm tabling those thoughts for now and instead writing about masks and covid.   

I recently saw a video of a DSA conference (Democratic Socialists of America) and it was a mandatory mask event!  In 2026.  Crazy!

It got me thinking about my own experience with masks over the past six years - and I wrote those thoughts down...

Thanksgiving 2020 (crazy uncle Chris thinks masks are bullshit lol)

******

Every so often, I look across a poker table and see someone wearing a mask. 

In 2026. 

I have to admit that my immediate reaction isn't particularly charitable.

I play poker regularly at my local Moose Lodge. We probably have around 150 active poker players, and on a typical tournament night we might have 50 people in the room. Out of all those people, there are two who still wear masks every single time they play. They put them on, sit down at the table, and keep them on throughout the tournament.

I'll call them Bonnie and Billy.

Bonnie once explained, without anybody really asking, that if she gets COVID, it could kill her. My immediate thought was: Then what are you doing here?

That's harsh. I know it is. And that's really what I've been wrestling with.

My Perspective Is Colored by Experience

My wife went through pancreatic cancer. She received ten rounds of FOLFIRINOX, an absolutely brutal chemotherapy regimen. After only a few infusions, her immune system was essentially nonexistent.

So we took it seriously. When we went to the infusion center, we wore masks. When we were at City of Hope, we wore masks. Otherwise, we were home. I worked from home. I stopped playing poker. I didn't go to the grocery store. We ordered from Amazon. We ordered food. We didn't go out socially. We essentially removed ourselves from public life because we understood something very simple: if Beverly was severely immunocompromised, being around lots of people was dangerous.

A mask wasn't some magical force field that made everything okay. We believed the safest thing was not being there in the first place.

That's why, when Bonnie tells me that COVID could literally kill her and then sits for hours in a crowded poker room, my brain has trouble reconciling those two things. If I genuinely believed walking into that room might kill me, I wouldn't walk into that room.

But that's me.

And I'm slowly realizing that those last three words matter more than I sometimes want them to.

Bonnie Doesn't Have to Make My Decision

Maybe Bonnie has a permanent medical condition. Maybe this isn't six months of chemotherapy that she can ride out at home. Maybe her alternative is spending the rest of her life avoiding restaurants, poker rooms, theaters, airplanes, parties and everything else involving other human beings.

Maybe she has decided that poker matters enough to her that she's willing to accept some risk while reducing it however she believes she can. I can disagree with that calculation. I can even think it's a bad calculation. What I can't honestly say is that I know everything that went into it.

And that's where grace starts getting uncomfortable. Grace is easy when I already agree with somebody. It gets considerably harder when I'm thinking, "This makes absolutely no sense."

Then There's Billy

Billy is an older guy who also wears a mask every time he plays. Billy is, shall we say, stoic and/or grumpy. He's generally pretty curt, and unlike Bonnie, he has never offered an explanation for why he still wears a mask. I've never asked him. I'm pretty sure he'd be aghast if I did.

And you know what? He's entitled to that. He doesn't owe me an explanation. I don't have to think wearing the mask makes sense. He doesn't have to submit a medical affidavit to play poker at the Moose Lodge.  (Though briefly we all did - we had to show proof of vaccination.  I have strong feelings on that, but that's a whole other blog post that I likely won't bother to write.  This post is about 2026 and where I'm at now.)

Back to Billy - the short of it is, we get along just fine.

That's an important distinction I've had to think about: I am entitled to my private judgment, but I'm not entitled to demand that somebody justify himself to me merely because he's doing something I find strange.  See what I did there?  Doing to others what they would not do for me only a few years ago is something that I work at, and ultimately am proud that I can do it.

And Then There Was Sheri

Sheri is interesting for a different reason. I've played poker with her since 2016. When poker resumed after the shutdowns, she returned wearing a mask. She continued wearing one for years.

At one point she announced at the table, quite emphatically: "I'm wearing this for the rest of my life."

Okay.

Then sometime in 2025, Sheri walked into the poker room without a mask. I almost didn't recognize her. And strangely enough, for a while I had less respect for her than I did for Bonnie and Billy.

Bonnie and Billy, whatever I think of their choices, are consistent. They're still doing what they apparently believe they should be doing. Sheri made a grand proclamation about what she was going to do for the rest of her life and then, inevitably, didn't do it.

But I've reconsidered that a little too. Because changing your mind isn't a character flaw. In fact, we desperately need more people who are capable of changing their minds.

What I would have appreciated from Sheri was just a little self-awareness. Nothing dramatic. No apology. No humiliation. Just something like: "Remember when I said I'd wear this thing for the rest of my life? Yeah, I might have gotten a little carried away."

That's it. I'd probably respect her more for saying that than if she'd never made the original declaration.

In the immortal modern phrase: "Woke 1 was crazy."

We all deserve the opportunity to have our own "Woke 1 was crazy" moment.  And unlike many of my conservative brethren who rolled their eyes or even flashed anger at AOC's recent glib retraction of policies that saw people fired and lives ruined - I'm willing to move on with even this very tiny admittance of guilt.

Why COVID Still Makes Me Angry

Part of what makes all of this difficult for me is that I still carry a fair amount of anger about the COVID years. I got vaccinated in the spring of 2021. I got a booster that October.

I wasn't an anti-vaccine guy.

But I remember what we were told. We weren't merely told that the vaccine might make COVID less severe if we caught it. We were explicitly told that vaccinated people were much less likely to become infected and less likely to spread the virus. Some public officials spoke with extraordinary certainty about it.

As time went on, breakthrough infections became commonplace. New variants changed the equation. Protection against infection waned. The most durable benefit of vaccination turned out to be initial protection against severe illness, hospitalization and death.

That's valuable. But it wasn't what we were sold in 2021.

And one of the things that damaged my trust wasn't simply that the understanding changed. Science is supposed to change when the evidence changes. It was the feeling that some of the original certainty was subsequently forgotten.  It felt like we had been lied to.

Suddenly the explanation became, "The vaccine was never supposed to prevent you from catching COVID. It was about keeping you out of the hospital."

Bullshit. I was there. I remember.

That's where I think institutions made an enormous mistake. People can forgive being wrong. It's much harder to forgive being told that something you distinctly remember happening never happened.  But then again, that is the lefty game all too often.

My Own Experience With COVID

I've had confirmed COVID at least three times. I also strongly suspect I had it in December 2019, although I'll never know. I was rather sick for about a week, which was incredibly unusual for me, and had several symptoms that we would soon come to associate with COVID. I never went to a doctor and wasn't tested, obviously, so I can't claim that one as fact.

The confirmed cases afterward were pretty mild. I'd get a sore throat, feel crummy for a few days, get congested and then recover. Each infection seemed milder than the previous one.

I was in my 50s and overweight at the time. I never remotely felt as though I was going to die. That doesn't mean COVID wasn't dangerous to other people. Obviously it was. Age, underlying conditions and immune status made an enormous difference.

Also, having a shit ton of other co-morbidities, and being an octogenarian or older had a lot to do with it.  Tons of folks died with Covid and not necessarily from it.

But my own experience inevitably affects the way I perceive the disease. Today, for me personally, I regard COVID as a nasty respiratory bug I'd rather not get. Someone else may reasonably assess his or her personal risk very differently.

There's that irritating concept again: Grace.

Grace Doesn't Mean Agreement

This is probably the biggest thing I've come around to. For a long time, I think I unconsciously treated grace as though it required agreement.

It doesn't.

I don't have to look at Bonnie wearing her mask at a poker table and think, "That makes perfect sense." It doesn't make sense to me. I don't have to admire Billy for wearing his mask. I don't.

I don't have to pretend I wouldn't find it slightly amusing if Sheri someday acknowledged her old "rest of my life" proclamation. I absolutely would. And I don't have to forget how angry I became at institutions I once trusted during COVID.

But none of that gives me permission to treat Bonnie, Billy or Sheri badly.

That's the line.

The Thoughts in My Head Aren't the Same as My Actions

This may be the hardest part for me to accept. Sometimes I see someone wearing a mask and my immediate internal reaction is: Oh, come on. It's 2026. Sometimes it's even less charitable than that.

I can't necessarily stop that first thought from appearing. What I can control is what happens next.

I can remind myself that I don't know why the person is wearing it. I can remind myself that another person's risk tolerance doesn't have to match mine. I can remind myself that somebody can make one decision I consider ridiculous without being a ridiculous person.

Most importantly, I can behave decently. I can say hello. I can joke around. I can deal the cards. I can lose a pot to Bonnie and congratulate her. I can take Billy's chips and try not to enjoy it too much. I can see Sheri sitting there without the mask she once promised to wear for eternity and resist saying, "Hey, weren't you wearing that for the rest of your life?"

That's not weakness. Maybe that's what being an adult in a society full of people who disagree with one another is supposed to look like.

I Don't Want Courtesy to Be Fake

There's one more uncomfortable part of this. I don't want to settle for merely being outwardly polite while internally despising everybody who sees the world differently. That's technically courtesy, but I'm not sure it's grace.

I'd like to get somewhere better than that. Not agreement. Not admiration. Understanding.

I can think Bonnie is making the wrong risk calculation while acknowledging that I don't know everything about her life. I can think Billy's permanent mask is bizarre while recognizing that he owes me absolutely no explanation for it. I can roll my eyes internally at Sheri's abandoned lifetime proclamation while also appreciating that she eventually changed her behavior rather than remaining trapped by something she said years earlier.

Maybe that's enough.

The Lesson I Wish We Had Learned

If there's one lesson I wish had survived COVID, it isn't about masks or vaccines. It's about certainty.

I want institutions to say: Show me the numbers. Tell me what you know. Tell me what you don't know. Don't exaggerate your certainty. Don't quietly rewrite what you told me before. And then let me make my own decision.

But if I'm going to demand that humility from institutions, maybe I owe some version of it to the people sitting across the poker table from me. Maybe I need to admit that I don't know everything either.

I know what Beverly and I did when she was immunocompromised. I know what I would do. I know what risks I'm willing to take. I know what I think about masks. They're all but useless for viruses. I know what I think about the COVID vaccine. It was a decent tool but not a miracle, and we were lied to about it over and over.

What I don't know is everything going on inside Bonnie's life, Billy's life or Sheri's head.

That's the space where grace has to live.

And I'm still working on it.

I'm not going to pretend that every choice deserves my admiration. It doesn't. I'm not going to pretend every belief deserves my agreement. It doesn't. I'm not even going to pretend I can stop myself from occasionally thinking, "That's ridiculous."

But I can refuse to turn that thought into cruelty. I can disagree wildly with somebody and still genuinely respect that person's dignity. I can be angry without being an asshole.

Maybe that's not sainthood.

But these days, I'll take it.

Ticket still in hand - but the train is delayed...

On July 23 2026, my wife Beverly was two years out from Whipple surgery for pancreatic cancer. And today, as I write this, she is still NED — No Evidence of Disease. Those three letters have become extraordinarily important to us.

Two years.

There were plenty of moments along the way when it was difficult to imagine getting here. There were moments when it was difficult to imagine getting through the next week, much less the next two years.

Pancreatic cancer still casts a long shadow over our lives. I don't know that the shadow ever completely goes away. Every six months there are scans, blood tests and the inevitable "scanxiety" that comes with them. Pancreatic cancer has a nasty habit of returning, often in the liver or lungs, and we're very aware of the statistics.

But we also know this: Beverly is here. She walks more than three miles almost every day. She's happy. We're living our lives again. Our lives are mostly normal. And after everything that happened, "normal" feels pretty damn wonderful.

February 15, 2024

There is a terrible symmetry to the date Beverly was diagnosed. Her father, Paul, died of colon cancer in our home on February 15, 2023. Exactly one year later, on February 15, 2024, Beverly received the phone call telling her that she had pancreatic adenocarcinoma. To the day.

By then, we knew something was very wrong. Beverly had been experiencing abdominal pain since the previous October. During Super Bowl weekend in February, the pain suddenly became much worse and began radiating upward. She became concerned that she might be having a heart attack, so we went to the emergency room.

The attending physician was an older fellow who initially told us something to the effect of, "You basically have to be bleeding out for us to admit you." Then her blood work came back. He admitted her immediately.

Bev's mom Jan and step-dad Jim came from Vegas right away.

The next day became a blur of tests — an ultrasound, CT scan and eventually an endoscopic biopsy. Before we had the biopsy result, we had already seen the words that terrified us: A lesion on the pancreas suspicious for adenocarcinoma.

"Suspicious for" leaves you a tiny crack through which hope can squeeze. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's something else. Maybe there's some benign explanation. But both of us feared the worst.

Beverly was discharged,  and on the 15th the gastroenterologist called. It was pancreatic cancer. One year to the day after her father's death.

Welcome to the Whirlwind

Once you hear "pancreatic cancer," life changes immediately. Suddenly you're navigating oncologists, surgeons, hospitals, insurance companies, scans, pathology reports, treatment protocols and statistics you never wanted to know. Fortunately, we had help.

My brother, David Merrill, is a doctor at St. John's in Santa Monica, and he helped us get in front of a world-class surgical oncologist, Dr. Bilchik, within about a week of Beverly's diagnosis. Dr. Bilchik reviewed Beverly's scans and numbers. The tumor appeared to be approximately four centimeters and was adjacent to the portal vein. His assessment was that it was borderline resectable.

That phrase became extremely important. Surgery offers the best chance of long-term survival with pancreatic cancer, but the pancreas sits in an extraordinarily complicated neighborhood of the body. A tumor's relationship to the major blood vessels can determine whether a surgeon believes it can safely be removed.

Meanwhile, something remarkable happened with my employer. He wanted to help us get the best possible medical care, but our existing insurance wasn't ideal for what we suddenly needed. So he essentially "fired" me from one of his companies and hired me through another company he owned in Virginia. That employment change created a qualifying event outside the normal enrollment period and allowed us to obtain a Platinum PPO.

It was brilliant. More importantly, it gave us access.

That allowed us to consult my boss's physician, the renowned oncologist Dr. Lawrence Piro at Cedars-Sinai. By then we had also met with a local oncologist, Dr. Yu at the Institute of Hope in Burbank, who had recommended a treatment plan. Dr. Piro reviewed everything and told us essentially: This is exactly what I would do.

That was enormously reassuring. Beverly didn't want to spend her life driving across Los Angeles for every infusion if she didn't have to. With Dr. Piro confirming that Dr. Yu was recommending the same treatment he would recommend, Beverly chose to receive her chemotherapy locally in Burbank/Glendale.

For surgery, however, we wanted another opinion. My sister-in-law, also a physician, found Dr. Aaron Lewis at City of Hope. That meeting changed the trajectory of everything.

Dr. Lewis looked at the same scans and had a more confident assessment: The tumor was resectable. Dr. Lewis is a Whipple specialist who performs roughly two of these extraordinarily complex operations every week, using robotic surgery and some of the most advanced equipment available. We had found our surgeon.

Dr. Lewis and Dr. Yu would work together. First, however, Beverly had to make it through chemotherapy.

FOLFIRINOX

The plan was the standard aggressive treatment for someone in Beverly's situation: FOLFIRINOX every two weeks. FOLFIRINOX is not one drug. It is a combination of powerful chemotherapy drugs, and Beverly's treatments included an infusion at the oncology center followed by a pump she took home with her that continued delivering chemotherapy.

From late February through June, this became the rhythm of our lives. And it was brutal.

The very first infusion caused Beverly to projectile vomit for something like twelve hours. We eventually had to take her back to the oncology office to be rehydrated. After that, Dr. Yu developed a much more aggressive anti-nausea regimen for her, which helped enormously.

But "helped" doesn't mean chemotherapy suddenly became easy. There was still nausea. Exhaustion. Weakness. Food problems. Emotional strain. And side effects that seemed to accumulate rather than diminish because chemotherapy is cumulative — every round piles on top of what came before.

Then her hair started falling out. After her second or third infusion, it began coming out in clumps. Beverly asked me to shave her head. So I did.

Then she got into the shower. While she was in there, I turned the clippers on myself and shaved my own head. When Beverly came out and saw me, I'll never forget the look in her eyes. She cried. I cried. We held each other.

It was one of many times during this experience when there really wasn't anything useful to say. You just hold onto the person you love.

The First Good News

After approximately four rounds — about a month and a half into treatment — we got new scans and blood work. The chemotherapy was working like gangbusters. The tumor had shrunk by more than half. And, critically, there was still no evidence that the cancer had metastasized.

That was huge. We were winning. The problem was that winning felt terrible.

Life in Lockdown

One of the things people don't necessarily understand about chemotherapy is how much it affects everyone around the patient. Beverly's immune system was compromised. That meant we essentially went back into COVID-style lockdown.

I worked from home. Our daughter Natalie was home from college, but she couldn't live with us because her summer job involved working with grade-school children at the YMCA. Anyone who has children knows that kids are adorable little Petri dishes. A routine cold for somebody else could potentially become dangerous for Beverly.

So during the time when Beverly needed her daughter most, we had to keep Natalie at a distance to protect her. That hurt.

Another problem was neuropathy. Beverly began experiencing numbness and nerve problems in her hands and feet. We were warned that chemotherapy-induced neuropathy can sometimes become permanent. That possibility scared us tremendously.

There were also smaller, stranger adjustments. One thing that genuinely helped Beverly were marijuana "knockout" pills. They helped with her discomfort and, especially, helped her sleep.

I have been a lifelong sober person — I don't drink and had never been a recreational drug user — so even walking into a marijuana dispensary felt strange to me. But when somebody you love has pancreatic cancer, your perspective on a lot of things changes.

I went to Swish in North Hollywood expecting God knows what and instead found what looked like an upscale boutique with a kind, knowledgeable young woman behind the counter who couldn't have been more helpful. On my first visit to buy Beverly's pills, she threw in some THC gummies.

And here is my confession: I ate some. They were indica gummies, and they helped me sleep.

For somebody who had spent his entire life avoiding alcohol and drugs, it was bizarre. But during one of the most stressful periods of my life, I was grateful for the mild oblivion and the sleep they gave me.

Because cancer doesn't only happen to the patient. I want to be very careful saying that because nothing I experienced compares to what Beverly physically endured. But caregiving is hard. Watching the person you love suffer is hard. Being the person who has to remain optimistic when you're terrified yourself is hard. Trying to make decisions when the consequences can literally involve life and death is hard.

This entire experience was traumatic for Beverly. It also sucked for me. Both things can be true.

July 25, 2024

Eventually we had done enough chemotherapy. It was time for surgery.

            

Beverly was admitted to City of Hope in Duarte on July 23. Her sister Renee', who had already been staying with us for weeks at a time — probably a month and a half altogether — came with us for this part of the journey.

On July 23, Dr. Lewis performed Beverly's Whipple procedure.

There are major surgeries, and then there is the Whipple. The formal name is a pancreaticoduodenectomy. In a typical Whipple, the surgeon removes the head of the pancreas, the duodenum — the first section of the small intestine — the gallbladder, part of the bile duct and sometimes a portion of the stomach. Then the digestive system has to be reconstructed, reconnecting the remaining pancreas, bile duct and stomach or intestine so that food, bile and pancreatic enzymes can once again travel through the digestive tract.

It is intricate surgery performed in one of the most anatomically complicated parts of the body. Beverly's operation lasted almost six hours.

I will never forget those hours. We knew we had one of the best surgeons in the world for this operation. We knew Dr. Lewis did Whipples routinely. We knew Beverly had responded spectacularly to chemotherapy. None of that makes it easy to sit there while your wife is undergoing a six-hour operation.

Eventually, Dr. Lewis called and asked me to meet him in the lobby. I remember studying his face. Doctors become very good at controlling their expressions, so I was looking for anything.

He was calm. Composed. But I couldn't help noticing something else. He seemed upbeat.

Everything had gone well. And then he told me something extraordinary. He could feel scar tissue where the tumor had been. But he couldn't actually find the tumor. It appeared to be gone.

The Miracle in the Pathology Report

Beverly sailed through the immediate recovery room period and eventually got into her own room. Renee' and I were there as she woke up, and we stayed with her over the next several days.

They had Beverly walking the hospital corridors remarkably quickly — I remember us getting her up and moving around the ward the very next day and continuing every day afterward. At one point they removed a drain, which was extremely painful for her.

Eventually, we went home.

Two long weeks passed before our follow up appointment with Dr. Lewis. Just before we saw him we finally got the pathology report on the app.  We stared at it. Did this mean what I think it did?

Our visit to Dr. Lewis confirmed it.

No adenocarcinoma in the lymph nodes. No adenocarcinoma in the surrounding tissue. No viable tumor.

Complete pathologic response.

Zero percent residual adenocarcinoma.

This was not something we had expected. It is a rare outcome with pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The chemotherapy had apparently destroyed every detectable cancer cell in the tissue they removed.

Dr. Lewis also pointed something out that stuck with us: The result was so consequential that two pathologists had to sign off on the final pathology report.

It was real. Beverly had pancreatic cancer. And now, as far as medicine could determine, she didn't.

I was ecstatic. Beverly was miserable. And that became another lesson.

"But You're Cancer-Free"

I wish I could say that after surgery everything steadily got better. It didn't. In many ways, recovery from the Whipple was the hardest part of the entire experience.

Beverly didn't have a major surgical complication. The operation had been an extraordinary success. But she hurt. A lot. Oxycodone was about the only thing that could really dull the pain.

She was weak. She had digestive problems. Nausea. Dumping. Her body had been completely rearranged internally. She had endured months of chemotherapy and then one of the biggest abdominal operations a human being can undergo.

She had lost an enormous amount of weight — 77 pounds! She looked good, but she looked different. And she was sad.

That was difficult for me. In my mind, we had gotten the miracle. The cancer was gone! I wanted us to move immediately into the "we're getting better now!" part of the story.

But Beverly wasn't living in my mind. She was living in a body that hurt every minute of the day.

It was particularly difficult after Renee' had to return to her husband and family in San Jose. Renee' and I had been able to boost one another. When one of us was tired or discouraged, the other could keep the pressure on — keep Beverly moving, keep her eating, keep her looking forward.

Now it was mostly me.

Beverly and I tried to walk every day. Some days she could only make it half a block before she had to turn around. I'd find myself thinking: You're free of a cancer with terrible survival statistics. Why can't you be happier?

That wasn't fair. I knew it wasn't fair even while I was feeling it.

Cancer recovery isn't a movie. The music doesn't swell when the pathology report arrives and then everybody walks happily into the sunset. She was alive. She was cancer-free. And she was still suffering.

I had to learn to hold all three truths at the same time.

Getting Knocked Down Again

Little by little, Beverly improved. There were setbacks.

At one point she began vomiting and we ended up back at City of Hope's emergency department. We feared something had gone terribly wrong. It turned out to be residual fluid from the surgery — frightening, unpleasant, but essentially part of the recovery rather than evidence of some catastrophic complication.

Then came another challenge. Chemotherapy wasn't finished.

Beverly had completed seven rounds of FOLFIRINOX before surgery. The goal was twelve total. So after everything her body had just been through, treatment resumed.

Renee' flew back down at one point to help us again. She was invaluable, especially on the walks. She helped keep Beverly's spirits up. She helped keep mine up too.

Jan visited as well...

Bev's first trip out of the house (besides the walks) - Costco!

But when chemotherapy returned, so did the neuropathy. And this time Dr. Yu became seriously concerned.

Oxaliplatin — the "OX" in FOLFIRINOX — is an important component of the regimen, but it is also notorious for causing peripheral neuropathy. For round 8 Dr. Yu reduced the OX by 70%.  After bad bloodwork after that round, for rounds nine and ten, Dr. Yu eliminated the oxaliplatin altogether.

That was another frightening tradeoff. We didn't want Beverly to receive less of a drug that might help keep pancreatic cancer away. But we also didn't want to cure the cancer only to leave her permanently disabled.

After round ten, Beverly had had enough. Dr. Lewis would have preferred that she complete all twelve rounds. But Beverly had reached her limit.

She chose quality over quantity. She wasn't willing to risk permanent, debilitating neuropathy — potentially spending the rest of her life severely disabled — for two additional rounds of chemotherapy whose incremental benefit nobody could quantify.

And Dr. Lewis ultimately acknowledged another important reality: We didn't actually know whether those additional rounds were doing anything. The tumor was already gone. Her pathology was clear. Her blood work was clear. Her scans were clear.

Eventually treatment ended. She had made it through ten rounds. That was enough.

Life Comes Back

Recovery wasn't fast. It happened by inches. Then feet. Then blocks.

The digestive problems gradually improved. The pain subsided. The nausea diminished. The dumping episodes became less of an issue. By early 2025, Beverly was dramatically better.

And she just kept getting better.

Today she routinely walks more than three miles. Think about that for a moment. This is the same woman who, after surgery, sometimes couldn't make it half a block.

She laughs again. She plans for the future. She lives her life. Our lives are mostly back to normal.

Her body will probably never be exactly the body she had before pancreatic cancer. She has to be careful with certain foods, particularly fried foods. She has had a couple episodes of pancreatitis, including one that required hospitalization, which was frightening. Thankfully, at least so far, there is no indication that she has developed chronic pancreatitis.

Her gallbladder is gone. Part of her pancreas is gone. Her digestive anatomy has been permanently altered.

But she's here.

Surprising her Aunt and Cousin on a trip to visit family in Omaha!

And so far, every surveillance scan has remained clear. Her CA 19-9 tumor marker has remained very low. At different points we've watched it move from 3 to 5 to 8 back to 6, numbers that would mean nothing to most people but that pancreatic cancer survivors and their families can stare at like stock-market traders watching a ticker.

Every six months we go through it again. Blood work. CT. Waiting. Trying not to interpret every ache. Trying not to read too much into every number. Trying not to let fear steal days from us before we have any reason to be afraid.

The People Who Carried Us

Cancer reveals something else: Nobody gets through something like this alone.

Beverly had an extraordinary team of doctors, nurses and medical professionals. But she also had a team outside the hospital.

Her sister Renee' was incredible. She left her own home and family in San Jose for long stretches to help take care of her sister. She was there during chemotherapy, during surgery, during recovery and again when chemotherapy resumed.

There were times when Renee' wasn't merely helping Beverly. She was helping me help Beverly.

Her best friend Grace came from Georgia to visit and support her. Her cousin Pam became — and remains — one of Beverly's lifelines. To this day, Bev and Pam talk almost every day. Her mom, Jan, was there for her on a regular basis.

And then there is Natalie. Our daughter. Twenty-two years old now and, without question, the best thing that has ever happened to both Beverly and me.

There was a terrible irony in having Natalie home from college during treatment but being unable to have her live with us because her work with children made the infection risk too great. But she was part of this journey too.

Cancer doesn't happen to one person. It happens to a family. And our family showed up.

PurpleStride

In 2025, we participated in our first PanCAN PurpleStride. We did it again in 2026. I suspect we'll do it for the rest of our lives.

With real life superhero Dr. Lewis

Beverly on the far right on the survivors stage.

PurpleStride is the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network's nationwide walk and fundraising event for people affected by pancreatic cancer — survivors, patients, caregivers, families, friends and those walking in memory of someone they lost. Purple is the color associated with pancreatic cancer awareness.

For us, PurpleStride is more than a charity walk. It's a way of standing among people who understand. Some are survivors. Some are still fighting. Some are caregivers. Some are walking for someone who isn't there to walk beside them.

We know how fortunate we are. And after pancreatic cancer enters your life, I don't think you ever completely leave that community.

Two Years

Which brings me back to today. Two years post-Whipple. NED.

When Beverly was diagnosed, we learned all the horrifying statistics about pancreatic cancer. The overall five-year survival rate is still only in the low teens. Recurrence is frighteningly common, even after successful surgery. We know that. We can't unknow it.

We also know that Beverly's particular story contains some extraordinary reasons for hope. Her cancer was caught before there was evidence of distant metastasis. She responded spectacularly to FOLFIRINOX. Her tumor shrank by more than half after only four rounds. She was able to undergo a successful Whipple performed by an elite specialist. Her lymph nodes were negative. Her margins and surrounding tissue were negative. And most remarkably, the final pathology found no viable adenocarcinoma at all.

A complete pathologic response.

Now we've stacked over two more years on top of that. Two years of clean scans. Two years of negative blood work. Two years of distance from July 23, 2024.

I understand that none of this comes with guarantees. We still get scared. When Beverly has an unexplained pain, there's always a little voice somewhere in the back of my head. When scan time approaches, the volume gets turned up.

I imagine it does for her too. Probably more.

Pancreatic cancer changed us. It changed Beverly physically. It changed our family. It changed the way I think about time. And it changed our marriage.

I learned things about caregiving I never wanted to learn. I learned that sometimes being strong means keeping everybody optimistic. Sometimes it means sitting beside somebody who is miserable and accepting that you cannot make her feel better. Sometimes it means shaving your wife's head. Sometimes it means shaving your own afterward.

Sometimes it means taking a walk around the block. Sometimes half a block. Sometimes it means being terrified and acting like you aren't quite as terrified as you actually are. Sometimes it means allowing other people to carry you because you can't carry everything yourself. And sometimes it means admitting that the caregiver is suffering too.

I am grateful that I was strong enough to stay beside Beverly through all of it. But I'm even more grateful that she was strong enough to endure it.

Once again, she made me a better man.

We Carry On

There is a temptation after something like this to divide your life into "before cancer" and "after cancer." I understand why.

But I don't want pancreatic cancer to own that much territory. It doesn't get to define Beverly. It doesn't get to define our marriage. It doesn't get to define the rest of our lives.

It is something that happened to us. Something enormous. Something terrifying. Something that left scars, visible and invisible. And something we survived.

So far.

I don't say "so far" pessimistically. I say it because I've learned that none of us are promised anything. Not pancreatic cancer patients. Not caregivers. Not anybody.

All we actually get is today. As Bruno Mars says - "Nobody's promised tomorrow..."

And today, Beverly is NED. Today she can walk three miles. Today we have our daughter. We have Renee', Grace, Pam and Jan. We have our family. My brother David and his wife and kids.  My mom and her husband.  We have our friends. We have doctors who gave Beverly a chance to be here.

We have another PurpleStride ahead of us. We have plans. We have ordinary days. We have arguments and laughs and errands and television and dinners and all of the mundane things that once seemed mundane and now sometimes feel like gifts.

And most importantly, we still have each other.

Pancreatic cancer will probably always cast a shadow somewhere in the background.

Fine. Let it.

We're not going to live in the shadow. We refuse to be cowed by it. We'll keep getting the scans. We'll keep doing the blood work. We'll keep getting nervous every six months. We'll keep walking PurpleStride. We'll keep moving forward.

Whatever comes, we'll face it the same way we faced everything else: Together.

Today, two years after Beverly's Whipple, I am incredibly grateful. Grateful for the doctors. Grateful for our family. Grateful for everyone who showed up. Grateful for western medicine. Grateful for luck. Grateful for Beverly's strength. Grateful for our lives. And profoundly grateful for our love.

Two years.

No evidence of disease.

And we carry on.

Baseball and Umpires have Changed

I've been reading a lot lately about former Major League umpire Ed Hickox. I'm not entirely sure why I fell down that particular rabbit hole, but umpiring has fascinated me for most of my life, and Hickox has one of the more interesting career trajectories I can remember.

Hickox was already an established American League umpire when, in 1999, he became one of the umpires caught up in what has to rank among the most disastrous labor strategies in sports history. Under the leadership of their union chief, Richie Phillips, a large group of Major League umpires submitted resignations in an attempt to force baseball's hand. The theory was that MLB couldn't possibly afford to lose that many experienced umpires at once.

MLB called their bluff.

Hickox was one of the umpires whose resignation was accepted, and suddenly a man who had been a Major League umpire for nearly a decade wasn't a Major League umpire anymore.

What fascinates me about Hickox is what happened afterward. He eventually went back to the minor leagues and started climbing the ladder again. Think about the humility that must have required. He had already made it. He had worked in Major League stadiums, umpired Major League players and established himself at the highest level of his profession. Then he found himself back in the minors, trying to prove that he belonged all over again.

And he did.

Hickox eventually earned his way back to the Major Leagues and stayed there until 2022. Ironically, the latter part of his career coincided with the development of increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring an umpire's performance behind the plate, and the numbers aren't particularly kind to him. His ball-and-strike accuracy was, at times, among the worst in baseball.

That doesn't diminish the comeback for me. If anything, it makes his story more interesting. Calling balls and strikes is obviously an enormous part of being a Major League umpire, but it isn't the only part. MLB evaluates positioning, rules knowledge, mechanics, game management, handling players and managers, working with a crew and a dozen other things that don't show up on an Umpire Scorecard. Whatever his deficiencies behind the plate, Hickox convinced professional baseball that he belonged in the Major Leagues twice.

The other umpire whose story fascinates me is Bob Davidson.
Davidson's comeback may be even more remarkable because he was considerably older than Hickox. He had been a National League umpire since 1982 and was already 47 years old when the 1999 resignation disaster cost him his job. He had worked a World Series. He had been a Major League umpire for the better part of two decades. By any reasonable standard, he could have concluded that his umpiring career was over.

Instead, in his 50s, Bob Davidson went back to the minor leagues.

There is something about that which I find incredibly admirable. Imagine having worked at the absolute pinnacle of your profession and then finding yourself riding buses and working minor-league games alongside young umpires who could practically be your children. Davidson swallowed his pride and did it. Eventually, he made it all the way back to the Major Leagues and remained there until 2016.

The third member of this unusual little club is Tom Hallion, who also lost his Major League job in the 1999 mess, returned to the minors and eventually made his way back. Hallion lasted until 2022 and became a crew chief. I always liked the cut of Hallion's jib. There was something about the way he carried himself that reminded me very much of the professional umpires I encountered when I was young.

And that brings me to why I probably find all of this considerably more interesting than the average baseball fan does.

In 1991, when I was barely 20 years old, I attended the Brinkman-Froemming Umpire School in Florida. At the time, I was seriously considering the possibility of becoming a professional umpire. I was young enough to think it sounded like a perfectly reasonable way to spend my life, and I loved baseball and umpiring enough to give it a legitimate shot.

It remains one of the great experiences of my young life.

My lead instructor was Gary Davis. Baseball fans of a certain age will immediately recognize the name. Gary was still relatively early in his Major League career at the time and had a tremendous career ahead of him. He would eventually become a crew chief, work multiple World Series and umpire thousands of Major League games.

Gary was awesome.

I remember him as being kind to me, although "kind" is probably a relative term when describing professional umpire instructors of that era. These guys weren't running summer camp. They were trying to identify people who might actually survive professional baseball, and their teaching style reflected that. There was a certain amount of intentional intimidation involved. They wanted to see what happened when you were tired, confused, challenged or confronted.

Still, I always felt that Gary treated me well, and I admired him enormously.

I also had the opportunity to meet and learn from some extraordinary people. Bruce Froemming and Joe Brinkman themselves were there, obviously. Tim Tschida was among the Major League instructors. As was Steve Rippley, the head field instructor, affectionately known as "Sgt. Rippley." Jeff Nelson and Fieldin Culbreth were minor-league umpires at the time, years before either would become established Major League umpires and eventually crew chiefs.

We also had some remarkable guest speakers. Steve Palermo spoke to us only months before the terrible incident in Dallas in which he was shot while intervening in a robbery, an act of courage that ultimately ended his umpiring career. Richie Garcia spoke to us as well, eight years before he would become the involved in the mass-resignation catastrophe that would cost him, Hickox, Davidson, Hallion and so many others their jobs.

At the time, of course, none of us had any idea what was coming.

I did pretty well at Brinkman-Froemming. In fact, I finished in roughly the top 10 percent of my class, which earned me an invitation to the Major League Baseball development program, essentially the finishing school for the top students selected from the Brinkman-Froemming, Harry Wendelstedt and Jim Evans schools — programs of the era.

Suddenly I wasn't competing against everybody who thought they might like to become an umpire. I was competing against the people those schools had already identified as their better prospects.

That's where things got considerably tougher for me.

I was a good umpire mechanically. I was solid calling balls and strikes. I was good on safes and outs. I knew the rules well. The actual baseball part of umpiring came pretty naturally to me.
What I wasn't particularly good at, at age 20, was dealing with angry grown men.

That was a much bigger part of umpiring in those days than younger baseball fans might realize. The instructors would play the roles of managers and coaches, deliberately arguing with us, challenging us and trying to knock us off balance. They weren't merely interested in whether you had made the correct call. They wanted to know whether you could maintain control after making it.

One particular exercise has remained vivid in my memory for 35 years.

Dick Nelson, who was the head instructor at the development program, played the role of a coach arguing with me over a complicated line-drive/infield-fly situation. I knew the rule. That wasn't really the problem. The problem was that Nelson was much, much better at arguing than 20-year-old me was at being argued with.

He started challenging me. I started explaining. He challenged the explanation. I explained some more. He moved. I followed him. Before long, he had literally led me around in circles while continuing the argument.

I'm sure he knew exactly what he was doing.

The lesson, which I understand much better at 55 than I did at 20, was that at some point an umpire has to stop explaining. You make the call. You give the manager a reasonable opportunity to ask what you saw. You explain it. And then the conversation is over.

Dick Nelson controlled that entire encounter. I didn't.

I ended up finishing near the bottom of that development class, and that was effectively the end of my professional umpiring aspirations. I went back to college, which I had promised my mother I would do, finished my degree and ultimately went in an entirely different professional direction.

I've never regretted it.

More importantly, I've never looked back on the experience as a failure. I was barely 20 years old. I went to one of the premier professional umpire schools in the country, finished in the top 10 percent and advanced to the next level. When I got there, I discovered that I was good at some aspects of the profession and not yet particularly good at another very important one. I could have gone back, worked amateur baseball, matured a little and tried again. I simply didn't feel compelled to do it.

I had gotten enough of a taste to know what the profession required, and I went on with my life.

What I did take with me was a lifelong admiration for professional umpires.

That doesn't mean I think they're always right. Obviously they're not. I don't even think they're all equally good. Modern pitch-tracking data has conclusively demonstrated that some Major League umpires are substantially better at calling balls and strikes than others.

But I do think my experience gave me a different perspective than the average fan who sees a missed strike call on television and concludes that the umpire is an idiot.

I've stood behind the plate and tried to track a pitch. I've worked the bases and tried to get into exactly the right position. I've studied the rules. More importantly, I've experienced, albeit at a vastly lower level, what it's like to make a decision and immediately have somebody get in your face and tell you that you're wrong.

And the world in which I learned to umpire was fundamentally different from the one today's young professional umpires inhabit.

In 1991, the umpire was the final word.

If I called a runner out and the runner was safe, he was out.

If I called a pitch a strike and television replay showed that it was six inches outside, it was still a strike.

If an umpire missed a call in the ninth inning of a pennant-race game and that call changed the outcome, everybody watching television could see that he'd blown it. The broadcasters could replay it from five different angles. The newspapers could write about it the next morning. The manager could scream himself hoarse.

The call still stood.

There was something almost frightening about that authority, because it came with enormous responsibility. You couldn't tell the manager to challenge it. You couldn't put on a headset and let somebody in New York clean up the mess. There was no automated system waiting to tell everyone whether the pitch actually clipped the strike zone.

You made the call and you lived with it.

That reality also created far more confrontation. If a manager believed an umpire had just cost his team a game, his only recourse was the umpire himself. So he came out of the dugout and argued.

Sometimes spectacularly.

That was why our instructors spent so much time teaching us how to handle those situations. A Major League umpire needed more than excellent eyesight and a thorough understanding of the rulebook. He needed presence. He needed confidence. He needed to know when to listen, when to explain, when to stop explaining and, occasionally, when to eject somebody.

The umpire had to control the game because there wasn't anybody else coming to rescue him.

That is one reason I always enjoyed Tom Hallion. He had that old-school professional-umpire quality. He looked comfortable when somebody was angry with him. He could listen, respond and give a little back when necessary. Most importantly, there was usually a point at which his body language made it abundantly clear that the conversation was finished.

That's a skill.

Today's umpires operate in a radically different environment.

First came increasingly sophisticated television replay. Then pitch-tracking technology allowed us to evaluate strike zones in ways that would have seemed like science fiction when I attended umpire school. Then came expanded replay review.

Now baseball is moving further into the ABS era, where technology can directly participate in determining whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.

There are benefits to all of this. I'm not some nostalgic crank who believes baseball was better because an obviously incorrect call couldn't be fixed. If a runner is clearly safe and the umpire calls him out, I would rather get the call right.

But something undeniably changes when the umpire is no longer the absolute final authority.

Today's umpire can make a close call and know that replay may correct it. A manager can disagree without necessarily needing to turn the disagreement into a five-minute confrontation. On balls and strikes, the umpire is increasingly working alongside technology rather than standing as the sole arbiter of an invisible strike zone.

I find this new generation of umpires fascinating for precisely that reason. They're learning a different profession than the one I briefly trained to enter.

They still need judgment, positioning, mechanics, rules knowledge and game-management skills. They still have to stand behind a catcher while 95-mph pitches are moving all over the place. They still have to make split-second decisions with tens of thousands of people watching.

But they also have technological backstops that Bruce Froemming, Joe Brinkman, Steve Palermo and the other umpires of my era could never have imagined.

In some respects that makes their job easier. In others, I think it makes it harder.

Every plate umpire today can have his performance quantified. We can know exactly how many pitches he missed, where he missed them and how his accuracy compares with every other umpire in baseball. A mistake that once disappeared into the flow of a nine-inning game can now become a red box on an Umpire Scorecard circulating on social media before the umpire has even left the stadium.

Ed Hickox experienced both worlds.

He began umpiring in the Major Leagues in 1990, essentially the world I was introduced to at umpire school a year later. The umpire's judgment was final. By the end of Hickox's career in 2022, fans could pull up data documenting precisely how good—or, in his case, sometimes how bad—his strike zone had been.
That's an incredible transformation within one man's career.

Maybe that's why I've found myself reading so much about Hickox, Davidson and Hallion lately. They represent a bridge between two completely different eras of umpiring, and I have a small personal connection to the world they came from.

I never became a professional umpire. Instead, I got an experience at 20 years old that I've appreciated more and more as I've gotten older. I learned from men I admired. I discovered that I was pretty good at something extremely difficult. I also discovered a weakness in myself that, at that age, I wasn't particularly equipped to overcome.

And somewhere along the way, Dick Nelson walked me around in a circle while arguing about an infield fly.

Thirty-five years later, I can laugh about that.

I can also appreciate what he was trying to teach me.

The rulebook can tell you what the correct call is. Technology can now tell you whether you got it right.

But neither one can teach a 20-year-old kid how to stand his ground while an experienced baseball man is doing everything he can to make him doubt himself.

That part of umpiring hasn't completely disappeared.

And I hope it never does.