Sorry. This one is a little windy, so there may be a little chop in today’s wave.
Have you ever had that person you just wanted to sit down with? You know, just to see what’s going on in their head? Maybe to offer them some sage advice? Maybe to just talk stuff over?

Looking back over the years there have been some pivotal moments. You know … the points in your life when everything changes. Everything.

Just a little background to give a little context to the conversation I’d like to have with 30 Year Ago Me. Also, since y’all are listening to me bare my soul, it is only fair you have a little history. What made me the person I was thirty years ago into the person y’all think I am today? Maybe this will illustrate the waves I’ve ridden on, and the one I am riding today.

In 1988, I was 27 years old. I had just ended my first marriage of seven years. I was pretty sure I had managed to ruin my life. despite my intentions to better my life, everything seemed to be circling the drain.
Granted, in retrospect, I had been married far too young. But I was sure I could make it work.

At the tender age of 19, I decided to take a bride. I had seen both of my parents’ marriages fail. More than once. I wasn’t going to follow in their footsteps. I was much smarter than they were. After all, I was almost twenty years old. I knew everything.
It is all about commitment, right? Keeping a promise. Making a vow, and sticking to it. Forsaking all others, and stuff like that. And I was going to do just that.
Of course, I hadn’t been too diligent in keeping commitments to that point. I should have been in school. But I had no direction in life, so I didn’t even know what in Hell I wanted to be when I grew up.
Funny. I’m horrible at remembering dates. Anniversaries I have to make notes on, lest I forget them.

But on july 4th of 1979, I met a woman. OK, she was a girl. But she was driving a 1974 Firebird. And she was willing to talk to me. I wasn’t exactly a chick magnet, so maybe I was just mesmerized by the fact that a female was showing me some attention. And she had a hot car.
By April of the following year, we were married. I was committed.
I had gone from living in a shitty efficiency apartment to a nice one bedroom. We adjusted our jobs. We moved into a duplex. We had a beautiful little girl who was everything to me, in spite of the fact that I never saw myself as a parent. It was a lot of responsibility. And I didn’t want to fail a child.
Daily life crept in, and so did the distance between us …
I was deli manager of a kind of upscale grocery store in the Indy ‘burbs, and I thought I knew some stuff. And I wanted to know more. I love food, and cheese. This was a good place for me. I was growing, and feeding my love for all things food. I loved the work, even though it didn’t pay the money one needs to be upwardly mobile.
As time and life progressed, I learned a few things …
First, and likely most importantly, my bride wasn’t interested in much outside of the county we lived in just north of Indianapolis. Her dream was to live close to her parents, in a little house with a white picket fence with two or three kids.
This wasn’t exactly my dream. I wanted to learn about the world. I wanted to see things. I wanted to be close to water. I wanted to sail the seas. Adventure Boy.
This was the key to the breakdown of my first marriage: We got married, and didn’t know each other. Hell we didn’t even know ourselves.
The logical Midwestern way of handling problems in a marriage is to have another child. What could possibly spell success better than manufacturing a new human? So we did.

James came into the world ten days before the Challenger disaster in 1986. He would be the one person to carry on the family name. No pressure, son.
But a troubling pregnancy, premature birth, and a change of jobs drove a wedge between us. Money got tight, and the relations between us got looser.
There is no question that we loved each other, at least at some level, but we also realized that we didn’t feel we belonged together. And that’s some sad shit.
At the end of the day, I found myself working with a woman who had taken a fancy to me. I later found it had been engineered that we find ourselves in a situation where we could be somewhat alone, outside of the work environment. It was poor judgement on my part. I’m still ashamed of allowing myself to be in that situation. But I was young & dumb.
In the span of three hours and several rum drinks, I found myself in an extremely compromising position, and I threw all of the vows that I held so dearly into the wind.
This is a fact of my life that I am least proud of. And it is a difficult truth to face.
I blew up my marriage. I lied. I became every stereotype of an asshole man that you have ever heard. I had cheated. I has done all of the things I swore to myself that I would never do.
I had done the one thing that I promised myself that I would never do, under any circumstance.
Making it worse was that after all of the new promises made, the woman that had provoked the end of my marriage wasn’t willing to end her own marriage to be with me.
I was suddenly alone. Sucker.
I wasn’t completely responsible for how things ended. I know that now. But I felt as if I were completely responsible. Marriage is a team sport, and I was acutely aware I had let the team down.
Now, sitting on a park bench on St. Simons Island, Georgia, I was forced to make some important decisions.

I had run away from Indiana to pursue a dream of being a chef. After a lot of hard work, and some impressive ass kissing, I was accepted into the chef’s apprenticeship at the (then) prestigious Cloister Hotel of Sea Island, Georgia. This joint charges upward of over $700 per night to stay. It was a big deal. I thought I was a big deal. Maybe I was, or could have been. Who will ever know?
But mixing 80 hour work/apprenticeship weeks, grief of a life & promises broken and lost, and way too much accessible alcohol and women who simply wanted someone to buy their next drink for them resulted in only more ruin. I was a train wreck. And even though I knew it, there was little I could do to stop myself.
I pissed away my job, and more importantly, my apprenticeship. I had worked really hard to get this. I was depressed. Severely. And I didn’t know how I was going to survive. I knew I was a better person than this, yet here I was.
To me, relationships were the most important things in life, not stuff. And I had destroyed my marriage, and my relationship with my children. Rationally, I knew I had received plenty of help in this destruction, but I chose to take the responsibility totally upon myself.
This is the guy I wish I could talk to.
He was lost. I might have been able to steer him in a better direction. On the other hand, why would I want to change his experiences … MY experiences. The very thing that makes me who I am today?
I could have told him that he would make a decision to join the Navy. See the world, taste new foods, make new and lasting friendships with some solid citizens, and maybe find a new perspective or two. I’ve found that perspective is everything
The only thing I would change about my time in the Navy would be to have spent a tad more time seeing the actual lands I was able to visit. If I had spent 50% less time sampling the local alcohol, it would have been a win.
Even so, I was privileged with seeing some wondrous sights. I recommend it to anyone trying to see where they fit into the world we live in. It certainly gave a better perspective on the world I was living in.
I would have loved to tell myself that there would be another love in my life. That I would be happy. That I would have hope for the future. But that was a way off.

I would have said to 30 Year Ago Me …

“You will meet a beautiful, young woman. You will spend a great deal of time together, and fall deeply in love.”
“You will be forthcoming in your wants and desires with this woman, but you won’t take time to look inside of her … truly get to know her. You will love the veneer on the outside because you won’t have taken the time to do more than just “spend time” with her. You will have failed to actually get to know the person on the inside, her dreams, motivations, and what makes the fire inside of her burn.”
“And one day, she will tell you she no longer loves you. She no longer wants you. She will have found something else to entertain her.”
“You will also one day realize that you can’t fault her for her flaws. We all have them. But she won’t have realized them herself at the time you will meet, and she will need to find them on her own. She won’t let you point out her faults, either. It doesn’t really work that way. We all have to grow and learn our flaws on our own.”
“It will be about this time when you first realize that being an adult can really blow sometimes.”
“You will feel at the time of the end of your second marriage that you have gotten what was coming to you. You cheated on your first wife, and you’ll feel it is time for you to experience some payback. You will be crushed, and you will simply feel you deserve it. But you need to understand that the actual truth is that no one deserves that.”
“Ten years of a second marriage, gone. Basically, a quarter of your life will have been invested in this woman, and you will suddenly learn that in the end, you meant nothing to her. That shit will hurt.”
“It will be like having a body part ripped away. It will be a deep loss. It will be unexpected.”
“In later years, you will learn that she discovered what she had done and what she had lost. But that will have been far too little, far too late.”
“But, your journey is far from over. There will be more ups and downs ahead of you. Please pay attention. There are important lessons to be learned in all of the things that you will experience, if you are just open to them.”
“Now, let me caution you. You are not only going to learn some valuable lessons in the next stage of your life, but also some things about the person you will have grown into.”
“And you will find that some of these valuable lessons can cut you to your soul like a dulled and rusty knife, leaving you more hurt than you thought a person can survive.”
“And you never will believe you can hurt even worse that if someone had just purposely stomped all over your feelings.”
“Please pay attention. There are very important people who will enter your life in the future.”
“You will meet a woman, and it will be quite by accident. Friend of a friend sort of thing. It will all be completely unexpected, and that’s what she will be: Unexpected.”
“Oh, and she will have children. Twelve year old, identical twins. They will, with your help, grow into amazing adults. You will think of them as two of your most cherished friends, and as your own children. And that’s exactly what they will be. They will be a consistent source of pride for you.”
“The pride you will feel will be largely due to their mother. She will have a clear cut and no-nonsense view of the road ahead of her, and for her girls. She will be Mama Bear.”
“One of her favorite sayings will be, ‘Don’t fuck with the cubs!’, and she will mean it. She will always protect her own.”
“You will have both suffered losses and victories in life, and you will talk about them. You will learn about the inner workings of each other. You will learn what motivates each other, and each of your deepest desires.”
“You will start out with nothing between the two of you, having both come out of bad divorces. But you will work hard. You will face difficulties. You will personally suffer a life changing injury that will make you certain you will never find a way to support yourself, let alone a family.”
“Your injury will prevent you from working for quite some time, but will cause you to look into work you can do. And it will change your life in a positive way that you cannot imagine.”
“You will go to school. You will find more than a job; you will find a profession you feel you were made for, and was made for you. You will actually help people. You will find a satisfaction you never thought you could find.”
“You will find the satisfaction you didn’t think you deserved, and you will have a wonderful family to share it with.”
“You will travel together. You will make plans for the future. Together. And you will both feel a fulfillment you never imagined.”
“After eight years, an invader will appear. This woman, your partner, will find she is sick.”
“During pre-procedural testing for an unrelated procedure, a chest x-ray will reveal a small spot in her right lung. And it will be cancer. And it will change everything.
“And you will see something … Something you have never seen in this strong woman before: You will see fear in her eyes. And you will feel fear in your deepest soul.”

“She will have a number of surgeries over the years. It will beat her back, but she will be a beast. She will refuse to lose. And she will insist on continuing to live her life, and for you to enjoy your lives together.”
“After being together for ten years, she will finally agree to marry you. You will plan a dream wedding on a tropical beach in Punta Cana. And you will both revel in the life you will have created together.”

“Before you can have your wedding, your plans will be burned to the ground. The cancer will return, and your wedding will be canceled. And you will both feel beaten back, but you will not have been defeated. It will take far more for you to be defeated, so always go forward knowing there will be victory.”
“Somehow, either another recurrence, or just the anxiety that goes with ongoing testing, will always coincide with a vacation. So just know that along with your vacations, there will always be a cloud of anxiety hanging at the horizon, and you will never be sure if it will blow in like a storm.”
“You will become almost used to the cycle of the wave. Well. Sick. Fixed. Recovered. Repeat.”
“Try not to become complacent. Everything is temporary, and that is a simple but absolute truth.”
“I suppose I can tell you her name. You will learn it eventually. Her name will be ‘Liz’, and she will be your Queen. And as much as you can, you will try to treat her as such. And she will be your greatest fan. Try not to let her down. She will have had enough of being let down by the time you find her.”
“After 16 years together, three days after passing the five year mark from her last recurrence, you will both learn that the cancer has returned.”
“She will joke (as you will find she does), “I was a cancer survivor for an entire 72 hours. What the fuck?”
“Living will become a priority to you both. This is important.”
“In the ensuing 18 months, she will lose what was left of her right lung. She will do something she had managed to escape in previous bouts, that being chemo.”
“She will be told this will seriously degrade her quality of life. Breathing will be difficult. Her life would change in a drastic way. She will have none of that shit, so don’t believe it. Remember, I told you she will be a beast? She will be. And she will amaze you in ways you cannot imagine.
“Now, I think it is worth a brief review. You will already have been married twice previously by this time. You will have learned how not to treat a partner. You will also have learned how you would like to be treated by your partner. And you will have found Liz, who will have learned similar lessons, and who knows what she wants to experience in her life.”
“You will have found a person who gets it in the same way that you do. This can be terribly rare, and it is a valuable treasure to find in life.”
“After her surgery and treatment, she works to get herself back into some reasonable shape. She plans a trip to the West Coast. She wants to drive up the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. She wants to fly on a water powered jet pack. Yeah, really.”
“In fact, she tells her oncologist, point blank in the eye that she is going to do just that. He will just smile at her, feeling she may be setting her goals a bit too high.”
“Her oncologist will find what she is really made of. She is a beast, after all.”
“You will travel together to California. And you will watch her fly on a pillar of water. And your heart will swell when you see the joy on her face from accomplishing this. Lizzie didn’t like being told what she couldn’t do.”
“She will push herself during this trip. She will try to soak up as much life as she can. She will have discovered that life might somehow be more finite than we were giving it credit for.”
“You will have both fallen into a bit of complacency with the whole cancer thing. It will come, she will beat it back, and you will go on living your lives together. But something will have changed. “She will have become weary from the repeated battles, and she won’t bounce back as she has in the previous bouts.”
“When it comes back faster than it ever had before, and in a different place, the treatment plan will change drastically.”
“She will be treated with immunotherapy. It will kick her ass.”
“Even though she will feel like crap, she will go on to raise money for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation by shaving her head for childhood cancer, as she has in the past. She will set fund raising records with the help of some amazing people. They will name an award in her honor for raising so much money.”
“The immunotherapy won’t get the job done. They will start her on serious chemo.”
“One day, you will come home from work, and she will give you shit for shedding all over the pillows. But it will have been her hair. She will pull some wisps of hair from her head and place them on your bald spot you are developing. She says she is just trying to help. (Sorry Dude, but there’s a bald spot in your future.)”
“You will realize an event is about to occur. You will ask her if she would like you to go ahead and shave her noggin for her. She won’t want to do it. It will make here feel like she has suffered a defeat, but she won’t want to look like she has the mange, so she will agree.”
“And you will shave her head, outside on your patio. And you will be proud of yourself for being able to do it without her seeing your tears, or hearing you muffle your sobs.”

“She will be sick. She will be physically ill in a way you have never seen someone sick. And you will have had plenty of experience seeing sick people by this time in your life.”
“The chemo won’t work, but they will get her qualified for a clinical trial for a new immunotherapy/chemo combination. She will be scared, but she trusts her oncologist.”
“This combination will make her even sicker, You will find yourself doing things to take care of her that you didn’t think you could do, or that she would allow you to do for her.”
“But, she will be the single most important person in your life. You won’t care about anything else. And there is nothing you won’t do for her.”
“And this is rather the point of all that I have told you to this point: You past experiences … Your failures, and betrayals. Love given and taken. Every experience and choice you will have ever taken in your life will lead you to this point. It will lead you to what a relationship is supposed to be. It will reveal to you what love truly is. True, selfless love.”
“I wish I could tell you that this is where the wave turns back upward, but it this won’t be the place in time for that. And more than anything else, I wish that were the case. But always keep in mind that the wave will turn back upward in its oscillation. All in it’s own time, not ours.”
“Jeff, you will come to hate when people speak of fighting cancer as a battle. It is a war made up of smaller battles. All are individual, and all come with their own sets of hurdles. You will figure that out. I can’t find the appropriate words to describe it.”
“You will be awed by the love she shows you. You won’t recognize it for what it is when it happens. You will actually feel a bit hurt by it, until you realize what she will try to do for you.”
“She will become pretty sick. You will take her to the hospital, and she will have testing done. They will send her home after a few days, and some testing. You will be pissed because you think she still needs more care than you can give her at home. You will want nothing but for her to be taken care of, and you don’t want to fail at this. It is far too important.”
“Before sending her home, you will learn that the cancer has spread to her brain, and she has had a couple mini strokes. They will discuss options for treatment, including radiation to her brain. There will be choices to make.”
“After being released from the hospital, less than two days later, she asks to be taken back. And she doesn’t like the hospital. When she says she needs to go to the hospital, she is seriously concerned. This will tell you she is scared … More scared than you have ever seen her. She will have developed a talent for shielding you from her fears, as she tries to prevent you from worrying about her. She will be trying to protect you. Don’t argue with her. I did, and it was a mistake.”
“You will sit with here every day in the hospital. You will watch her withdraw. You will get messages asking how she is. You will tell people that she is just so tired. That will be the truth.”
“She will have started telling you to take her phone home in the evenings, as it has become difficult for her to operate. But on a Saturday night, she will tell you to leave her phone, and to text her when you get home. So you leave her phone, happy that even though you won’t be with her, you will be able to tell her ‘Goodnight’.”
“When you get home, you will text her and tell her you are home and safe. You will wish her sweet dreams.”
“Then your phone will ring, and it will be her. You will be surprised and happy to hear her voice, as she wasn’t terribly talkative during the day.”
“She will tell you to get a good night’s sleep, and that she loves you. You will tell her the same thing, and you promise to be there first thing in the morning.”
“These will be the last words you will ever speak to one each other.”
“This is hard to tell you. You will arrive to the hospital to find she has just been taken to ICU due to respiratory failure. You will run up the stairs and make it to her room just as they are settling her into her room. You see through the curtains that she is on a breathing machine. And you know you have a question that needs answered quickly.”
“You find the attending Dr, and ask her if the breathing machine is simply to help bridge her to a point where she will be able to breathe on her own, or if this will be her new baseline.”
“The Dr will reluctantly tell you that she is also fighting kidney failure, and considerable cardiac arrhythmias. She has likely suffered a stroke due to blood clots originating from her ill-beating heart.”
“You will go to her side and look into her eyes. You will see that she is gone. and you won’t be able to breathe.”
“You will regain your composure long enough to tell the Dr that once you have gathered her brother and our daughter together, that it would be her wish to have to breathing tube removed, as she was extremely opposed to heroic, life prolonging measures.”
“By noon the girls and her brother will have arrived. The tube will be removed, and you will all sit by her as the last of her life drains from what was her body.”
“You will watch her as she draws her last breath. You will go to kiss her, one last time, even knowing she left for a better thing hours earlier. This will have just been the body where she had lived and loved and experienced this world.”
“Now it is worth mentioning that we both know this isn’t the first loss you have suffered. You lost your first marriage. You had done that pretty much on your own. But you already know that. That was a minor loss, in light of your actions. You felt you deserved that to some extent. (Get over that, already. It wasn’t all your fault.)”
“You will experience the loss of your second marriage, and THAT will be a loss. And unexpected loss. And it will cut your self esteem from your bones. But you will learn some valuable things about yourself.”
“You will have witnessed the death of two people, and lost others that you weren’t present to witness. Death will not be something new, but this will be something different. This will be a very personal loss.”
“And this will be an unexpected experience. This won’t be like hearing someone had a heart attack, or got hit by a train. You will have seen this coming.”
“I’ve come to think of it being like sitting on the train track and watching the train bearing down from so far away. Seeing the smoke from the train’s smokestack around a bend, far away on the horizon, hearing the train’s whistle warning of its impending approach. The train bearing down with you unable to help this woman who taught you how to really enjoy life get herself off of the tracks.”
“And the train will continue to bear down. And then it hits. And then she will be gone. And your life will forever change.”
“Whisper a word of thanks to her. She will have changed you. She will have helped you to get perspective on what it means to live a life to the best of your ability, and to honor a person and the commitments you make to them. She will demonstrate what it means to go on an adventure, and also how to make your own adventure.”
“Oh, and that whole cancer, War vs Battle opinion of mine …”
“Look, fighting a war is a series of battles. And she will win every single battle, except for the last one. But that doesn’t mean she loses the war.”
“She doesn’t lose because at the moment of that single loss, cancer no longer hold any power over her. She will have won the war, and she will have won it in spades.”
“You will miss her. You may well miss her every day for the rest of your life. That may not be a bad thing. She will make you a better person. You will carry the parts of her that will rub off on you, always. She will always be a part of you.”
“That’s all I can factually tell you right now. Anything else is conjecture on my part, as I am, even now, working on my next adventure. And I can’t help but feel she helped put all of this next chapter of my life into motion. I hope I am honoring her wishes.”
“You will, on a leap of faith, radically change your life. You will get a new job. You’ll get a cat. (Yes, a cat.) You will drive across the country to a strange place. You will live in a little red house in a canyon on your way to the sea you will find yourself craving.”
“And in the midst of change and despair, you will find love in an unlikely place.”
“Now you might think I am crazy, but if that’s true, so are you. Remember, I am you.”
“Liz will say things to you that I believe set into motion the events that will follow her passing.”
“You will have to judge these things on your own, and only the passage of time will tell the tale of if any of this holds true. But I truly believe that she tried to engineer my future happiness. You will learn that she likes a couple of things: Being in control, and having the last word.”
“All I can tell you is that you will find love. I think you will feel as I do that Liz nudged this all into being, or at least orchestrated the possibility of it all. And if I am right, she will once again have proved herself to be a loving and funny genius.”
“I am still rather on the outs with whatever Supreme Being there may be out there. I don’t see the wisdom in an all powerful Being allowing a wonderful creature to suffer, and then taken from people she loves and who love here. Time would have no meaning to this Being, so waiting a few more decades would have really been no big deal.”
“Having said that, no matter where you faith lay, always live by the Bill & Ted credo of, ‘Be excellent to one another.’ Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated. Make one person smile every day, if you can. Work out that whole Golden Rule thing. It’s a pretty good way to live.”

Anyway… That’s what I would tell myself. It wouldn’t make any difference in where I would end up. After all, I’d still be me.
And I wouldn’t want to miss or change one bit of it. I am anxious to see where this all takes me.
It seems odd to be in love now. Everything else feels like a lifetime ago. And in a way, I suppose it is. This life bears little resemblance to what I was living six months ago. Hell, there has been so much change over the past twelve months, I kinda makes my head spin a lot.
Wouldn’t it be great if “30 years from now me” could stop by to give me a little insight on what is on the road ahead of me?
On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to know. It’s all been about figuring out life as I go along. Holy shit … I was so absolutely certain that I knew everything when I was 20! I now know that I’ll never know everything, but I always have the opportunity to incorporate my life experiences into my future self, and maybe be a better person.
Hopefully, I’ll be the partner my new Love needs and deserves. I want to be able to show her what I have learned about how two people can be so much more than just two people. And, it is a team sport.